A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:05:14 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:05:14] S1: Just a human to go drive it, okay. [00:05:17] S0: I didn't know it at the time, but the problem that Avis, or Hertz, or Enterprise has is actually very similar to the problem that Chipotle, or Target, or Best Buy, or Walmart have. It's high volume hiring with people that don't last that long, and so you're constantly having to rehire and rehire your staff. The best way to do that is with software where you don't have to individually interview them. There's ways to take data to understand what's the likelihood that they'll show up for work? The gimmick that we had or the trick that we had with Avis was can we get one of these applicants to log into their Uber account or their Lyft account, and we would be able to surface to Avis, hey, Shmulik has driven a thousand miles, has driven on Uber for six months, has a 4.5 rating? This is somebody that is going to be willing to drive cars for you. That was the very early stages of what I would now consider pre-employment screening services. I know, a really wonky long term. [00:06:20] S1: This was at Argyle, or this was still at KAR Global, your last startup? [00:06:23] S0: I had Lester Adam. I was fooling around with a lot of different concepts. This was one of them. I was lucky enough to meet my co-founder, Audrius, who's now Argyle's CTO, and we had the luxury of time. We got to play around with ideas, and this was one we were super excited about. We knew contacts at Avis.
00:06:23 · Shmulik Fishman, Pablo Srugo
[00:06:23] S0: I had Lester Adam. I was fooling around with a lot of different concepts. This was one of them. I was lucky enough to meet my co-founder, Audrius, who's now Argyle's CTO, and we had the luxury of time. We got to play around with ideas, and this was one we were super excited about. We knew contacts at Avis. [00:06:46] S1: Was this after the exit? You have some, let's say, good stuff in the bank account happening. You got some time. You have the energy to go at it again. [00:06:52] S0: Yes. I know that this is talking about the journey. I do consider ourselves lucky to have an exit that did give us some cash where we had the space and the time to think things through, which I don't think I had when starting the fleet management company. Space and time is a really helpful thing. It's always good to think about it before you start building. That's what we had there.t [00:07:41] S1: It's almost the reason why. Going back to earlier point, I think, as a first-time founder, there's the hype that attracts you to how do I tell a story that gets me money, and there's the need that's like how do I get some money in the door? I remember we were obsessed with just how do we – because revenue was so far away for us, the only way to get money was fundraising. We were obsessed with fundraising for the first couple of years. It's a little backwards, but you understand where it comes from having gone through it.
00:07:41 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:07:41] S1: It's almost the reason why. Going back to earlier point, I think, as a first-time founder, there's the hype that attracts you to how do I tell a story that gets me money, and there's the need that's like how do I get some money in the door? I remember we were obsessed with just how do we – because revenue was so far away for us, the only way to get money was fundraising. We were obsessed with fundraising for the first couple of years. It's a little backwards, but you understand where it comes from having gone through it. [00:08:11] S0: A hundred percent. I think that, also, that desire to get the first client, to send the first invoice, to get the first $100,000 of revenue, those are great desires, and you want to be as efficient as possible at achieving them. You also don't want to take shortcuts, and that's that dividing line of you want to make sure that you're onto the right concept that's in a really big market, that has the right unit economics. You have to guide yourself and be able to listen to yourself and to the market as you're exploring those things. [00:08:15] S1: Going back to the main storyline, I guess my question is you have this idea of using existing data, alternative data, let's say, about who these drivers are through Lyft and Uber. Avis and Hertz and Enterprise, what were they even doing at the time to interview? What was the before and after?
00:08:15 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:08:15] S1: Going back to the main storyline, I guess my question is you have this idea of using existing data, alternative data, let's say, about who these drivers are through Lyft and Uber. Avis and Hertz and Enterprise, what were they even doing at the time to interview? What was the before and after? [00:08:29] S0: It's actually a very frequent story, but people go into an office with their resume and their driver's license and two referrals. You have to call them up on the phone, and there's this huge phone bank to verify their employment. I think that the elephant in the room with Argyle is this other business that you might've heard of before called Equifax, huge credit bureau, and Equifax has a huge business line that does pre-employment screening for this exact reason. It's a huge problem set across every single vertical where you need to hire a lot of people at McDonald's, or Target, or wherever, and you need a service that can verify their previous employment. It just so happens that a lot of this is still done, frankly, manually, but that was the case at Avis as well. [00:09:15] S1: Okay. You show up with this idea. You have some relationships. What's Step 1? Do you MVP it? Where do you go from there?
00:09:15 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:09:15] S1: Okay. You show up with this idea. You have some relationships. What's Step 1? Do you MVP it? Where do you go from there? [00:09:22] S0: I'm happy to report the very first version of the Argyle service was a website that an Uber driver just logged into, and they took a screenshot of this fake resume we would build. It would generate from their Uber profile data, but it would just put a certificate on a page. It would have their name and the star rating, and they would take a screenshot of it. It would have the Argyle logo at the bottom, and they would show this screenshot to an Avis clerk on the other side. Because they knew me and they knew what Argyle was, there was a way for them to be like, oh, I know what this screenshot is, but it was a very retro first experience. We were just trying to figure out could we shorten the cycle times? Could we get down to a day, to one connection to get hired for the job? It was the early winnings. [00:10:12] S1: This is a bit in the weeds, but I think it's important. How did you get in – you went to Avis and you told them about the service. How did you get in front of the drivers for them to even go into this place and get the certificate? Did Avis tell them to do it, or did you market directly?
00:10:12 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:10:12] S1: This is a bit in the weeds, but I think it's important. How did you get in – you went to Avis and you told them about the service. How did you get in front of the drivers for them to even go into this place and get the certificate? Did Avis tell them to do it, or did you market directly? [00:10:25] S0: Super low tech again. Super low tech again, which is when Avis sends out a job posting – and it still happens today. On Craigslist, on Jobvite, there's all these requirements for what the job is: print out your resume, come with two references, and so they just added another thing. Get a resume from this website. I believe our first website was actually applicationprecompletion.com, a super long URL. We just added it in as text. Again, it's something that completely doesn't scale, but we're trying to get the first 500, 1,000 people to try it. What we've done over time, we're mapping the origin story and where Argyle is, is everybody that needs income and employment data needs different pieces of it. A big part of the service that we've come to realize is real important is that everybody can build their own resume now and figure out what they want to put on the resume or on the verification report. [00:11:17] S1: Are you charging Avis at this point, or what are you trying to get out of this first pilot?