A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:11:17 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:11:17] S1: Are you charging Avis at this point, or what are you trying to get out of this first pilot? [00:11:21] S0: Yeah, there's billing or invoicing set up at that time, so that was not in place. This is a company – it's still the culture of the company today, but we're really building backwards because we're not industry veterans. I don't come from an income verification background. I have no experience in credit bureaus. I've never worked in any of these businesses, and so we've been so client led from the very beginning. We've just been getting feedback from each one of our clients. The first client that paid us was a business called Level Goals, which I – is still around. They're a small dollar lender, and Level Goals only was interested in doing lending to gig workers. We had already built the first integrations into Uber and Lyft for the Avis use case, but they just wanted to use those same data points but to issue a small dollar loan for $100. I believe they gave us $1 per verification. That was the first paying client, and that is a much bigger business just for the industry, for income verification. That's also become a major business for us as well. [00:12:35] S1: How much time went through from the first pilot with Avis until you signed that first paying customer? [00:12:40] S0: It took a while. The first year of Argyle, I believe, until the late part of 2019 – Argyle was found in 2018. Until the late part of 2019, we had no paying customers. We were just building, and I think we got our first couple of customers in late '19, including Level Goals.
00:12:40 · Shmulik Fishman, Pablo Srugo
[00:12:40] S0: It took a while. The first year of Argyle, I believe, until the late part of 2019 – Argyle was found in 2018. Until the late part of 2019, we had no paying customers. We were just building, and I think we got our first couple of customers in late '19, including Level Goals. [00:12:58] S1: What was hard about it? What are you building? From the outside looking in, you're like, okay, we've got this resume builder thing. It's got the main KPIs on it. I feel like somebody should pay for that.