A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:20:41 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:20:41] S0: Then maybe moving on. You're building this wait list. You're creating content and I assume just spending a lot of time heads down building the product. How do you shift from there to actually putting the product in people's hands? When did that start happening and what did that look like? [00:20:58] S1: We worked with Design Partners and we started onboarding companies that were part of the wait list. We had a couple of hundreds of, like I said, of contacts on the wait list and we tried choosing companies where we thought it's going to be a fit and use cases where we thought it's going to be a fit. Because our way to a fast market fit is not going all in with everything that – with everything possible. You’ve got to try and make something valuable for the clients. Otherwise, you're the one that's starting off. They have nothing to lose and you can lose a lot of money and precious time. [00:21:37] S0: What did you think about, when you thought about, because I think that's critically important. Product market fit is partially about the product. It's also about the market and specifically the market you choose to start with. What were some of the elements you thought through when you decided, these customers are a fit, but these ones maybe not yet? [00:21:53] S1: First of all, the persona that reached out and signed up for the wait list, if we saw it as someone that can make an impact and help us drive success within the organization, that's one thing. The size of the company, of course, we tried to go enterprise and…
00:21:53 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:21:53] S1: First of all, the persona that reached out and signed up for the wait list, if we saw it as someone that can make an impact and help us drive success within the organization, that's one thing. The size of the company, of course, we tried to go enterprise and… [00:22:07] S0: You wanted bigger. You didn't want big market or SMB. You'd rather large enterprise to start. [00:22:13] S1: Yeah, which, overall, I think that we had a couple where – we actually had a mix. We had a couple of startup companies where the founders were making demos all day long. We had Fortune 100 companies. I think that this problem of showcasing the product is a cross vertical problem and a cross size problem. I tried to prove it by showing that we can drive value to initial companies in various stages. It played out completely. It's really not about the size of the company today. It's really a global problem, you might say. [00:22:48] S0: One of the things with enterprises, I find, is there's so much upside because the contract sizes can be so big when you get there, but one of the things that I've seen at least is this mismatch between speed. As a startup, every day matters, every week matters. As an enterprise, you're thinking in quarters maybe, but probably years. Did you find some of that or did you, for whatever reason at that time, find there was actually enough pull from these enterprise customers and they were moving at your speed?
00:22:48 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:22:48] S0: One of the things with enterprises, I find, is there's so much upside because the contract sizes can be so big when you get there, but one of the things that I've seen at least is this mismatch between speed. As a startup, every day matters, every week matters. As an enterprise, you're thinking in quarters maybe, but probably years. Did you find some of that or did you, for whatever reason at that time, find there was actually enough pull from these enterprise customers and they were moving at your speed? [00:23:18] S1: They were moving fast. We were obviously – you're starting at a price point where it's not too much of a complicated procurement process with enterprise companies, right? You never stop with a – you never start with a $200,000 ACV if you're a startup company. You always find the right – if you find the right guy within the company, then obviously you can decide together what's a financial agreement that he can move fast with, he can see value, then he can finally expand within the organization and try to go for everything that could get us traction and not scare off their CFOs. We grow our prices from there. I think you have to lose some dollars the first place in order to get those logos.
00:23:18 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:23:18] S1: They were moving fast. We were obviously – you're starting at a price point where it's not too much of a complicated procurement process with enterprise companies, right? You never stop with a – you never start with a $200,000 ACV if you're a startup company. You always find the right – if you find the right guy within the company, then obviously you can decide together what's a financial agreement that he can move fast with, he can see value, then he can finally expand within the organization and try to go for everything that could get us traction and not scare off their CFOs. We grow our prices from there. I think you have to lose some dollars the first place in order to get those logos. [00:24:03] S0: Maybe just the other thing, I don't know if this came up in conversations, I just am thinking in the back of my head, oftentimes startups are pitching this time saving ROI, whereas with you, I would assume that for a lot of these salespeople who are implementing it, it affected their own KPIs, close rate, and things like that. Is that accurate? Is that how they looked at, well, the demos don't crash, I'll close more deals and that's why it's so important to me?
00:24:03 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:24:03] S0: Maybe just the other thing, I don't know if this came up in conversations, I just am thinking in the back of my head, oftentimes startups are pitching this time saving ROI, whereas with you, I would assume that for a lot of these salespeople who are implementing it, it affected their own KPIs, close rate, and things like that. Is that accurate? Is that how they looked at, well, the demos don't crash, I'll close more deals and that's why it's so important to me? [00:24:28] S1: It was a little easier to quantify, I would say, because if you don't have to spend millions of dollars on teams that just build out demo environments, if you don't have to spend theoretical millions of dollars on people communicating inside the organization, can you add a feature? Can you remove a feature? We all know what happens when a salesperson in a B2B company goes to anyone at RND and asks them to illustrate a new feature, right? They're going to kick his ass. It was really hard to – it was really easy to quantify. At first, I think I wouldn't be as ambitious to say we doubled everyone's sales or everyone met their quotas just because they used Walnut. You cannot attach us such a success to any of your tools, not even the most successful one, but we were definitely proud of a set of improvements that they saw within the org.
00:24:28 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:24:28] S1: It was a little easier to quantify, I would say, because if you don't have to spend millions of dollars on teams that just build out demo environments, if you don't have to spend theoretical millions of dollars on people communicating inside the organization, can you add a feature? Can you remove a feature? We all know what happens when a salesperson in a B2B company goes to anyone at RND and asks them to illustrate a new feature, right? They're going to kick his ass. It was really hard to – it was really easy to quantify. At first, I think I wouldn't be as ambitious to say we doubled everyone's sales or everyone met their quotas just because they used Walnut. You cannot attach us such a success to any of your tools, not even the most successful one, but we were definitely proud of a set of improvements that they saw within the org. [00:25:17] S0: Then that's the design partners, I guess, you're going back and forth. Did you end up picking – you had, as you said, from startup founders all the way to enterprise as you started off in this design phase. Did you end up deciding to at least from a go-to-market perspective, hone in on one of those company size types or did you scale from there to a million plus growing across the board?