A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:28:48 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:28:48] S0: Can you describe maybe just what it felt like for things to move that fast, both in terms of just getting all this money into your company within 12 to 18 months, and then the hiring and the servicing that you need to do to react quickly? What was that experience like? [00:29:08] S1: It's a pretty intense experience, I think. You need a strong initial leadership and management team as your first team, otherwise, it's not going to work. You don't have to grow to a hundred people for things not to work. You can grow to 40 people or 30 people and get it wrong. The first thing I made sure that the leadership was super strong. We tried to put our culture in mind, even though it's distributed across so many time zones. There was some, of course, growing pains with going from zero to whatever that was super fast. You spend a lot of time taking care of situations where people were not mid management, but then they are mid management and then they want to manage two people, but maybe, and then things are going back to normal and there's a lot of lesson learned here, but I would say it all falls on how strong your initial leadership team that surrounds you.
00:29:08 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:29:08] S1: It's a pretty intense experience, I think. You need a strong initial leadership and management team as your first team, otherwise, it's not going to work. You don't have to grow to a hundred people for things not to work. You can grow to 40 people or 30 people and get it wrong. The first thing I made sure that the leadership was super strong. We tried to put our culture in mind, even though it's distributed across so many time zones. There was some, of course, growing pains with going from zero to whatever that was super fast. You spend a lot of time taking care of situations where people were not mid management, but then they are mid management and then they want to manage two people, but maybe, and then things are going back to normal and there's a lot of lesson learned here, but I would say it all falls on how strong your initial leadership team that surrounds you. [00:30:09] S0: One of the problems I see, and especially when, actually, this is when things are working and you're getting market pull, is CEOs getting caught up putting out fires, right? Because especially as you start growing, just things go wrong and sometimes you do need to react as a CEO, but then you can also get to the point where you're just constantly putting out fires. Any thoughts around that? Especially having been through it a few times, I would think you manage to get your head above it all. How do you do that? How do you manage being reactive and putting out fires versus staying on top of it and being able to really just move your company forward?
00:30:48 · Yoav Vilner, Pablo Srugo
[00:30:48] S1: I don't think – if I think of friends of mine that have 1,000 people on their team or 5,000 or 10,000, I think everybody has fires all the time, and also, when it's just two co-founders to start with, right? There's always a fire. Then also it goes to your first team helping you out to your board, to your investors, people, advisors, whatever that is, you shouldn't expect your employees to help you fix the daily fires and for good reason because what they have in mind is their path, their progression within the company, and if it's good for their career and if it's good for the company, and you as a CEO, you have to be providing, the most successful paths to all of your employees while you are putting out files that could be anything, something in production, a huge customer is on a conference now showing a demo and something and they don't have Wi-Fi and whatever, right? Someone is to fly over – it never stops. You just need to have the world's best people on your management team to make sure that you're able to succeed. [00:32:03] S0: Perfect. Well, listen, we'll stop it there and maybe just end on the two questions we always end on. The first one, when did you feel you had true product market fit?
00:32:03 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:32:03] S0: Perfect. Well, listen, we'll stop it there and maybe just end on the two questions we always end on. The first one, when did you feel you had true product market fit? [00:32:14] S1: That's a good question because when I was in SF a few months ago, I went to Dreamforce and it was just – I was meeting one of our investors and it was going for the last two hours of the entire week. I walked in and then I noticed that a big – I wouldn't say half of the companies, but a huge portion of companies were actually using Walnut to show their demos inside the Dreamforce Hall. Some of them also recognized me from that video that we did. It was a pretty – when you build a B2B SaaS product, you don't really see it in the hands of real-life people in the real world, right? It's not a B2C app or something, but that was a moment where I saw people just using it and showing me how they use it, show me if they're using it on a huge screen or a tablet or just a laptop. That was an amazing moment. I left that conference hall and I felt that we did something that actually gets to people on their day to day. [00:33:23] S0: That's a great story. Yeah, I admit, I think as a founder, seeing the value truly delivered and appreciated by our customers is really what it's all about. Then the last question. Taking everything you've learned over the last, I guess, three and a half or so years running Walnut, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when you were just starting this company, what would that be?
00:33:23 · Pablo Srugo, Yoav Vilner
[00:33:23] S0: That's a great story. Yeah, I admit, I think as a founder, seeing the value truly delivered and appreciated by our customers is really what it's all about. Then the last question. Taking everything you've learned over the last, I guess, three and a half or so years running Walnut, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when you were just starting this company, what would that be? [00:33:49] S1: When we started the company, the tech market seemed as difficult as it is now because the first lockdown of COVID seemed like tech is never going to come back. Everybody was let go. Nobody was raising money. I remember people telling me when I told them I'm going to start raising a seed round, they were like, “You're crazy. It's the worst time ever. Find a job. Stop ,” but I was sold on the problem that we wanted to solve and it really reward us because people really appreciate founders that are trying to raise at all costs and even when times are difficult. Now I think this is a different type of crisis and I think VCs definitely appreciate pre-seed teams or seed teams that are just going all in and saying tech has taken a hit and multiples have taken a hit, but we're still – we believe in the problem we want to solve, so not to let other people's opinions of if it's a good time now to be doing it, if it's a bad time, if you should wait six months, or those tips that I sometimes hear founders get from investors. I think there's no right timing. You’ve just got to go all in and it's going to be fine.
00:35:02 · Pablo Srugo
[00:35:02] S0: I love that because I think, if you are starting a startup today, you are doing it because you genuinely believe that you have to solve this problem. You're certainly not doing it for the hype. Two years ago, who knows? Some people were doing it for that reason, and some people were doing it because of the TechCrunch headline that they raised $10 million, right? Yeah, when the tide goes down, it really washes down a lot of people that are in for the wrong reasons. To all the founders that are fighting it right now, that's the plus side. Anyways, with that said, Yoav, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Yeah, I think founders learn a lot from what you did, especially on the raising awareness, right? Just using content to propel yourself forward, to make yourself a category leader and all the good that comes from that. Thank you for sharing all that. If you've listened to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact. Whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to Product Market Fit Show and leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me, to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover this show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews. The reality is, if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. Please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing, “great podcast,” or “I love this podcast,” whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously the longer the better, the more detailed the better, but write anything, leave five stars, and you'll be helping me, but most importantly, many other founders, just like you, discover the show. Thank you.