A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:19:16 · Pablo Srugo
[00:19:16] S1: Let's be honest, Sequoia is probably like the number one brand in VC. Probably if you pulled 100 founders, like they'd be on the top is just about all their lists. Like if you're thinking about early stage founder who would love to raise from Sequoia, there's the relationship building. You want to get in the door somehow like you did. But, you know, many people just like, you know, they're just not close enough for that to like happen. What do you find is some of the things that matter most to Sequoia? Like, you know, take this with a grain of salt because at the end of the day, you can't just like will yourself to raise from a particular firm. You've got to talk to a lot of them and you've got to find somebody that believes and all these sort of things. But having worked with Sequoia and having a sense of what they care about and don't care about, what would be like your number one advice to someone who's like, I just want to raise from Sequoia. What should I do?
00:19:54 · Nick Fleisher
[00:19:54] S0: Yeah. Well, I think my first push would be you shouldn't just want to raise from Sequoia. Like, you know, there's a lot of amazing firms out there and I love Sequoia and they've been great. But like, there's a lot of places to access capital that is going to be as helpful and for some founders more helpful than that. And so that's my starting point. In terms of like kind of breaking in or how to do it, I think the biggest thing is, you know, you started to touch on it, but like you have to find a partner that you are going to build a relationship with, right? Like as much as Sequoia invested in us, like it was really Bogomil investing in us, right? And frankly, he's also the reason that I took a check from Sequoia. Like he's someone who I would want on my board. I think the things that someone like that looks at are like one, it's so early in seed and pre-seed investing. Like it genuinely is all about the founder, right? Like the idea might completely change, right? And so it's like, you know, he always said to me, like, the reason I wanted you to work at my portfolio company is because in my interview with you, like the thing that I looked for was, is this someone that I would want to work for? Like if I had to work for this person, right, would I be happy doing it? Would I jump ship and go do that? And I think that's like one thing that you can show, whether it's through past experience or just how you carry yourself and talk about the vision, which is something to be, to be conscious of. I think the second one is like, we never went out and said we were raising. Like we raised because we had a problem where like we were too busy. Like I called him and I was like, I am too busy. I think I need to hire people. Like, should I raise? What do you think? To me, like going to the VCs without a deck and going to them with a demo and like customer problems is like way more compelling and way more natural than like, you know, spending all this time putting together a formal round at seed and pre-seed. And I know that that's so easy to say in practice because those things are like on the plate. But, you know, even with our series A, like I tried to not do a deck. It was like, I want you to like come meet the team, talk to customers and look at the demo because like that's what you should be investing in.
00:21:44 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
Not like how well do I put together a fancy page? [00:21:47] S1: Well, I think the meta thing there is like be different. I mean, every VC is looking for the thing that's going to be a huge outlier. So if you can find ways to shine and be unique and then you do, you have to do it many times because you've got to find a believer and like somebody might be like, I don't like legal. And then it doesn't matter what you say. You know, they don't care or they don't believe or whatever. But you see, you got to do it enough times, but to get that serendipity factor. But I think if you can find a way to just shine and be different, that's going to do a lot for you, especially in the early rounds, pre-seed seed and series A. [00:22:16] S0: As much as it's important that you show that to the firms, like there's again, there's so many VCs out there, like you need to find a partner that is the right fit for you. Like it's so critical. Like Sequoia was so critical in our early hiring. They were so key in early customers. And a lot of that's because I found a partner there that like I wanted to get on the phone with every day. And like at seed and pre-seed to me, that's far and away the most important thing. It's series A, B, C, whatever. It doesn't really matter as much. [00:22:40] S1: So let's talk a bit about go to market, really early go to market. Like at this point, you've got some money. You're going in full time. How do you get your first few customers? Let's go deep on that. That's that's that every founder wants to figure that out.
00:22:40 · Pablo Srugo, Nick Fleisher
[00:22:40] S1: So let's talk a bit about go to market, really early go to market. Like at this point, you've got some money. You're going in full time. How do you get your first few customers? Let's go deep on that. That's that's that every founder wants to figure that out. [00:22:53] S0: A couple of ways. One, we were very lucky to have been at McKinsey and I was lucky to have worked with massive clients there that we were close with. I think the second one is Jared was a lawyer. His sister's a lawyer in house. And you just kind of network through your family and friends and you get people to try shit and take a risk. Right. And so there's no perfect answer. Those were very scrappy. And then I think the other one is like taking that initial set of design partners and going to them and saying, hey, like who are five or 10 people in your network that we should show this thing to? [00:23:22] S1: What was your pitch to just on the design partners before you move forward? Like what was your pitch to them? Were they paying, not paying? Did they have like you need to show up for an hour a week? What was kind of the deal with them? [00:23:32] S0: Most of our early design partners were not paying, but we had aligned like, hey, we want you to use this thing for the next two months or three months. We're going to build around your use cases and really nail them. And then this is what we're going to charge you. And it was a dart on the wall, like random number that we came up with at the time.
00:23:32 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
[00:23:32] S0: Most of our early design partners were not paying, but we had aligned like, hey, we want you to use this thing for the next two months or three months. We're going to build around your use cases and really nail them. And then this is what we're going to charge you. And it was a dart on the wall, like random number that we came up with at the time. [00:23:49] S1: And did they have to meet with you like weekly or something like that to give feedback?
00:23:49 · Pablo Srugo, Nick Fleisher
[00:23:49] S1: And did they have to meet with you like weekly or something like that to give feedback? [00:23:52] S0: For all of them, we set up a weekly meeting. We had a shared Slack channel. We still do this with most of our accounts, honestly, just because it's the best way to get feedback and buy in. They would commit usually to an hour a week. Shared Slack. They would review new parts of the product or when we would release them. Some of them would meet more than others because that's just what they wanted to do. They were super invested. And so some of them was multiple hours a week. I think the most important thing, though, from our side was going in person. We wouldn't have gotten any of these design partners early on if we hadn't met them in person. It's just impossible to do this stuff over Zoom. They're buying into us, right? We have a fancy demo. Great. The product's still maturing at that stage. They're buying into working with us and believing that we can improve with them over the next couple of months. The goal was, hey, how many of these design partners can we convert to full paying customers? Right? That kind of has to be the goal. But as we went through and added more and more design partners, we started to get to the point where we felt comfortable asking some of them to pay us for that time that we were giving in to improve the product around them because the baseline of it was good enough that they were going to get value from day one.