A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:24:56 · Pablo Srugo
[00:24:56] S1: I'm really worried because, listen, like you've been listening for like, what, 10, 20, 30 minutes now. Clearly, you like it. And the thing is, the next episode is way better and you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. Design partners is an interesting thing. Like it's the playbook now. Beta customers and beta side partners, whatever. It's been played for a long time. The big danger is it's usually I find most founders can get at least some beta design partners because ultimately it's free and you're like, I'm going to build stuff for you. It's like, okay, why not? Right? But the problem becomes you build something, you respond to feedback, you do all these things and you never really solve such a fundamental problem that all the other stuff that's supposed to come after, like the market pull, the payments, the referrals just don't come. As you're going through this, what are the tells for you? What are you looking for to make sure that you're solving like a true top priority problem and the stuff you're building is going to lead to true demand?
00:25:53 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
[00:25:53] S0: The worst mistake you can make there is just saying yes and doing everything that someone asks of you, right? Like when you're working with early design partners, it's so easy to just say yes to everything. And that's how you get led astray into doing things that like aren't high value because it's like, especially in legal, some company has some random workflow that no other company does that they really want you to nail. And so we made a point in like every piece of feedback to say like, can we find five or six other clients that we think of that like actually have this problem in order to justify the value of doing, even from like our first clients. And we had some early design partners that we like, you know, fired, if you will, where we were like, your problems just aren't aligned enough to the market. And so we're not going to work with you, but we'll circle back when we feel ready. [00:26:35] S1: And in person, was this just a sales tactic or were you using this as a design partnership was happening just to get more understanding of the problems and more of the subtleties?