A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:26:35 · Pablo Srugo, Nick Fleisher
[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? [00:26:43] S0: I would say both. Like we very consciously know that it's a sales tactic. Like if you look at our win rates and our close rates, they are significantly higher in person by a long shot. Like it's not even close, but it's also the best way to learn of what's going on in a company. Like at McKinsey, we used to talk about like walking the halls. Like you were supposed to go to your client and just sit there and like be annoying. And we do that here too. Like I literally, you know, even still, I go to the clients and I'm just like being annoying, finding people for coffee. Some of these clients have security rules where they have to like walk around with you and it's really frustrating. But like it's the best way to one, learn their problems and two, build a relationship. And now like clients will text us things like, hey, this other part of the org is doing this. Like how do we solve that? Like it's not just like finding better ways to build product, but also like in the large enterprises, they're very complicated orgs to sell into. And like the only way you can really nail it is like if you understand the complexity there and you have to build the relationship to do that.
00:27:41 · Pablo Srugo
[00:27:41] S1: I'm going to put you on the spot. Do you remember in those early days when you're going through these design partnerships and you're spending time in person, something important that you learned through that about the problem or about the workflows or whatever that matter, that made an impact like to product development or the way you sell or whatever it is. Some story you can share about why it's so important to be in person.