A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:20:22 · Pablo Srugo, Chaz Englander
[00:20:22] S1: And you would pay yourself and then get paid later? Like you didn't have a partnership with the stores where you're buying stuff? [00:20:26] S0: No way. Yeah. There was just like... We had nothing. And and to... But this is the thing, right? We learned from the first business. We were like, we literally said to ourselves, and also I think it was Michael Seibel as in YC, Michael Seibel, he said to me, he said, a proper MVP is like, it is a WhatsApp group. Isn't that the way that you should think about it? We applied this and we were like, look, we're not gonna spend any money. We're not gonna do anything. We're gonna write code. Right? We're gonna stand outside these student halls or whatever. We're gonna hand out some flyers. We're gonna get an order. There's no back end, by the way. Right? So there's a text message that we got the order, right, that we hooked up to Twilio. Everybody's gonna go to the shop. We're buy them. We're gonna take it to them. And if they order again, the unit economics add up, then great. But that's, like, how it started. But it just grew quickly. Pre COVID. Right? So we quickly got to, like, hundreds and then thousands of orders a day with no marketing. Right? So it was purely... There was a referral based thing and sticky and just so different to the first company.
00:21:26 · Pablo Srugo, Chaz Englander
[00:21:26] S1: I'm gonna ask you for a small favor, a tiny little favor. In fact, it's not even... Now that I think about it, it's not even really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. Just hit the follow button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't wanna listen to an episode, you just skip it, but at least you don't miss out. And you mentioned, like, competitive landscape earlier. Was GOPAF already doing this in The US? Like, did you get inspired by others doing it in different cities and you brought it to Newcastle? [00:21:56] S0: So, no, GOPAF already exists in The US. We didn't know them because they were in stealth mode really, so there was no like press about them or anything, they they were still in stealth mode at that point, they were doing pretty well in The US. We launched in Newcastle again for just like small town, easy to get around. [00:22:11] S1: So it wasn't like you saw somebody doing it in a different market and you brought it to The UK market?
00:22:11 · Pablo Srugo, Chaz Englander
[00:22:11] S1: So it wasn't like you saw somebody doing it in a different market and you brought it to The UK market? [00:22:14] S0: No, and I think in that respect, it was just lucky. I think it was just like, hey, we think this is kinda cool, you know, as a concept, would you want this? Yeah, okay, well let's just build it. And by the way, now with AI as well, I said to someone the other day, our MVP probably took a month to build. Again, no back end, it was just an app that you could like choose from a selection of maybe like 30 different items. Also I remember we literally hooked up the items database to a Google Sheet and even the image of the item was being pulled from like an image URL on the Google. So we weren't even hosting the images. It was just like some random image online. It was a real piece of you know what, like, I don't think we didn't have payments in the beginning, you know, people paying cash, was just boom, we ordered, we got a tech specialist, that was it. [00:23:00] S1: I... It's the ultimate test of product market fit. And it's not so much like if you can give them a shitty product and still use it. It's just like, do they care about the optimization piece and like the bells and whistles, or do they just want the thing? Right? In that case, they just want the... They just wanna deliver like groceries deliver. And like, yeah, the thing doesn't look that good and it doesn't work like perfectly, that's fine because I'm still getting my groceries delivered, and and that proves the core thing.
00:23:00 · Pablo Srugo, Chaz Englander
[00:23:00] S1: I... It's the ultimate test of product market fit. And it's not so much like if you can give them a shitty product and still use it. It's just like, do they care about the optimization piece and like the bells and whistles, or do they just want the thing? Right? In that case, they just want the... They just wanna deliver like groceries deliver. And like, yeah, the thing doesn't look that good and it doesn't work like perfectly, that's fine because I'm still getting my groceries delivered, and and that proves the core thing. [00:23:22] S0: Exactly. But sorry, the point I was gonna make there was like that MVP in today's world would take a day. [00:23:27] S1: Right. [00:23:28] S0: And and so I think that says to a couple of things. I said, I think it's like that thing I mentioned around competition. So like, you know, ultimately, if there is no competition and there's no competition for a while, you probably don't have a market. And the other thing of just like, you should be able to validate concepts just far quicker. Yeah. Say that, I mean, a year ago, vibe coding was great for prototyping. I mean, now I think it's like great for production. So in terms of MVPs, like, the concept of saying I don't have technical resources to build an MVP is just, like, not true.
00:23:28 · Chaz Englander, Pablo Srugo
[00:23:28] S0: And and so I think that says to a couple of things. I said, I think it's like that thing I mentioned around competition. So like, you know, ultimately, if there is no competition and there's no competition for a while, you probably don't have a market. And the other thing of just like, you should be able to validate concepts just far quicker. Yeah. Say that, I mean, a year ago, vibe coding was great for prototyping. I mean, now I think it's like great for production. So in terms of MVPs, like, the concept of saying I don't have technical resources to build an MVP is just, like, not true. [00:23:58] S1: Yeah. No. It's a 100% gone. It makes that experimentation piece so much faster, and it's interesting because I think a lot of the... Especially for the technical founders out there, like, a lot of the building... Was just talking to one the other week, like, is almost a defense mechanism. Like, they're comfortable there building, and so they don't they don't launch it. That excuse is like gone. You know? You can't even say that to yourself. It's like, you got... You gotta go out and launch and see what happens.
00:23:58 · Pablo Srugo, Chaz Englander
[00:23:58] S1: Yeah. No. It's a 100% gone. It makes that experimentation piece so much faster, and it's interesting because I think a lot of the... Especially for the technical founders out there, like, a lot of the building... Was just talking to one the other week, like, is almost a defense mechanism. Like, they're comfortable there building, and so they don't they don't launch it. That excuse is like gone. You know? You can't even say that to yourself. It's like, you got... You gotta go out and launch and see what happens. [00:24:23] S0: Yeah. And also, you know, when you... You're in production these days, anything that was on kinda like, if you're a wine back, if you take the business day, you put it back three years, that nice to have product list now becomes a need to have. There's also like the speed that you need to ship, you know, obviously as the barriers to entry get lower, that means there's more competition, it means like, you know, there's gonna be more products in the market, you know, you just need to ship so much faster. Come back to that point of like, product market fit in the area well, and it's just like... It's just not static. You might not have it and want it. [00:24:51] S1: So just to wrap up the fancy story that ultimately acquired by GoPuff, did they come to you? Did you go to them? And and same kind of idea, like, where was the business at more or less by the time that happened?