A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:07:11 · Pablo Srugo, Mark Hughes
[00:07:11] S1: That was a big change, like, going from a sales role playing, which there's been companies that had, you know, Hyperbound or whatever that have, like, traction there. But you moved from sales role playing to customer success role playing, and that's where you saw things really hit off. [00:07:22] S0: Yeah. Exactly. [00:07:23] S1: So let's go through I mean, you just went through the story, but you kinda gave us a two minute version. Now now that we understand kind of, like, where things started to work, let's kinda work backwards. You started, as you said, 2023. Give give me a little bit of of your background before that and kind of just the Genesis origin story. Like, why why did you start this company in the first place?
00:07:23 · Pablo Srugo, Mark Hughes
[00:07:23] S1: So let's go through I mean, you just went through the story, but you kinda gave us a two minute version. Now now that we understand kind of, like, where things started to work, let's kinda work backwards. You started, as you said, 2023. Give give me a little bit of of your background before that and kind of just the Genesis origin story. Like, why why did you start this company in the first place? [00:07:43] S0: Yeah. I suppose, like, a bit of background on myself. Like, I I would have met my cofounder actually first in university. We both studied in in Trinity College in Dublin. I studied business and economics. He studied computer science. We were both part of the Trinity Entrepreneurship Society as it was called, so we would come tinkering ideas together in university. Both Both happened to start our careers at Intercom at the same time, so that's when I would've got to know him a good bit better. He started as a product engineer, and I was a kind of BDR, kinda entry level sales position. Interesting. Patrick was working on, like, the sales use case team at Intercom. That was when Intercom was building everything from marketing, sales, and support, not just customer support. So he would, like, build things, and I'd be his guinea pig where I test new features and stuff like that before kinda getting them out of the road map. This was when, by [00:08:30] S1: the way? What what what year are
00:08:30 · Pablo Srugo, Mark Hughes
[00:08:30] S1: the way? What what what year are [00:08:31] S0: we talking about? 2017. Yeah. So both kind of worked there for a couple of years. He then had his own his first startup, which was a a YC company in summer twenty nineteen, and I had my first business which was a company called Grad Guide which I took full time and raised 2,000,000 against that business and that was a kind of graduate recruitment platform where we would connect students and grads with a mentor a few years ahead of them on the career ladder to help them find their first role, so it was more like a mentorship platform, particularly focused on sales support roles to help people land those kind of entry level jobs. After that then, like I sold that business in late twenty twenty two and Patrick left his YC company. We'd always stayed in touch and like one thing we like, I realized that I didn't have a technical cofounder. He didn't have like a sales cofounder or someone to focus on distribution, so we always wanted to work together. So to be perfectly honest, the origin story, we have a memo about this that I can share called Mark and Patrick Inc, but it was really like Mark and Patrick wanted to work together and build a business. And then the ideation kinda came after. [00:09:31] S1: So But it was the perfect time. I mean, late twenty twenty two is probably like out of all the times when you could just be like, me and you are gonna do something, we don't know what, that's like the best time for that to happen.
00:09:31 · Pablo Srugo, Mark Hughes
[00:09:31] S1: So But it was the perfect time. I mean, late twenty twenty two is probably like out of all the times when you could just be like, me and you are gonna do something, we don't know what, that's like the best time for that to happen. [00:09:40] S0: Yeah. It was funny. Like, I sold the business in November 22 when, like, ChatGPT just launched, and I had to do like a month handover basically to the new owners. And we were kinda just like working out of a working space in Dublin. We got free access to it at a place called Dogpatch Labs. They gave us a free desk, we were just like tinkering on ideas, taking long walks around Dublin in the cold winter, and eventually then kind of landed on the first version of Solid Road and took it full time in January 23, like I said. [00:10:10] S1: What was the first idea of what you decided you wanted to build together?
00:10:10 · Pablo Srugo, Mark Hughes
[00:10:10] S1: What was the first idea of what you decided you wanted to build together? [00:10:13] S0: There was lots of them. I think the first one was kinda like a gonna be a Gong competitor. Again, meeting bots. But, yeah, there are so many that was quite a commoditized software. So we built the first version of that, and then we send the transcript to ChatGPT, it would summarize the call. And even back then, was hilarious that, like, people were amazed by this because this is before the likes of Gong and Chorus dot ai had even implemented any AI into their product. And so people were like, oh, this is amazing. It's like I can get a summarized version of my my sales goal, and we built that on top of I remember it was another kind of YC company. That was kind of the first version, and then that brought us into the kind of role play training when the kind of speech to text has got slightly better. It's funny.
00:10:53 · Pablo Srugo, Mark Hughes
[00:10:53] S1: The the, you know, the thing you're mentioning about sending it to ChadGPT and that kind of being, like, v one of some product, that's why GPT rappers got such a bad name because that was the original GPT rapper. You just do something, like, incredibly simple. You know? Take it to Chad GPT, bring it back, and, like, this is a product. And then, obviously, a lot of those got killed by either an incumbent like a Gong or Chad GPT. And then the thing became, oh, you don't wanna be a rapper. And still people are saying, like, you don't wanna and the reality is, if you think about every vertical AI app, for the most part, like, they are rappers. They are they are rappers. They're just really good, and they embed the workflow and all this stuff. But it's funny to have that in your origin story just because the the time aligns so well. [00:11:32] S0: Yep. We knew, like, early on when we started using ChatGP for the first time, we're like, this is gonna be massive. Like, there's gonna be so many opportunities on the application layer. So, yeah, just kind of started from there. But it's funny, like, if you can remember, January 2023 was a terrible time to raise money. So, like, we were like, oh, Mark and Patrick, both second time founders, like, somewhat successful. Like, this will this will be easy enough. Let's go raise some venture money. And [00:11:56] S1: It should have been the best time to raise money, but, yeah, we had the macro winter of twenty two, and the AI stuff was just kinda starting off.