A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:35:26 · Pablo Srugo
[00:35:26] S1: The other way I’ve heard this expressed is you want to meet customers where they are. The reality is if you think about the average coffee shop owner, are they thinking about putting all of their invoices in one system to see them all? Not really, but are they thinking about something they bought yesterday that they wished was 5% or 10% cheaper? Or are they thinking about switching vendors? Yeah, they are. When you speak that language, you’re right away talking about something that, like you said, clicks. It’s top of mind. It’s the language they already get. You can save me 10%, 20%, and it won’t affect quality. They have a no-brainer, let’s go. Then the other value is why they stay, but they see that later.
00:36:09 · Dane Atkinson, Pablo Srugo
[00:36:09] S0: Yeah, 100%. A small business doesn’t know how to factor their time. They don’t want to calculate all that in. If you come at them with an extrapolated return, it’s unintelligible. You come at them getting rid of the problem they have in a way they can access because most people go into small business, particularly coffee shops and ice cream shops, and the customers we have because they want to make people’s lives richer. They want to make the community richer. They want to spend time with the customer, and their staff, and inventing the next ice cream or the next kind of thing. Don’t want to be worrying about their supply lines and their choices. To them, that’s all just muddle, and it’s an ugly muddle that I want to deal with. If it’s cheaper and I know I’m saving money, and now I’d take that five bucks I saved in that Oatly and I’d put it into my kids’ college fund, or I replace the light bulbs in the bathroom. I can instantly get return off that. [00:37:00] S1: Before we close here, I want to touch on one more story that you’d mentioned earlier, and maybe you can walk us through it. But my understanding is there’s a point at which you maybe overhired or just hired a lot of junior more interns and used them to fix a lot of different things that weren’t working all that well.
00:37:00 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:37:00] S1: Before we close here, I want to touch on one more story that you’d mentioned earlier, and maybe you can walk us through it. But my understanding is there’s a point at which you maybe overhired or just hired a lot of junior more interns and used them to fix a lot of different things that weren’t working all that well. [00:37:14] S0: Potentially better now because the capital’s gotten much more constrictive, but it’s certainly a red flag as a technology company. What happened to me in this scenario was we were scaling, and this is even the AI chapter, and I walked by one of the conference rooms and there was like nine people in there all hammering away. They’d had to hire interns to fill in orders and get things clarified. That was, oh, shit balls. First, we’re burning money. We’re solving a problem with money. We’re literally duct taping the world over with money, which is very hard not to do when you have a lot of money as any kind of human being. Second, there’s something fundamentally wrong with a solution when you’re trying to make everything automated and successful and you default into this process. That means that you’re culturally. [00:38:04] S1: Was this, by the way? Where were you in your journey? How many people? How much did you raise at this point?
00:38:04 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:38:04] S1: Was this, by the way? Where were you in your journey? How many people? How much did you raise at this point? [00:38:08] S0: Probably raised another 10 million at that point and we were still small, maybe 30-person, 40-person team. We came out of COVID with 15-person team because we didn’t know if the industry was going to be around. We started with 50 customers in 2020 and had 600 by the end of the year. It was mind-boggling. But at that point, actually we didn’t have interns. We’d used COVID to build technology and we saw our mistakes a year back when we were trying to do all your tech. I’ll say this for operators, like it’s very tough as a founder, you get this imposter thesis. Why am I here? That also affects the way you make decisions, and sometimes you get swayed by your team. I would encourage, whenever your instincts feel like something’s wrong, because sometimes that’s all you’re going to have is your instinct is that you not aggressively scream at people and all the rest, but you ask questions. You try to figure things out because those little nicks add up and they weigh you down as [unclear. You have to get on things as fast as you can as an operator. [00:39:05] S1: Let’s end it there. Let’s end it on the two questions that we always end on. The first one is, and this is for Odeko specifically, when did you know that you had true product market fit?
00:39:05 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:39:05] S1: Let’s end it there. Let’s end it on the two questions that we always end on. The first one is, and this is for Odeko specifically, when did you know that you had true product market fit? [00:39:16] S0: I think that empirically, you could see it in the growth data sales without a sales engine, sales without marketing, just sales because the product made sense, that an inflection rate was obvious. I visibly thought that we went to a coffee conference. I was wearing Odeko t-shirt and I don’t think I got around 10-feet before I got my first hug, making a difference to somebody. I have my Squarespace t-shirts and I’ll still get a like, oh, I made my site. It’s so cool. But when it’s someone that’s actually now making money in their business, it was, okay, this is not bad for the use of lifespan, but it’s different for everybody. I would say don’t use funding. Don’t use hiring. Don’t use your pretty box as your symptoms of success. <Laugh> Those are all number of employees, worst one possible. It really should be something where you can feel the impact.
00:40:03 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:40:03] S1: Number of employees, it’s funny. There’s vanity KPIs, and there’s vanity KPIs, and especially I remember as a first time founder being like, oh my God, we made this hire. We made that hire. <laugh> You’re not chasing the right things. But just to your point earlier, walking around that conference and having people hugging you, you have to be founder of experience feeling. But for me, the most rewarding feeling of being a founder is having an idea and seeing it transform into real life. Obviously, that idea changes, but there’s a point at which it was just an idea, and you know because you were involved and you were the leader of that. Then to see it actually happening in real life, that feeling is second and none. [00:40:45] S0: Everyone listening, this is a first time in history that you can have an idea, and in a number of years, humanity has felt it across the globe in your community, on your street corner. The fact that it’s possible to invent and change world, it is the most addictive applause you could ever have. It’s almost unimaginable. Something in your head years later is a living thing making the world different for. [00:41:14] S1: The last question here is, and especially for you having done as many startups as you did, being part of so many journeys, what would be some of your most important, most common advice for early stage founders that are right now in the trenches, trying to find, let’s say product market fit?