A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:03:28 · Dane Atkinson, Pablo Srugo
[00:03:28] S0: There is, and there are many ways to go about finding your product guide. Being the customer yourself is one of the best, because especially if you can viscerally understand the desire and hold onto that as you grow, it’s fantastic. There are a couple of blind spots that get created. I remember sitting with Anthony, arguing over improving the core module versus adding a calendar, which would have taken hours versus days. I think you see one version of the world, but being truthful to that almost always leads to a good fit because you yourself are that fit. A lot of VCs, you not included a lot of investors are like, but the TAM is too small. You’re just focused on blogs, or you’re just focused on selling surfboards. That tends to not actually be an effective long-term strategy, because once you build something that works for a customer, as in with Squarespace, I think the big delta for us was we had these blogging components and we added a blank module, add a photo module, which allowed you to really expand the use case. Originally, it was like photo blocking. Before you knew it, people were building wedding sites, and their pet stores, and everything else on it because utility was so strong in the core that these extensions made a lot of sense for everybody. [00:04:45] S1: How do you become CEO? It’s not normal for somebody to just be like, hey, you come and join me as CEO. Did you try to invest or buy the company? Or did you tell him right off the bat, hey, I’d be better off leading this, you’ll make more money? How did happen?
00:04:45 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:04:45] S1: How do you become CEO? It’s not normal for somebody to just be like, hey, you come and join me as CEO. Did you try to invest or buy the company? Or did you tell him right off the bat, hey, I’d be better off leading this, you’ll make more money? How did happen? [00:04:59] S0: He’s wickedly smart, so there was no hope of buying the company, although that was definitely on my mind at the time. It was actually interesting journey. I love founders. I love startups. I’ve spent my life trying to build tools, Squarespace, and help Shopify, and all these. These have been a facilitator of that. He looked like, in a lot of ways, a younger version of me. I felt like if I can’t get a big hug of this, I could definitely help on the journey and share some of my scars. It was interesting because it was just really him at the point. The final interview I had to become his CEO was his dad. He had coffee somewhere in the ‘20s. I remember it was the last second [unclear]. He was like, yeah, my dad says you’re all right, so let’s go for it. All right, cool. [00:05:44] S1: That’s awesome. You ran that company, what was like, 2 to 10 million, 2 to 15 million? Is that more or less when you were there?
00:05:44 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:05:44] S1: That’s awesome. You ran that company, what was like, 2 to 10 million, 2 to 15 million? Is that more or less when you were there? [00:05:52] S0: Yeah, it was that early arc. I don’t remember exactly what he was doing at the time we joined up, but we’d raised 40 million bucks during my time and had gotten to, I think, a pretty meaningful product market fit. It was more than 10 million in a revenue standpoint. We found a number of inflections both in product and in the way we went to market. I think that we continue to extend the utility of the platform, and we found ways to educate customers. One of the things that we ran into at the time was it was hard for customers to believe that you could actually design a tool inside of a tool. That sounds obvious right now. But at the time, you always hired engineer. It was a long process. The fact that you could do it yourself was an educational sell, so we had to find long formats. Truth, this format was one of our keystones to success. We found podcasters, and that ability for someone to actually share their experience with it really helped people understand what it could do, and open the category. [00:06:44] S1: You’re there till about 2011. How do you leave and end up starting another company? How do you leave a rocket ship like Squarespace to then go do it again from scratch?
00:06:44 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:06:44] S1: You’re there till about 2011. How do you leave and end up starting another company? How do you leave a rocket ship like Squarespace to then go do it again from scratch? [00:06:53] S0: My North Star is trying to help small business. Anthony is an incredible operator. I think in our chapter together, he learned a ton. I think the business, when I left, had really found its self-sense. It was going to be, and what did I think become is the way to make beautiful things online and to tell your story in that stunning fashion. I want to roll the dice some more, so went into the next one. That is probably company seven or eight in the sequence, so I am very much akin to this startup. Start in a room with an idea. It’s not the idea you’re going to end up with, but it’s an idea and keep going. [00:07:28] S1: Tell me just a bit about that company, SumAll. What was the idea there?
00:07:28 · Pablo Srugo, Dane Atkinson
[00:07:28] S1: Tell me just a bit about that company, SumAll. What was the idea there? [00:07:31] S0: We had seen this pretty demonstrative shift from the small business to start spending in digital from what was conventional advertising. It felt the time that Shopify was one of our earliest partners. Facebook and Google had a huge amount of data that they couldn’t get the attention to share with their customer. Actually, Toby and Harley, a bunch of those people were really early advocates as we put together a platform that let the user see and understand their data, but it didn’t work. The lesson I learned there, as hard as it was, and you do learn more from the ones that aren’t the rocket ships, but that struggled. We ended up with a half million small businesses, so we ended up with one of the larger platforms, but that data was very hard to action. We got swept aside in this, and I think definitely a topic we’re talking about, our customers just absolutely loved it. They would spend hours a day. They would print out the reports and share it with their team. I think it was like 15 times Google Analytics usage was our usage case, and we’re growing 20,000 customers a month, which having just come off Squarespace. It was a big number to get to early in your life. It didn’t correlate to people spending money. At the end of the day, we’re like, okay, now everyone’s using this. We want to start charging for deeper analytics or printed reports. What’s my data? Oh, am I going to pay for my data?
00:07:31 · Dane Atkinson, Pablo Srugo
[00:07:31] S0: We had seen this pretty demonstrative shift from the small business to start spending in digital from what was conventional advertising. It felt the time that Shopify was one of our earliest partners. Facebook and Google had a huge amount of data that they couldn’t get the attention to share with their customer. Actually, Toby and Harley, a bunch of those people were really early advocates as we put together a platform that let the user see and understand their data, but it didn’t work. The lesson I learned there, as hard as it was, and you do learn more from the ones that aren’t the rocket ships, but that struggled. We ended up with a half million small businesses, so we ended up with one of the larger platforms, but that data was very hard to action. We got swept aside in this, and I think definitely a topic we’re talking about, our customers just absolutely loved it. They would spend hours a day. They would print out the reports and share it with their team. I think it was like 15 times Google Analytics usage was our usage case, and we’re growing 20,000 customers a month, which having just come off Squarespace. It was a big number to get to early in your life. It didn’t correlate to people spending money. At the end of the day, we’re like, okay, now everyone’s using this. We want to start charging for deeper analytics or printed reports. What’s my data? Oh, am I going to pay for my data? [00:08:48] S1: Do you think this is because something like Google Analytics is free, so there’s that benchmark? Because if you’re getting value, presumably you would pay.