A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:08:20 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:08:20] S1: And what exactly were they doing eighty steps for? What was the end product of that? [00:08:25] S0: Yeah, so in those days, it was a lot of content creation for pretty basic stuff, right? But it would be like creating local pages for a national franchise or things that we typically call like programmatic SEO. So that was our first real cluster of interest. So I remember the CMO over at Deepgram created a workflow where he would look at Product Hunt every day for new products. He would then research those companies and create pages for each startup that launched on Product Hunt that met his criteria. And because those companies had nothing written about them, he would rank number one for all of them. And because Deepgram had domain authority. And so he'd figured out this sort of early use case for LLMs to create interesting, novel content in a semi-automated way. And I think it's 35x Deepgram's traffic to their website. So that was an early opportunity. Now, the space has moved on a lot from that, but it was incredible to see both the energy they were putting in and the wins that they were getting.
00:09:24 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:09:24] S1: So this is interesting because it's this mix of you've got a product, you've got some data, you've got people using your product in a certain way, and you're actually able to leverage that to double down. Let's go deeper on that because I think this is not an easy thing to do and a very important one. How do you take that next step? Do you go to everybody that's using it on the marketing side and have fifty conversations? Do you start maybe more from like first principles, you know, strategy? What is kind of that next move to say, OK, if we're going to go all in on marketing. What does that really look like? [00:09:55] S0: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question. The first piece of it for us is, can we solve the problem for one customer really, really well? So it's that true solution acceptance by a high-taste user. Where they go, this is it, this is great. I will be a referenceable customer. I really, really like this, and then you have to figure out whether or not the pain that this problem that you're solving is widespread enough as you need it to be, and also acute enough. You don't want to be people's number three or four problem. You want to hopefully attack their number one problem. So whilst you're figuring out if you can actually solve the problem, what the solution looks like, starting to learn about the shape of the sales motion. How you would end up selling this to more people. How broad-based this problem is in the market is incredibly important as well.
00:09:55 · Alex Halliday, Pablo Srugo
[00:09:55] S0: Yeah, I mean, I think it's a good question. The first piece of it for us is, can we solve the problem for one customer really, really well? So it's that true solution acceptance by a high-taste user. Where they go, this is it, this is great. I will be a referenceable customer. I really, really like this, and then you have to figure out whether or not the pain that this problem that you're solving is widespread enough as you need it to be, and also acute enough. You don't want to be people's number three or four problem. You want to hopefully attack their number one problem. So whilst you're figuring out if you can actually solve the problem, what the solution looks like, starting to learn about the shape of the sales motion. How you would end up selling this to more people. How broad-based this problem is in the market is incredibly important as well. [00:10:41] S1: But how did you do that? How do you figure out that you're actually not? Because I agree, you've got to be a number one pain. So how did you figure out that you were solving a top pain for these customers?
00:10:41 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:10:41] S1: But how did you do that? How do you figure out that you're actually not? Because I agree, you've got to be a number one pain. So how did you figure out that you were solving a top pain for these customers? [00:10:49] S0: I mean, for us in those days, there was an initial concentric circle of investor intros and network intros. And so, we would try and book our calendars as full as possible, just talking to people about this again and again. And then the outer concentric circle, which is almost more important to me, was starting to just do the basic growth tactics at a low level of scale. Meaning like just having some LinkedIn outbound going from a founder to your ICP. Start sending cold emails, start asking for intros and the goal here is to really look at things like the response rate and the appetite. And how quickly people get back to you when they don't have a natural incentive to. And I think the other thing I did not appreciate as someone who spent most of their career in consumer was just how important positioning is. And I cannot state this enough. Everybody, I mean I'm a product person, I really believe in the great product wins in the market, but I have been humbled so many times over when we have not clearly articulated what we do in a way that resonates with the buyer and it's like that is a continuous game of iteration. And to your question, at no time is it more important than when you are initially testing the waters in those early motions and you're listening for signal.
00:10:49 · Alex Halliday, Pablo Srugo
[00:10:49] S0: I mean, for us in those days, there was an initial concentric circle of investor intros and network intros. And so, we would try and book our calendars as full as possible, just talking to people about this again and again. And then the outer concentric circle, which is almost more important to me, was starting to just do the basic growth tactics at a low level of scale. Meaning like just having some LinkedIn outbound going from a founder to your ICP. Start sending cold emails, start asking for intros and the goal here is to really look at things like the response rate and the appetite. And how quickly people get back to you when they don't have a natural incentive to. And I think the other thing I did not appreciate as someone who spent most of their career in consumer was just how important positioning is. And I cannot state this enough. Everybody, I mean I'm a product person, I really believe in the great product wins in the market, but I have been humbled so many times over when we have not clearly articulated what we do in a way that resonates with the buyer and it's like that is a continuous game of iteration. And to your question, at no time is it more important than when you are initially testing the waters in those early motions and you're listening for signal. [00:12:05] S1: Do you remember the messaging that didn't work and the messaging that ultimately worked?
00:12:05 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:12:05] S1: Do you remember the messaging that didn't work and the messaging that ultimately worked? [00:12:10] S0: So what worked for us at the very, very beginning was, this is a bit of a cheat code for us. Was we mentioned our investors in the outbound to get people on the phone. That doesn't pass the sniff test of saying with the second concentric circle. I think what we realized, and another reason to get very, very focused, was that proof point driven outbound is just so important when nobody's heard of you. So you have to leverage other people's brand equity. So really being thoughtful about who you know that you can turn into a referenceable proof point really early, and then using that to at least get people to open the email. So when we had this Deepgram case study, when we had those early proof points, those early wins. That was the thing that stood out far above our name or any other detail about us and then, can you get them past the second or the third message with the problem statement? And for us, it was very much about this notion of organic growth being very challenging for the people we trying to reach out to, and they were a higher sales process. You have to arm the seller with the right talk track. You have to make them feel like they'll get promoted. You have to continuously kind of nail that as you get introduced to other actors in the buying process, especially as you start to ask for bigger and bigger contract sizes. [00:13:39] S1: And then like what you're doing today is pretty different than what you were doing then, right?