A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:38:30 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:38:30] S1: With Hipmunk, did you guys get to product market fit, would you say? [00:38:33] S0: What we learned most with Hipmunk was we definitely solved a set of user problems really well and we had some really rampant support, users who really loved using the product. I think what we learned though was economies of scale are a bitch. Having a small product like Hipmunk meant that we couldn't take advantage of just the bulk discounts you start getting when you have volume. Originally we went into it with a bunch of disdain for the large players, because it's like look at how crappy their product is. Yeah, their product is crappy but they're booking a billion dollars in revenue. You can afford a lot of crappiness if you can actually get that much lead gen, because you can spend a ton of money on marketing to get more users. I mean, you can buy a Super Bowl ad and be completely reasonable. [00:39:15] S1: Talking about flights, this is different, but always most flights customer service, when you're in it's just terrible. Sometimes I talk to people about this and I'm like the problem is when it comes down to it, I'm cheap as shit and I'm going to take the cheapest flight that gets me fastest and I don't care if they – they might have yelled at me when I was on the plane but if it's the cheapest flight that gets me fastest, I'm going again.
00:39:15 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:39:15] S1: Talking about flights, this is different, but always most flights customer service, when you're in it's just terrible. Sometimes I talk to people about this and I'm like the problem is when it comes down to it, I'm cheap as shit and I'm going to take the cheapest flight that gets me fastest and I don't care if they – they might have yelled at me when I was on the plane but if it's the cheapest flight that gets me fastest, I'm going again. [00:39:40] S0: That's the thing too is the flight is the means to the end. You're on the flight because you have to be and you don't have a lot of choice. It's like a temporary purgatory before you're doing the thing you actually want to do. No one takes a flight because they're like, "Oh yeah, I want to spend six hours in this metal tube with a bunch of humanity." It's like, no, you do it because you're going to go to fricking Maui and you have to get in the plane to get to Maui, which is also why we found that it's straight -- that's actually why we chose agony as our sort because everyone hates – there's very few people who are like, oh, I love flying. Even people who have -- at this point in my life, I have 1K status, which as we all know isn't a good thing. It just means I fly enough that I actually got status. It's like the mark of the beast. It's like, oh, I'm sorry, you have 1K. I remember I was in a plane at one point recently and the guy behind me hit his 3 million mile mark, and everyone around him was like, congrats, whoa. It's like, are you okay? [00:40:42] S1: It's like, are you okay, dude?
00:40:42 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:40:42] S1: It's like, are you okay, dude? [00:40:44] S0: He wasn't old. He was younger than I was. I was like, "Oh man, you've spent a lot of time in planes." [00:40:49] S1: That's rough . Yeah, that's rough. [00:40:50] S0: It's like that George Clooney movie from 20 years ago. He was up in the air and it was like he realized he spent his entire life on planes. Yeah. [00:40:58] S1: No, good. Walk me through, did you guys end up selling that? I'm interested obviously in the transition back in Reddit. Did you end up selling Hipmunk or how do you come back to Reddit? How does that happen?
00:41:08 · Chris Slowe
[00:41:08] S0: I think by about 2015, Hipmunk was in a good steady state. From my standpoint, a lot of the technical problems were solved or were just a matter of playing an existing playbook. There wasn't a lot of difficult work to be done there. What happened for me was I ended up consulting for Reddit mid '15, because at that point they were starting, starting to scale up a little bit more. The company was up to around 70 employees. They were looking at actually building a mobile app. They were looking at doing something that – some of the stuff that I had originally specialized in Retrospect was I became an infrastructure generalist. I became probably one of the first SREs in the team just as nature of the beast. I also ended up being one of the first people to work on what amounts to being – we eventually called anti ego, which is our user safety stuff. I was secondary to another guy, Mike Aldi, who is a good friend of mine now, who was the first – I don't know. At the time he was more the troll poker. He would help to fend off the trolls and put them back under their bridges and got really good at building out the toolkit for making sure the users actually had some amount of safety. Coming back the things that were top of the list for me were working on that safety toolkit, and so I ended up doing some consulting along those lines; talking about mobile usage; talking actually about data science, which wasn't really a function that existed much at Reddit that point, which again, my title at Hipmunk was actually chief scientist, which most of my titles historically was a joke but at the same time actually it was accurate. I was a scientist but also data science had come on the scene around that time, and so it made sense to say, well, Chris can work in analytics. Then by the end of that year, it was – I've made this analogy a bunch of times, but I have to repeat it. It's like it had the same feeling as dating your ex-girlfriend where it's like you dated a long time ago and you broke up for very good reason, but that was like five years ago.
00:43:06 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:43:06] S1: Have you changed? [00:43:07] S0: You both changed as people, so let's just see what happens. That was actually exactly how it felt where I had thought that I had emotionally separated myself from Reddit and then actually by about midyear in '15 Reddit was going through some tough times. They had a major blackout that was infamous, the first real modern blackout, and there was this possibility that Reddit would cease to exist and that hurt in a way that I wasn't expecting. It was almost like, oh God – I'm twisting metaphors in a bad way here but I'm going to do it. It was like seeing your kid in tough times. We worked really hard to get you going and then you find out that later on they're leading a rough life, so maybe it's time to swoop back in and see if you can actually help. [00:43:52] S1: Especially when it was a known brand, real brand with real users, a real community, the thought that that could go away, I could see that being not easy to accept, not easy to swallow.
00:43:52 · Pablo Srugo, Chris Slowe
[00:43:52] S1: Especially when it was a known brand, real brand with real users, a real community, the thought that that could go away, I could see that being not easy to accept, not easy to swallow. [00:44:05] S0: Yeah, and I think to some extent too, we just had a different model for how to approach Reddit, the community as well of – I remember historically there's always been pitchforks and torches on Reddit. That's the nature of the product. Prior to 2010, some of the ways to solve the problem would be the community would get ahead of Steve about something and then Steve would appear and just Spez would just comment, no. I remember there was one case where it happened in 2008, 2009, where he just replied no, and then the response he got was, "Okay, guys, let's just call it clearance from the advents. They're not into it, so let's just move on." [00:44:39] S1: It's crazy the persona of Reddit. It's pretty wild. It's just pretty wild to look from the outside. It's so unique. [00:44:51] S0: It's very much so [00:44:52] S1: I was going to ask, you mentioned the mobile app, what took so long? App Store comes out in '08, '09. I just have to ask that. It's nothing to do with product market fit but you would think –