A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:48:06 · Rafael Broshi
[00:48:06] S0: So usually, and it happened to us as well, working with an enterprise. If they're going to spend the time to do an actual POC with you, things will probably move. OK, it's not something that someone can decide. What could happen is that you're doing a POC with them, which they did not consider a POC. As an example, you might speak to someone who is not the business owner. Well, there's someone from the tech department in a company, and you're pitching, and you're pitching. We have a great platform for document ingestion and an AI agent, and this and that. And you excite the guy, the guy, the woman, they're from the tech team. They want to see capabilities and they're like, well I can show you this and that. And yeah sure I'd love to see, and they're like, well if you get me a document I can do this. This happened to us about a year ago. I was so excited. It's like, yeah, I'm going to get you documents, right? And you're getting documents and you're like, we're in a POC with a five thousand people company. Then you finish the POC. Great, look, we don't see any need right now, or we're going to be in. Because it wasn't a POC, a real POC and again, it's everything that the books say. We're all wrong about that. We all made those mistakes because you have wishful thinking. You want to go into POCs, but POCs should be budgeted. You should take money for them. You should meet the business owner. You should understand the use case. You should also not be afraid to ask questions. Hey, what are the KPIs for the POC? What happens if we succeed? How's the process going forward? How would that look like? If people want your product and you send an offer. They're not going to move out just because you wrote a number they don't like. OK, If they want to do a POC with you and you say it's a $50,000 POC, and they want to do a POC with you but they think it's an outrageous price. They're going to tell you this is an outrageous price. They're going to do something about it. But companies, I feel especially in the US. They understand that if they want a good partner and a vendor. They need to pay, they need to put in the resources. OK, so I really feel that they're very fair as long as you do the process correctly. So usually in those kinds of deals that get stuck, it's because if you really go back and ask, did I meet the relevant people?
00:50:29 · Rafael Broshi, Pablo Srugo
Did I ask the relevant questions? Was it really a full blown POC or did I spend seventy thousand man hours in my company to prepare a POC that someone looked at once? It's not a real POC, so I think those are the cases. If it's just stuck, yeah, that's the risk in enterprise, right? Someone changes jobs, your champion leaves. You have to build as many intricate connections at the same time in a company. Don't stop meeting people. Don't stop trying to build connections in every level. That's the only way to make those kind of projects work. [00:51:03] S2: Perfect, last question, we'll end on this. What would be a top piece of advice that you find yourself giving pretty often to early stage founders? [00:51:10] S0: I'd say I ask, who are your dream customers? And they give me a list or something. I said, OK, go talk to them. Well, we don't have a product. We don't have this. We don't have that. We're not sure. We don't have any other. No, that's the wrong way to go. Don't go the long route. Talk to your dream customers first. Just go to them. Because those are the people you're after, right? And if they're not interested, at least you know it now. But people are afraid and I was as well. That's a mistake I made. You're building something for someone and instead of talking to them, and saying, let me first raise $10 million, sell to 24,000 other customers. So then I could go to this customer and find out that he doesn't care about what I want to sell. [00:51:56] S2: It seems silly, but I think it's a protection of ego. But it makes a lot of sense, you're saying.
00:51:56 · Pablo Srugo, Rafael Broshi
[00:51:56] S2: It seems silly, but I think it's a protection of ego. But it makes a lot of sense, you're saying. [00:51:59] S0: It's just human nature. [00:52:01] S2: Rafael, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. [00:52:03] S0: Thank you, Pablo. [00:52:05] S2: So picture this. It's months from now, years from now, and one of your founder friends. A really close founder friend of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt and it turns out, if you had just shared the Product Market Fit Show with them. They would have learned everything they needed to, to find Product Market Fit and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't want to live like that. It is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them. Put it on WhatsApp. Put it on Slack. Put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.