A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:42:23 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:42:23] S0: Any hacks or tactics? Like, I I know of people that, you know, they have, like, dinner series that they'll do and they'll invite these enterprise type customers, or, you know, they'll say, oh, I'm just in the area. You know, it'd be great to grapple. You know, like, mean, like, classic kinda little hacks that people tend to do. Anything like that that's worked for you? [00:42:38] S1: So we just started to do a dinner series. So we do like... We've now done it in London, New York, Paris. It's it's relatively new motion for us, and we invite a combination of existing customers, prospects, and people we think might be helpful to everyone from the industry. Could be an investor, could be like a device manufacturer, like and we keep them small. Right? We we have a couple gigsters at each of those dinners, and we invite between like ten and fourteen outsiders. And like that has great feedback so far. It's... I would say it's too young for me to tell like, oh, this has worked wonders on our go to market. [00:43:21] S0: Perfect. Well, let's stop it there. What would be like one last piece of advice that you wanna share with a founder that's, you know, in the early stages of finding product market fit?
00:43:28 · Hermann Frank
[00:43:28] S1: As with everything, starting a company, just be ready to take a lot of notes. But like listen to why, right? Like you also need to iterate. But it's it's tough. It's especially tough getting started. And when you don't have reputation, when you don't have references, it is just you. It's gonna be your your sales craft, your conviction. You need to believe a 100%. Like you when you talk, people need to hear, like, with every fiber of your being. You believe in your product, and you will do everything you possibly can to satisfy them as a customer, because literally your life depends on it. So it's a sheer force of will to get past these initial conversations, and do not exit sales too early as a founder. Like, I'm a massive believer in founder led sales, and to a point where maybe others are telling you, you shouldn't be doing this anymore. Like, do it past that point, but not like forever. But the more you are, like the moment we started exiting process, like you see entropy creep in. And like, no one is gonna be as convincing and as quick on their feet as the founder, you kind of need to sell a little bit ahead of time. And no one has the mandate to do it more than the founder. Right? You you know which risk you're willing to take. You know how far you're gonna bend reality on that particular sales call, and it's on you. Your employees, right, your sales will... Like, the very good ones will know how to emulate your bullishness or your your balls, but like most people won't. And so if you wanna achieve the maximum outcomes, stay on there as long as you can, and as long as it makes sense for the business, because no one will be a better salesperson than you.
00:45:18 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:45:18] S0: Perfect. Well, Herman, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. [00:45:21] S1: So thank you so much for having me. [00:45:23] S0: So picture this. It's months from now, years from now, and one of your founder friends, a really close founder friends 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 wanna 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.