A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:19:32 · Andrew Tai
[00:19:32] S1: Yeah. I, I mean, I think there are other things as well. I mean we spent a lot of time on this, but I'll give you one more, really understanding the pain point that we're solving, as you said. Buying a car, yeah, in many cases it's a frustrating experience, but it's also one that happens every 4, 6, 8 years for a consumer. And so when you think about from a marketplace standpoint, for me as Unhaggle, to actually have to find your attention at the right moment in time in that 4, 6, 8 year time span where you're buying a car, and then actually convert you properly. It just became an exceptionally expensive and difficult endeavor. It wasn't a persistent problem that I as a consumer face every single day. It's something that I might always be interested in. That was just another headwind, not to say that any startup founder should be opportunities and ideas for startups now. I look at it through that different lens. I'm looking for tailwinds over headwinds. I'm looking at deeply understanding a real acute problem as opposed to something that feels like it's a cool idea.
00:20:46 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Tai
[00:20:46] S0: Makes sense. It actually reminds me, I always see these startups probably every few months or so, trying to fix renting, right? Inevitably, some young person goes through this renting cycle. They're like, wow, renting really sucks. It's one of these things, how often does it happen? Once every three years? What's the status quo with DG and Facebook marketplace? It's not great, but it's also not that bad. So it becomes a really, really hard problem to 10x – have this 10x better solution and these sort of things. Anyway, so you start. You're kind of three years-ish into this Unhaggle marketplace. It's going well, but not so well. How do you start – you ended up at vertical SaaS selling just to dealerships. How do you get – [00:21:25] S1: Dealerships and automakers. [00:21:26] S0: Dealerships and automakers, but do you start hearing things – because you're working with them already, are you hearing things from them that kind of inspire you towards this SaaS platform? Or how do you start to go and lean that way?
00:21:40 · Andrew Tai
[00:21:40] S1: Yeah, I think what's interesting is the experience that we delivered through Unhaggle. We realized we are creating real value here. There's a very positive customer experience and in many cases efficiency and a positive experience on the dealership’s side as well. It was very difficult to get that positive experience that happens one time or 10 times or 100 times and have it happen 10 million times. So we knew we had something there. And really, what we did was okay, instead of trying to get all the consumers to come to Unhaggle and experience this experience and that experience being, hey, you get transparency online in terms of pricing and be able to complete much of the transaction before you even step foot into the store, right? Or ultimately even buy it online. We were early to that game. But we could see that there was real customer delight when it actually happened. It just wasn't happening at the volumes that we wanted to through the marketplace. And so we saw dealers using it. We saw consumers using it. We just decided hey, what if we actually enabled the dealers and the automakers that we had started working with to deliver that kind of experience to the audience that they already own, right? And that was the just very kind of small – it was almost like we had a solution, which was an easier buying experience enabled online and digital first with transparency at the heart of it. We just kind of found a different delivery mechanism. It was almost like a shift in go to market, if you will. Instead of using a marketplace to go to market directly to the consumer and have it consumer-led or selling it to automakers and dealerships so that they can enable their version of the experience.
00:23:28 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Tai
[00:23:28] S0: But to be clear, the idea actually came from inside your walls. In other words, the team thinking through what value it had created and how to deliver it versus, let's say, dealerships saying, hey, can I just buy this platform? I don't need your consumers. I just want to do it for mine. It was more of the former. [00:23:44] S1: We would have moments where we're sitting around and we're like, okay, this is okay. We've got a business here. We're generating real revenues. We're growing. But if we don't do something different, we can kind of see the trajectory, right? And we really thought hard about, okay, we're not going to walk away from this. As you said, it's like if it was – it'd be easier if it was just a complete failure. There was something here. And we really drilled down on what's actually working? What are the moments of delight where there's magic happening almost, right? And how can we monetize that as a business, differently? Part of this is I'm a big believer that having a customer pay for something is the ultimate validation. The one step before that, though, is – you can't just go to a customer and say, hey, what do you – not to contradict what I said earlier about really understanding the problems. But in my experience, it isn't as simple as, hey, Mr. Customer, what problem do you have to solve? And let me try to just, do that, right? You do have to have a bit of a vision to start.
00:23:44 · Andrew Tai, Pablo Srugo
[00:23:44] S1: We would have moments where we're sitting around and we're like, okay, this is okay. We've got a business here. We're generating real revenues. We're growing. But if we don't do something different, we can kind of see the trajectory, right? And we really thought hard about, okay, we're not going to walk away from this. As you said, it's like if it was – it'd be easier if it was just a complete failure. There was something here. And we really drilled down on what's actually working? What are the moments of delight where there's magic happening almost, right? And how can we monetize that as a business, differently? Part of this is I'm a big believer that having a customer pay for something is the ultimate validation. The one step before that, though, is – you can't just go to a customer and say, hey, what do you – not to contradict what I said earlier about really understanding the problems. But in my experience, it isn't as simple as, hey, Mr. Customer, what problem do you have to solve? And let me try to just, do that, right? You do have to have a bit of a vision to start. [00:24:50] S0: Once you had this new idea that, okay, maybe we just go direct to auto automakers and dealerships, do you – how do you start? I assume you didn't just go build the product and then try and sell it. There was probably some kind of testing or some discovery type motion there. What did that look like?
00:24:50 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Tai
[00:24:50] S0: Once you had this new idea that, okay, maybe we just go direct to auto automakers and dealerships, do you – how do you start? I assume you didn't just go build the product and then try and sell it. There was probably some kind of testing or some discovery type motion there. What did that look like? [00:25:06] S1: Yeah, so for much of our history, we were bootstrapped, right? And so we didn't have a lot of luxury to go out there to build massive products and see if they worked. I think that's one of the things that I loved a lot about B2B and enterprise is I could go and sit with a dealer or an automaker and talk to them about the vision of where we think the market is going, what customer experience should look like when it comes to buying a car and solution with that product before it is necessarily fully evolved and fully built out. [00:25:47] S0: And so you had these conversations. How did those go? Did that kind of vision that you explained to them resonate, or with some of them at least? What was from 1 to 10 of wow, we've got the thing, or hmm, I don't think kind of – where did that land?