A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:25:47 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Tai
[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? [00:26:03] S1: So I think with some of them, is the accurate characterization. I think we were still early into the space. I think this – again, it's actually amazing looking in hindsight now today where we are, we're a host of companies that are doing online car buying. And it's become much more ubiquitous in the space. But we were still early back then, right? Many of these conversations we were having in 2014, 2015. Some would be able to see the light and be interested in the vision. Now, not every single meeting would be like, oh, hey, yeah, let's go do this. Some of the meetings were like, hey, yeah, what? This is never going to happen. Other meetings are like it's probably going to happen, but I'm hoping not anytime soon. So I'm not going to pay attention.
00:26:52 · Pablo Srugo
[00:26:52] S0: That makes sense. You had this vision, by the way, which is informed. It was informed from your own experience as a customer that the car buying experience had to improve, relative to everything else you saw in other industries. And then reinforced, I think, through three years of being in this market and seeing that when the thing worked, it did provide a lot of value. And so that makes sense. Then it's a question of, okay, delivery and to who, right? In terms of this life cycle, who's on the early adopter side of this curve that is going to get it; is going to be – want to – all the kind of characteristics that early adopters tend to have? What did you do with them when you found them? Did you try to get them? You mentioned paying. Basically the only signature that matters is the one on a check, right? That's the ultimate form of validation. Did you try to get them to pre-buy it, or did you make them – you talk about design partners, is that – what model did you use to kind of get them onto the next step?
00:27:47 · Andrew Tai
[00:27:47] S1: Ultimately, the goal is to get a customer to actually pay for something tangible. That's the ultimate kind of measure in my mind of do you have something of real value or not? Listen, I think that might be biased by my B2B enterprise software experience, okay? I'm speaking in that lens really only. When we started working with some of these early automakers that became our design partners, one is finding just a small number that bought into our vision that where we thought the market was going and where they should go. We worked together to come up with a solution. We hadn't built it yet. We came up with a solution, like hey, this suits your needs, is something that you would buy. We got clarity on what problem we're solving, how we're solving it, how we're going to integrate it into different systems. So we really did deeply understood with our design partners, what it actually needed to be. It matched our overall vision. And so we believed that this thing actually should exist in many of the – those cases where we asked them to pay for. And I think that really is ultimate validation on whether or not they really want it or not. But in many of those cases, our customers helped us finance our growth where they paid for a solution that we designed together. And ultimately that solution became our product. And it scaled. So yes, we're having deep customer conversations to help them shape and form ultimately what our product is. But it's our product because it aligns with our overall product vision and our vision on where the market is going.
00:29:32 · Pablo Srugo
[00:29:32] S0: On that custom software piece, it's not uncommon on the B2B, especially the bigger the customer. The more it's going to feel like custom software. As long as you're the one keeping the product and you have reason to believe that 80, 90%, let's say, of these features are going to be very relevant to kind of the next early adopters you're going to sell to, you look at the early days of Athenian, you look at the early days of StackAdapt, right? Which now is doing $100 million plus in revenue, and it was effectively custom software. I mean, it was a design partner. And you're building what that design partner believes they need, and there's guardrails. But yeah, I think that's a pretty common story. Let me ask you one thing around getting them to pay. I'm always curious on the strategies used. Because one of the things that I think founders always run into in this case is like, okay, yeah, they really want it. But they're like, we'll pay when it's ready. And what's in it for them to pay early? Did you have to use any strategies to convince them to pay ahead of it? Or what did you think incentivized them to get in early, so to speak?
00:30:39 · Andrew Tai
[00:30:39] S1: Part of it is actually just having the boldness to ask, right? I think there's almost this hesitancy to ask. It kind of goes to sales. Basically, you have to ask for the sale. That has to be anchored with the confidence that we'll be able to deliver it. And that it is something that the customer deeply wants. It goes hand in hand. If they don't really want to pay for it, you have to really ask yourself how big of an opportunity am I creating for them, or a problem am I – that I'm solving for them? It could either be an opportunity or a problem. You're either solving a problem or opening up an opportunity. I think there's a hesitancy to ask. Make the ask, be confident in your ability to deliver it. And if it's a no, then I think there's, serious reflection to be done there. Oftentimes, it's less about the initial idea. As long as you're in a space where there is going to be a change in your direction and you have a big macro problem to solve, how you exactly go about it almost matters less. It's just about, constantly putting one foot in front of the other, reflecting and adjusting, and reflecting and adjusting. So I don't regret the Unhaggle journey whatsoever. We wouldn't have gotten to Motoinsight if we didn't do the Unhaggle journey.
00:31:56 · Pablo Srugo
[00:31:56] S0: That's completely true. I mean, we summarize that by, you have to be in the market to win the market. And the reality is you can do all the customer discovery you want to do. And you should, because you're going to discover problems that are worth solving. You're going to waste, let's say, less time. But at some point, you're going to have to get in the market. And frankly, the unique insights that are going to lead to the actual final solution that truly gets product market fit, they can't be found without being in the market in the first place. So I totally buy that. The other thing I'll point out, actually, is to your point around you have to have the confidence to ask. Otherwise they're not going to pay. That's one of the things that's also, I think, a little bit paradoxical, which is – in a sense, it becomes a bit of an advantage, I think, to be bootstrapped because constraints set you free. The fact of the matter is you don't have the luxury to say, well, they're not buying, but it's because of blah, blah, blah. So let's just go build it and then they will buy it, right? If they're not paying, I'm not building, pretty simple. It actually is powerful. Because, again, it sets you free to only build stuff that clearly does have value and is validated through signatures on a check. Let me maybe like fast forward a little bit. You're going through this. You've kind of moved into this pivot. Describe to me if you think about the first six months or so of the marketplace, right? Of Unhaggle, which ultimately got traction, but not true clear product market fit, versus those first six months – and I'm using six months, could be three, could be nine, whatever, early days of the B2B SaaS, which is the Motoinsight product that ultimately really did get real product market fit, real traction. What are some of the notable differences? What are the – some of the things you start to see, whoa, this is a different world sort of thing?