A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:35:35 · Pablo Srugo
[00:35:35] S0: It's funny you describe it in these kind of nebulous terms. Because I think that's just much closer to what reality is. The reality, is zero to one, is always and has been, will be more art than science. Everybody wants a playbook. Everybody wants clear things to do or not to do, and they just don't exist. The picture I get when you're talking about it is the difference between pushing a rock up a hill, right? Classic, if you work at it, you will make progress. But it's always like you feel like if you just happen to sleep for one day too much, it just kind of comes right back down versus running down that hill, which, hey, you're going to trip up. It's not necessarily easy. You can't just not do anything. You got to go. But there's kind of this momentum, right, that keeps you going down as time progresses sort of thing. And yeah, it's hard to get more clear than that. So look, I think that really wraps it up, right? I mean, we've gone through the evolution, the struggles at the beginning, which I think are the important piece. Because as a founder, the hardest part of pivoting, frankly, is realizing that you need to pivot in the first place. That's the piece that I think founders struggle with more – most, is do I go another quarter? Because by the way – not giving up, right? That's the key. It's like you can't give up. And so sometimes you confuse that with not giving up means, oh, if it's hard, it's supposed to be hard and we just got to keep going. And there's some truth to that. Because if you give up too easily on a go to market or in a certain delivery, you're never going to see the other side. You're never going to get to success, right? At the same time, you've always got – every quarter or so, you do have to think about, am I pushing a boulder up a hill, right? And is there some other way to shift things around as you did shift the go-to market around to get a little bit more tailwind, a little bit more momentum? Let me ask two questions that we always end with. The first one, and we kind of alluded to this but maybe you had a bit more time to think about it as we chatted, which is, when was the first time that you felt like you had true product market fit?
00:37:45 · Andrew Tai
[00:37:45] S1: The memory that comes to mind was I was at my desk at this dingy office that we had rented and got a call back, one of the automakers that we had been pitching. And I can't remember if this was maybe the third one. Basically, it was like, hey, yeah, we're in, right? I got the call back that hey, we want to do this, right? And there was still some details that had to be ironed out. It's one – maybe it's luck, right? If you can get some – one customer, maybe it's luck. You get two, it's like, oh. And then you get three. It's like, that's it. That's the pattern now, right? I remember the moment, getting that call. It was like one of those entrepreneurial moments that I live for. I don't know if you golf. But it's kind of like one of those things where when hit that one perfect shot, it keeps you coming back for more. That's the mountain top for me as a founder, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur where we felt breakthrough, or I felt breakthrough in that moment where we – I knew we were doing something valuable because a third customer, major customer just decided to send me a lot of money for a solution that we're delivering. And we knew we were on the right track at that point.
00:39:17 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:17] S0: I love that. I mean, being a founder fundamentally is all about turning an idea to reality. And that happens once customers buy and adopt the product. So the feeling you get when that happens is irreplaceable. Last question is, if you could go back and kind of – maybe you're doing this because you're starting a second one. But if you could go back to the early days taking everything now, what's one piece of advice you would give yourself 11, 12 years ago?
00:39:44 · Andrew Tai, Pablo Srugo
[00:39:44] S1: Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned it earlier. I'll expand on it. I think it's like, know what you are good at and what you are built for, right? I think, as you mentioned, as I think about what's next and,explore all kinds of different ideas and opportunities. There's really cool stuff out there that I'm like, oh man, wouldn't it be interesting to do that? Or that seems like such a really cool idea, right? Really understanding what my strengths are, right, as an entrepreneur. You’ve got to build the business that, and I think you said it well earlier, that fits you, that this founder fit for. I think we learned that in hindsight in the earlier part of our journey. You have to deeply have conviction about where a market is going. And I think that was one thing that held true through our entire journey. We knew that the car buying experience was broken. We knew that it could – it needed to be better and it would be better. And we knew that technology was going to modernize a lot of it. And a decade later, that all played true, right? How we actually created value in solving that evolved over time. But if we got anything right, was like we picked the market that we had deep conviction on that it was going to go a certain direction. And we stayed. You have to – what was that saying that you had, you have to be in market to – [00:41:14] S0: You have to be in the market to win the market, yes.
00:41:14 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Tai
[00:41:14] S0: You have to be in the market to win the market, yes. [00:41:16] S1: You have to be in the market to win the market, right? So we got that part, right? We picked the space that was – we knew it was going to go in a certain direction. How we went about it at the beginning, you could say maybe we picked wrong, right? Maybe if we were better at sussing out that early concept, we may have done things differently. I don't really regret any of it, as I said. Because it led to the right place. But we were right in the market. We were persistent in staying that – in that market, persistent in staying in that market, but not ignorant to signs when it wasn't working, right? Or wasn't growing to the potential that we thought we could capture. So I'd say, yeah, know what you're good at and what you're built for and pick a market and a company and an approach that fits that. And then to have deep conviction about where space is going and get in that space and stay in that space.