A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:00:00 · Niklas Lindgren, S1
[00:00:00] S0: We do almost the same pitch to him. Like, this is the problem, this is how you work, this is what the engineers globally today are producing and this is the way they get there. And he said almost the same thing. This is incredible, if we can solve ten percent of this, this will be a generation of companies. It didn't have a fraction of the feature set that we have today, but they understood the concept of this and it was almost like a dream coming true for them. Because they spent so much time on tasks. They have to move data from this program to this program and it's almost like a copy paste. They spent so much time doing that simply because these systems are not interconnected with each other and don't talk to each other. So we raised a $4 million pre seed, $20 million seed, and then we raised our Series A in June of this year, and that was a $50 million round. And, we closed a million and a half in January alone. And that was all enterprise revenue, which was a very strong signal that the global industry would want to do this. We were also closing the deals with some of the most important logos from very early on. [00:01:05] S1: That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.
00:01:05 · S1, Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:01:05] S1: That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. [00:01:17] S2: Do you think the Product Market Fit Show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Niklas, welcome to the show, man. [00:01:34] S0: Thank you for having me. [00:01:35] S2: It's an interesting time right now, because a lot of companies are raising massive rounds, massive Series A's. You raised $50 million from A16Z not too long ago but a month, two months ago. But also a lot of companies are not able to raise. I think it's still about fifteen, twenty percent of companies that actually raise an A, but the ones who do are very big. That said, in your case, you're probably 3x the median, because the median A even there is $15 million. It's still, it's a big A no matter kind of how you slice and dice it. So we'll get to that and kind of how that all happened, why that all happened. Let's start where we always start, which is the product market fit moment. You mentioned that I think shortly after launch, it was January 26th. So we're talking only six, seven months ago, you closed a million and a half of ARR in a month. Take me to that time, what was happening? How do you make that happen?
00:02:23 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:02:23] S0: So we started having commercial discussions with our customers. We mostly work in the enterprise space, so we work with large MEP engineering consultancies. So we started approaching them in late 2025, and we told them about what work we're doing. No one had any clue about what our brand was and who we were as sort of a company. So we had to start telling our story early on. We did that in very creative ways, not only through the conventional ones but we were out on Reddit. We did outbound to a lot of these engineers at these firms to try to get inside them and tell them about the work that we did. And we got in there maybe December 2025, and they were very excited about the work we did. Then we started our first pilots early January '26, that very fast converted into signed contracts end of January '26 and so that was the moment that we felt that, oh, holy shit, this could really, really be something. And we closed a million and a half in January alone. And that was all enterprise revenue, which was obviously a very strong signal that the global industry would want to do this, because we were also closing the deals with some of the most important logos from very early on. [00:03:44] S2: How many customers, like one million and a half over how many customers? [00:03:47] S0: So at that time I think our ACV was around three hundred something. So we were targeting the main customers in the Nordics at the time and also for the UK.
00:03:47 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:03:47] S0: So at that time I think our ACV was around three hundred something. So we were targeting the main customers in the Nordics at the time and also for the UK. [00:03:58] S2: How do you get yourself in a position so early on to have four or five large enterprise customers? That's very rare. Many companies move up market, but let's take those out. There's the companies that say, I'm going to be an enterprise company and I'm going to start selling enterprise. I've rarely seen them be able to have more than one or two pilots in those early phases until they ramp up, go to market, and then it's a different beast. But how did you put yourself in that position?
00:03:58 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:03:58] S2: How do you get yourself in a position so early on to have four or five large enterprise customers? That's very rare. Many companies move up market, but let's take those out. There's the companies that say, I'm going to be an enterprise company and I'm going to start selling enterprise. I've rarely seen them be able to have more than one or two pilots in those early phases until they ramp up, go to market, and then it's a different beast. But how did you put yourself in that position? [00:04:22] S0: It's mission critical for our customers to get this right, and if one of their competitors get this right, and are able to roll out this type of technology. It's incredibly powerful in the market because you can start winning contracts over your competitors. Because you can deliver your work much faster, you can deliver your work much better at a cheaper price point, right? So as the global leaders started to understand, oh, holy shit. My number one competitor is doing work with these guys and it actually seems to work, and they're doing successful pilots. They wanted to speak with us and then once we got into them. We could show them that this technology actually does work and that it will have a lot of impact on their business, and show them the ROI from this. That was how it spread in the early days, only word of mouth, except from the work that we did in terms of outbound but mostly it started outbound. But then today it's still almost word of mouth and very organically.
00:04:22 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:04:22] S0: It's mission critical for our customers to get this right, and if one of their competitors get this right, and are able to roll out this type of technology. It's incredibly powerful in the market because you can start winning contracts over your competitors. Because you can deliver your work much faster, you can deliver your work much better at a cheaper price point, right? So as the global leaders started to understand, oh, holy shit. My number one competitor is doing work with these guys and it actually seems to work, and they're doing successful pilots. They wanted to speak with us and then once we got into them. We could show them that this technology actually does work and that it will have a lot of impact on their business, and show them the ROI from this. That was how it spread in the early days, only word of mouth, except from the work that we did in terms of outbound but mostly it started outbound. But then today it's still almost word of mouth and very organically. [00:05:19] S2: So it was, if this works, you cannot have it. That's kind of the nature of the beast here.