A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:20:47 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:20:47] S2: In this case, add the fixtures for me. Like you tell it more or less, hey, this is the number or this is the spacing or these are the constraints and it kind of just does it. [00:20:54] S0: Exactly like that. [00:20:55] S2: OK. [00:20:56] S0: When engineers are starting to say like, holy shit. I know because they gave us their models that they previously completed. So once you saw like, once I ingest this into Endra, it's not perfect but it comes to eighty, ninety percent of whatever I did before and I spent four hundred hours doing this project. Endra created this for me in under ten minutes. [00:21:15] S2: This is an interesting point to draw on because a lot of the AI output is eighty, ninety percent. In some cases, eighty nine percent is almost as good as zero. It saves you no time because then you have to review, you double check, blah blah blah, and you're like, oh my god. But in this case, the eighty to ninety percent really was eighty to ninety percent. I just, I don't know how that plays out, but maybe you can speak a little bit about that.
00:21:15 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:21:15] S2: This is an interesting point to draw on because a lot of the AI output is eighty, ninety percent. In some cases, eighty nine percent is almost as good as zero. It saves you no time because then you have to review, you double check, blah blah blah, and you're like, oh my god. But in this case, the eighty to ninety percent really was eighty to ninety percent. I just, I don't know how that plays out, but maybe you can speak a little bit about that. [00:21:34] S0: Yeah, definitely and the reason why we're saying eighty, ninety percent is because it goes back to how you design buildings. That's an iterative process. So eighty, ninety percent is one deliverable and it's fine that it's not a hundred percent in that stage. But that's the full deliverable that you charge your customer for and then as design develops, the architect comes up with a new building layout. Which has another room in the left wing or whatever. You sort of iterate, iterate, iterate. There's a lot of time being spent on both, but sort of the greenfield design is usually around eighty percent of then you iterate as design develops into a more and more detailed design. And that, also consumes a whole lot of time and that goes much, much faster once you do it in Endra. Because you don't need to do that in five, six different point solutions.
00:22:22 · Pablo Srugo
[00:22:22] S2: You're going into an industry you don't know that much about. You've experienced a subset of your problem yourself before. So that kind of pulled you in that direction and then as you said, your dad maybe pulled you more in that direction but you're not an expert in the space. How much work do you do up front, and how do you do that work to get to really know your ICP? Because it's one thing to deliver one feature, like the feature you just mentioned. Which is happening everywhere with AI automating things. My experience is, in many cases, for some subtlety that you missed, it doesn't land and you don't get the pull that you thought you would have given the amount of time saving. Obviously, you did get it. So I'm curious, how much work did you do up front and how did you do the work to really understand your ICP at that kind of detailed level?
00:23:00 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:23:00] S0: We did a lot of work. We tried to scope everything down. So in our early days of product, we still have that philosophy, but we're trying to scope everything down to something viable. One point of value that we can deliver to the customers is good. We should like, let's just focus on one workflow inside Endra and do that extremely well. And I think that we nailed that early on to focus on. I'm not sure if it was three or four different workflows that they can do end to end at Endra and it actually worked. I think a lot of companies are getting very wide too fast in terms of their product offering and then, you know, you're not doing anything very good. That was sort of something that we did very good early on that we focused on, on three or four core workflows that we did extremely well. [00:23:52] S2: And did you do a lot of interviews, you know, structured or not, to know that these workflows. It's not just one or two people that are doing things like this. Everybody does things in this exact workflow sort of thing? [00:24:02] S0: Early days, we didn't have a thousand interviews. We had kind of few, but they were very similar to each other and they were kind of from the same ICP, which was from large MEP consultancies. So we took a bet at the end of the day. Because we didn't have the resources to do a very big research on the industry and we definitely didn't have the time in order to map out the full industry and the full aspects of what should we build. We needed to get something out fast and we nailed those for the first one.
00:24:02 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:24:02] S0: Early days, we didn't have a thousand interviews. We had kind of few, but they were very similar to each other and they were kind of from the same ICP, which was from large MEP consultancies. So we took a bet at the end of the day. Because we didn't have the resources to do a very big research on the industry and we definitely didn't have the time in order to map out the full industry and the full aspects of what should we build. We needed to get something out fast and we nailed those for the first one. [00:24:39] S2: You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best interest. And the other question then is, because you're going workflow by workflow. How do you think about getting somebody out of status quo? Oftentimes when you're replacing a platform that is so embedded and so old. The upside is it's easy for you to create a 10x better experience on some workflow like you did. Relatively easy, but it's hard for you to create enough of the features that they can actually say, okay, I'm going to get rid of this and I'm going to go into Endra. How did you kind of bridge that gap? [00:25:13] S0: We bridged it very easily through integrating natively with the legacy players. As Legora and Harvey integrate natively into Word, we did the exact same thing. So the user who works in Endra, whatever work is being done there is perfectly possible to just translate into these older platforms.
00:25:13 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:25:13] S0: We bridged it very easily through integrating natively with the legacy players. As Legora and Harvey integrate natively into Word, we did the exact same thing. So the user who works in Endra, whatever work is being done there is perfectly possible to just translate into these older platforms. [00:25:33] S2: So it was never a replace, it was just add this on top. Like, hey, you're doing this thing, it's taking you X number hours. Do it in our system instead, and then you just integrate it back just like you used to. [00:25:41] S0: Exactly, exactly. So the end result they're getting is the same one as if they were to use us. The design team of fifty people, but you know, you can do it from one person and you can do it much faster, and you can do much better. [00:25:55] S2: Walk me through the fundraising history. How long did you bootstrap for? When did you raise the first money and how?