A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:25:55 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[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? [00:26:02] S0: So me and Anton invested money at inception. So we needed some money to get off. We wanted to build a very strong brand. So that was the reason why me and Anton invested $300/$400K, something, in the sort of at inception. Then we used that cash for something like six months and then we were discussing internally, should we bootstrap this or should we go raise VC money. David, as I said before, was sort of, he wanted to bootstrap this and not go raise VC money. We were like, yeah, but you know, there could be a big upside doing so as well. We can probably accelerate a lot of the work that we do much faster and so we did. And we raised a pre seed in, I think that was in April or May. I don't remember really, of 2025, a bit over a year ago. Then we raised our pre seed with Nordskan, a Swedish fund and then we raised our seed, as you said, in December of 2025. So we raised a $4 million pre seed, $20 million seed, and then we raised our Series A here in June, of this year and that was a $50 million round. [00:27:17] S2: I mean, out of those, the one that really shines the most is the $20 million seed. A median seed is like $4 million. You're at this point still pre launch, I believe. How does that $20 million seed happen?
00:27:17 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:27:17] S2: I mean, out of those, the one that really shines the most is the $20 million seed. A median seed is like $4 million. You're at this point still pre launch, I believe. How does that $20 million seed happen? [00:27:30] S0: That $20 million seed happens because we had a waitlist at the time and the global engineering industry started to really understand the work that we did. That somehow, the VC community somehow got that information and there was a lot of interest to go lead that seed round. And from our standpoint, we understood at the seed level that this is going to transform how we design buildings. It's just a matter of when. I think that also came to the minds of the venture capitalists of the world, that this is probably something extremely big and something extremely meaningful for a very large industry. And this is just the early days. [00:28:20] S2: Did that come inbound or did you do a process for that? [00:28:23] S0: No, no, no, we have never done a process. None of the rounds has been a process. [00:28:28] S2: Do you have a sense of what you've done in order to generate so much inbound from VCs?