A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:05:19 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:05:19] S2: So it was, if this works, you cannot have it. That's kind of the nature of the beast here. [00:05:24] S0: Yeah, exactly. They have thousands, tens of thousands of engineers across the globe that are working to do this work and then we're offering them a platform that just does this work much, much faster, does it better. It's a way for them to do much more as engineers so they can start offering new type of products to their customers. They can deliver their work much faster and it's very similar. And many people in this audience probably know what's been going on in legal AI with Harvey and Legora. This is almost the exact same thing, but for an engineering workflow. [00:06:02] S2: Yeah, tell me a bit. I was going to ask, what does Endra do? Tell me a bit about that world. [00:06:04] S0: Yeah, so we are in the physical world. More specifically, we work with buildings and how we design the technical systems that go into buildings. And the technical systems inside buildings are mechanical or HVAC systems, electrical systems or plumbing systems. It's basically everything that you have inside a modern building that's not the structure of the building or the actual building itself, or the architecture. [00:06:29] S2: So not like the architecture, more the engineering.
00:06:29 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:06:29] S2: So not like the architecture, more the engineering. [00:06:31] S0: So we power the engineers that are working to design the HVAC systems and the cooling systems of all buildings, and the power systems. And as buildings get much more complex, all owners want to have their buildings run much leaner and less power and there are so many modern requirements on how buildings should work. These type of engineers are just increasing globally because buildings get much more complicated to run. So we build Endra for these type of engineers, so they can work much faster. Today they work in one tool that's called Revit. It was built in '97, acquired by Autodesk in 2002. Nothing had happened since and then. So that's the core platform they work on, and then they have four or five other tools that are all siloed in their tool stack. What Endra does is that we bundle all of this into one platform and then we can run agents to have agents create the design for them. And the end result of all this is that it goes incredibly much faster. The results are based in physics and simulation, and in a much better way than whatever is done today. So that is high level what we do at Endra and the industry that we work in. This is a very large industry. It's only for the consultancies that are designing these systems. That's a $150 billion industry and the MEP equipment market, which is all the equipment that gets installed in buildings. It's almost a trillion dollar market. It's an incredibly large space. [00:08:01] S2: What does MEP, what does that stand for by the way?
00:08:01 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:08:01] S2: What does MEP, what does that stand for by the way? [00:08:03] S0: MEP stands for Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing. So those are the main systems that get installed into buildings and if you look at a data center, for example. That's like, they're ninety percent agree, that's an MEP box, basically. So you have cooling systems, you have electrical systems, and you have a lot of mechanical systems that sit inside that. [00:08:22] S2: Tell me about your background, what you did before this and I'm curious how you end up in the space. [00:08:27] S0: I was in law school, and then I went two years in law school. I kind of understood that I wasn't becoming the best lawyer in the world. I didn't really love going to law school, so I thought that was a bit boring. I started a company in 2014, with my childhood friend Anton. Who is also a co founder in Endra. [00:08:47] S2: And where were you based when you started this? [00:08:48] S0: In Stockholm, in Sweden. [00:08:50] S2: Okay. [00:08:51] S0: So we both were in law school, thought that was a bit boring. Started a company almost as a side hustle that ended up that we scaled that company. That was a design build integrator and contractor for security systems. So we were part of building enterprise level security systems for data centers and logistics like, warehouses and enterprise office campuses around the world. But this started very small in Stockholm. We started doing small system installs of CCTV cameras to iPhone repair shops, but we ended up building very, very large enterprise systems.