A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:32:29 · Pablo Srugo
[00:32:29] S2: I mean, I think the other thing, just to learn from your experience. Something that I've always believed is, I mean if you land on an idea that's massive, that's great. But if you don't, you know, look at your first company, right? Your first company was nothing, let's say, sexy and also nothing that was going to become a trillion dollar company, right? Even a multi billion dollar company, but it could become a big success and at least relative. And certainly relative to you as a first time founder in the 20s, right? So, part of it is, like you said, dip your toes, getting into something that is, for whatever reason, interesting to you. Where there's team market fit, regardless of whether it can become a unicorn. What that might imply for you, not just in that first company but moving forward, is hard to kind of predict up front. But as long as you get something out of it, it could be a win.
00:33:10 · Niklas Lindgren
[00:33:10] S0: Exactly, and I think investors also understand the entrepreneurs that they are working with, like who are these persons. I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't think that VCs don't understand that, but they do understand who they work with and my appetite for risk is very high. I try to control, for controlled risk, it's very high. My appetite to sort of build something meaningful is extremely high. I'm not in this business to be number two or number three. Even though we're still the only player in this field, I'm sort of very, very hungry to win and to dominate in this space, and dominate by orders of magnitude in this space. I think that's also a factor, whatever you get your ass into make sure to win, make sure to not be number two, number three, number four, number five. Because vertical software doesn't really work that way. The power laws are not in your favor if you aim to be number two or three. So I think it's a matter of that as well, like whatever you get into, make sure that you're creating the category winner and that you are the category. The one who is the best in the world of this is Jensen Huang. He creates his own industries and for natural reasons he wins them as well. So, we try to be, I'm not sure if it's too bold to say that we're trying to be a little bit Jensen here. Trying to create a new type of industry.
00:34:36 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:34:36] S2: Well, that's a good segue. Because we have two tech players I want to talk about. One of them is brand and using Reddit but you spent, you said, $300,000, $400,000 on building a brand at inception. Which is not a thing that you normally do. Normally you go out, you get customers, MVP, you prove value, and then later on you kind of, increase everything with brand and investing in brand. What did you spend those first few hundred thousand dollars on, and why did you choose to spend on brand early? [00:35:00] S0: Yeah, I'm almost embarrassed of saying that, but yeah. It turned out well, so I'm not embarrassed anymore. But in the early days, it was really weird. It sort of went against all early stage playbooks of how you should do things. I think YC even have an advice, like don't spend any money on marketing early on or something like that, or a website or something. But we went straight against that. We spent a lot of money on brand, on storytelling, on marketing. [00:35:00] S2: How much would you say you spent, in those first few quarters?
00:35:00 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:35:00] S2: How much would you say you spent, in those first few quarters? [00:35:00] S0: I think we spent maybe $150 something, $150k something. So building the first web, building the first sort of visuals and motion around the product, like before there is almost anything. And the reason why that was really good was that we got in touch with a lot of engineers that were excited about sort of the, at the time, fictional work that we were doing. But we could almost get them to sort of get a packaged feeling of what we were trying to create. More importantly, they can understand who we were as a company, what we stood for and our core values, and sort of who we were. We got an identity for those $150k and that was very, very important for us and it's paid off multiple times after. [00:36:22] S2: What would you say is the most, out of all. Because I'm sure you've tried different things. What were some of the most impactful brand assets that you built and why? [00:36:29] S0: I would say the website, definitely the website. [00:36:29] S2: Did you outsource that? [00:36:29] S0: We did, so there was a great creative agency in Stockholm called EW. They've been doing work for us. I think they did Legora after us, they did Sana. [00:36:46] S2: And what did they get right? I mean, regardless of whether somebody uses EW or not. They're like, okay, I'm gonna spend time, effort. Maybe I have $150k, maybe I don't, on my website. What did they get so right about your website?
00:36:46 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:36:46] S2: And what did they get right? I mean, regardless of whether somebody uses EW or not. They're like, okay, I'm gonna spend time, effort. Maybe I have $150k, maybe I don't, on my website. What did they get so right about your website? [00:36:56] S0: So they got the story right. It doesn't really look like it does today, but early on it was more sort of scaled down and then we would be telling a story about the work that we did, why we did it, and they did this, in a very nice and compelling way. And they got that extremely right. And then we also produced product trailers for them. They were part of designing our first user interface before, you know, we almost had a product. So they helped us also on product user interface. So it was sort of very aligned with whatever we communicated on the website and in the other marketing assets that we were producing. And they were great, they were incredible. Really, really incredible, a small agency in Stockholm, EW is the name. [00:37:37] S2: So what would you recommend to someone who's thinking about investing in brand, whether they're going to hire a consultant or not. When you think about they got the story right. What's behind that? What do you have to do to get a story right? What does a good story look like?
00:37:37 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:37:37] S2: So what would you recommend to someone who's thinking about investing in brand, whether they're going to hire a consultant or not. When you think about they got the story right. What's behind that? What do you have to do to get a story right? What does a good story look like? [00:37:47] S0: It's a good story always, to some extent. It has a start, a middle part and a finish, right? And we did kind of that as well. We were trying to explain to the industry, what is the current state? How are you guys working today? How are we planning to fix this? And what does the future of this industry look like and how you design buildings, right? So that was sort of what we were trying to create with these marketing assets, to create the storytelling around why are we doing this and what problems are we trying to solve. And the website, and all of the other assets that we created was instrumental in doing so. So people started believing in the work that we did. They were very excited about the work that we did and that's also how we got into very, very intimate discussions with the ICP early on as well. Because they frankly believed in the mission and the work that we did. [00:38:44] S2: How did you drive traffic? Because you have a website, it's great. How do you get people to actually see it? [00:38:47] S0: It was all word of mouth for us. So it was all driven by people telling other people and we had a wait list that we put out early on. [00:38:47] S2: But how did you kickstart that word of mouth?