A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:42:11 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:42:11] S2: I've always liked the life story as an interview guide. I know that Shopify was famous for doing that and once you draw that trend line. It gets a lot easier to make out who's exceptional and who isn't. [00:42:22] S0: Exactly, and you can also very easily understand, is this person someone that does incredible things? Because they can go very deep on the details on how they do things and why things work, why they don't work, where they failed and what failed. And so those are the type of things that we screen very much for. And also a lot of personal things in terms of how did they grow up? What type of environment was that? As I said, who are they as teenagers? What type of sports do they do? There's a lot of different things that we screen for, and we screen everything in order to make sure that we can check box all these ten hiring principles. Because everyone needs to pass those hiring principles. Otherwise, they don't get hired. [00:43:07] S2: And then the last question is just related to hiring. You used outbound a lot, a lot of LinkedIn outbound. Tell me what you did there, and just kind of a little bit of a playbook that somebody else could replicate.
00:43:07 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:43:07] S2: And then the last question is just related to hiring. You used outbound a lot, a lot of LinkedIn outbound. Tell me what you did there, and just kind of a little bit of a playbook that somebody else could replicate. [00:43:17] S0: We did it very easy. We said, what type of persons are we looking for? What is a relevant background for this role that we're now hiring for? And obviously that's very different if you're a developer or if you're go to marketer or if you work in marketing or whatever. But we set up, this is the background we think that we are looking for and then we just try to find individuals with that type of relevant background on LinkedIn. And I did a lot of the outreach as well as two other colleagues of mine. And the founders did all the outbound on LinkedIn, like regular, just adding, connecting with a message like, hey, I'm Niklas. [00:43:52] S2: Any learned secret other than volume or whatever? Any anything you learned from doing that firsthand, or is it just do it?
00:43:52 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:43:52] S2: Any learned secret other than volume or whatever? Any anything you learned from doing that firsthand, or is it just do it? [00:43:58] S0: Just do it. There's no magic behind it. Just do it and in order to get, like, obviously it's much easier once you're like thirty, forty, forty five, fifty. You can start using these individuals' networks because you have screened for them to have other great talent in their network, right? So it organically evolves and gets much easier as you get more people inside your company that believes in your mission, and believes in you, and believes in the team. But I think a critical number is to get to the first fifty people that way and then you can start leveraging other people's networks and brands. Like even their personal brands, because if you're hiring really good people. They have probably a lot of other people that want to follow them. [00:44:44] S2: Perfect, well, last question. What would be a top piece of advice that you find yourself giving to other early stage founders?
00:44:44 · Pablo Srugo, Niklas Lindgren
[00:44:44] S2: Perfect, well, last question. What would be a top piece of advice that you find yourself giving to other early stage founders? [00:44:50] S0: Talk to your customers like hell and try to get every piece of information you can from them. Then once you get all of this information into your brain, you can start triangulating around that and making assumptions. You can start drawing conclusions and stuff like that. But you need to get a lot of information from your customers early on and do that in the most creative ways possible. I did it on Reddit, I did it on cold calling, emailing, going through contacts, whatever and the critical part is to do that early on, and get into these rooms early on. So do that as much as fucking possible. [00:45:35] S2: Perfect, Niklas. Thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. [00:45:37] S0: Thank you, Pablo. It's been great, thank you for having me.
00:45:37 · Niklas Lindgren, Pablo Srugo
[00:45:37] S0: Thank you, Pablo. It's been great, thank you for having me. [00:45:40] S2: So picture this, it's months from now, years from now and one of your founder friends. A really close founder friend of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt and it turns out, if you had just shared the Product Market Fit show with them. They would have learned everything they needed to, to find Product Market Fit and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't want to live like that, it is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them. Put it on WhatsApp. Put it on Slack. Put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.