A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:42:44 · Mark, Pablo Srugo
[00:42:44] S1: Second Closet, I mean the nice thing with storage is it just kind of keeps tolling. We just had all this high gross margin storage revenue in our warehouses that let us finance all our software development and builds for this new B2B business. They were all still in our warehouse, bearing in mind that when you are using your last-mile fleet, it's not touching the warehouse largely, right? It's just they're dormant and collecting revenue, which is the great thing about the business model, but also the thing that we, as founders, weren't super excited about anymore, it's just literally collecting dust. If our success is going to be measured by how much dust is on top of a pallet, that's a really shitty measurement of success. Let's go do something that's way better from a consumer experience perspective, and let's go create cool experiences for brands that sell online. [00:43:31] S0: What percent of your revenue now is the last-mile delivery GoBolt piece? [00:43:36] S1: Our business breaks down almost perfectly. Roughly half of it is warehousing and everything to do with our fulfillment business, and the other half is our last-mile business truck and parcel. It's almost half-half between warehousing and transportation. [00:43:52] S0: The warehouse is not fueling self-storage, it's fueling the delivery, the commerce piece. [00:43:57] S1: Yeah, exactly. We'll store hundreds to thousands of pallets for brands that store things like water bottles or couches or work. Yeah, it's a totally diverse storage base now.
00:43:57 · Mark, Pablo Srugo
[00:43:57] S1: Yeah, exactly. We'll store hundreds to thousands of pallets for brands that store things like water bottles or couches or work. Yeah, it's a totally diverse storage base now. [00:44:13] S0: It's funny how if you try to predict looking forward from 2017 or whatever year it was, storing things for the summer, to becoming a fully integrated third-party logistics provider for some of the biggest brands in the world, you could never predict it, but looking backwards, it all fits, right? It all makes sense. It was one step at a time. [00:44:34] S1: Yeah, we could tell this story in a different way and make it seem like it was all planned, and purpose-driven, and sound super Harvard MBA, McKinsey-esque but the reality is we just made the best decision possible in that moment in time. We are so lucky that the big decisions ended up working out for us. Tons of small decisions that went to shit, but the big ones worked because we were trying to be thoughtful. Looking back, they all kind of stitched together nicely. Now, what I challenge myself to do is look forward to the future, 5 years out, 10 years out, what does the world look like? We're too big now as a business and we have too many people that are super smart, capable, ambitious, to not have a rudder and not have a North Star. [00:45:21] S0: How big are you now?
00:45:21 · Pablo Srugo, Mark
[00:45:21] S0: How big are you now? [00:45:22] S1: We're over a thousand people. I think we were six people in 2017. It's grown a lot, and everyone deserves to know what we're here to do and what they're here to help us do, right? That's the product that GoBolt offers our team, and people join us because they want to help make logistics way more sustainable than it is today. That is a core reason why some people choose to join GoBolt. Other people join because they're tired of the way these big old logistics companies operate, and they like that we're a Nuvo tech-enabled business, and they can have an impact and fingerprints all over our growth. Now, I think more about what we will be when we grow up than ever before. It's important because that's about understanding how do we fit into the market in five years' time, because what we've built so far has legs to run that journey and we might need to reinvent ourselves a couple more times in five years to really have good staying power. [00:46:19] S0: That's great. Let's stop it there. Let me just finish off with the two questions that we always finish off with. The first one is if you could go back, having learned everything that you've learned over the last six years or so, if you could go back to Mark starting off Second Closet with one piece of advice. What might that be?
00:46:19 · Pablo Srugo, Mark
[00:46:19] S0: That's great. Let's stop it there. Let me just finish off with the two questions that we always finish off with. The first one is if you could go back, having learned everything that you've learned over the last six years or so, if you could go back to Mark starting off Second Closet with one piece of advice. What might that be? [00:46:43] S1: That is a great question. It's so tough because the butterfly effect is real, and if you change one thing back then, does it maybe change the trajectory of where you're going? The one piece of advice would need to have accelerated where we ultimately got to. I would say ironically, I would say, where a hundred percent of our time then was one foot in front of the other, I would probably want to have dedicated at least 10% to thinking a bit further in the future because that would've probably inevitably moved us in the right direction sooner. The other thing I would say is that hire help faster because to do everything yourself only works for so long. Probably hiring a generalist sooner would've been better because, I was like, "I have to choose between finance and CS and sales. That's not great." If I had hired another generalist or a young business grad who was just looking to learn, you could probably have resourced the team equally across divisions and done better. I would say, it'd be, dedicate some more time to think about the future and bring on more generalists sooner.
00:46:43 · Mark, Pablo Srugo
[00:46:43] S1: That is a great question. It's so tough because the butterfly effect is real, and if you change one thing back then, does it maybe change the trajectory of where you're going? The one piece of advice would need to have accelerated where we ultimately got to. I would say ironically, I would say, where a hundred percent of our time then was one foot in front of the other, I would probably want to have dedicated at least 10% to thinking a bit further in the future because that would've probably inevitably moved us in the right direction sooner. The other thing I would say is that hire help faster because to do everything yourself only works for so long. Probably hiring a generalist sooner would've been better because, I was like, "I have to choose between finance and CS and sales. That's not great." If I had hired another generalist or a young business grad who was just looking to learn, you could probably have resourced the team equally across divisions and done better. I would say, it'd be, dedicate some more time to think about the future and bring on more generalists sooner. [00:47:53] S0: I think this is really important, so I'll deep dive on this one. What's the profile of the right generalist? You're a pre-seed or seed-stage company. Are we talking a year out of school, five years out of school, 20 years, gray hair? What's the perfect profile?
00:47:53 · Pablo Srugo, Mark
[00:47:53] S0: I think this is really important, so I'll deep dive on this one. What's the profile of the right generalist? You're a pre-seed or seed-stage company. Are we talking a year out of school, five years out of school, 20 years, gray hair? What's the perfect profile? [00:48:05] S1: I don't think it matters. I was in school when we came up with Second Closet. It doesn't matter. I think it's more so about are they curious and are they going to run through a wall for you? That is it, because curiosity will lead you to come up with random crazy shit that you need to then run through a wall and execute on. You need both those things to be true. Someone that will run through walls for you time after time needs to be told which walls to run through. Someone that's just curious is probably just theorizing what needs to happen. You need someone that will do both. That could be a 17-year-old or an 18-year-old, that could be a 22-year-old, that could be a 50-year-old. [00:48:38] S0: That makes sense. Then the last question, when was the first time that you felt like you had true product market fit?