A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:27:05 · Pablo Srugo, Lee Silverstone
[00:27:05] S0: I touched on this before because obviously when you tell it, like the way we're telling it, makes it sound like we're completely stupid <laugh>. What are we doing? There was a driver, right, which was, man, we just wanted to be founders so badly. We just wanted to have a company so badly, which goes all the way to starting that whiteboard. It was just methodically trying to force fit and just push out a company. The closer you get to that and the more you invest in it, the less you want to hear anything that's going to tell you maybe this is not the thing. I'm committed. I'm in. We were just finding ways to validate what we were already going to do. We just didn't want to get stuck having to come up with another idea because It sucks being in that stage of what are you guys doing? Oh, I don't know. We're just like exploring ideas. We're exploring, okay, what is that? [00:27:58] S1: I think to our defense, I know we're telling these funny stories, but I think to our defense we did really believe at the time if we build it, they will come. Our belief was people just didn't see it. They couldn't understand it. Once we built it, all of these customers would magically appear. We would build this amazing system that everyone would have to buy it. We'd have all this customer pull. I think to a certain extent it wasn't only just, hey, we want to be founders. I think we did also buy into this story that we're going to build this amazing thing and all of a sudden customers appear.
00:28:33 · Rob Woodbridge
[00:28:33] S2: You know what? That's a really important part though because visionaries, people who reinvent the future or invent the future, I would say don't listen to their customers. Steve Jobs is obviously famous for saying that if you want to invent something that people use, don't listen to your customers. That's evolutionary versus revolutionary. In the back of your head, you had to have been thinking, they don't get it. This is the future. They're just on this path. We're going to move them onto this path, which is the Trex, or sorry, the Gymtrack path. This is where we're going. They don't see it. Many times you have that train of thought that happens, that pulls companies through. I'd say 99.9% of them don't materialize into something. For every one apple you have, you have a thousand or a million other companies that didn't invent the future. That's what's appealing about it. You got two young guys that seemingly more and more, as you say, Pablo, believe and believe and believe in the idea, believe and believe and believe, and then get completely invested. There's no going back now. Believe the story that they're telling. I mean it's infectious. It really was. I think that that's the story that you guys were able to tell, but then you built it.
00:29:53 · Lee Silverstone
[00:29:53] S1: I also think like to your point, Rob, this kind of believe and there's no turning back. I actually think to this comment I made earlier about the double-edged sword of like getting into 500 Startups and raising money is that that's the negative side of startups getting validation from the wrong places early on. Startups are, Pablo, you said this, I think in one of the other PMF podcasts or in one of your LinkedIn posts, was startups are an experiment, right? They should be treated as an experiment and they should be dealt with as such. What happens when you get validation, not from customer, but VCs is now all of a sudden you've made this promise to people and now you feel like you can't experiment with customers as much. You're stuck on this trajectory of, hey, we told everyone we were going to go build this thing, we’ve got to go build it. I think the longer startups can stay experiments without these external stakeholders and their only stakeholders are the people on the team and then the customer, the better you can run experiments and the better you could actually find value. To my earlier comment around maybe it would've been better if we didn't get into 500 startups, I think sometimes there is truth to that for companies, if you're not really ready to accelerate growth, you're probably better staying an experiment.
00:31:05 · Pablo Srugo, Lee Silverstone
[00:31:05] S0: I think the way I'm viewing it now is the later stage of a company you are, the more it makes sense to trade overhead for resources. Yeah, let's take more money, let's hire more people so we can have more resources. It's more overhead, but we can do more things. In the early days you think that also applies, if only I had more money, if only I had a few more developers, you actually want zero overhead. The less overhead you have, the more you can twist, turn, try, which is really the thing that's going to get you to something that you can then invest into without the pressure, without the – it's like if we wanted to switch it expectations, all of a sudden, oh, it's communication to all these investors, it's communication to my entire team versus Lee and I just being like, dude, let's dump this. Let’s just do something else. That's it. [00:31:52] S1: Yeah, exactly. Again, if you're just two guys or two women or two people or whatever who have good rapport and you're on the same level in wavelength where you're just wake up one day, you look at each other and you go, this isn't going to work, right? Cool, super easy, go do something different or change it or go back to the customers and be like, hey, we realize we're idiots. Let us talk to you more and do more customer discovery, but man, imagine saying that to a software developer who's been working on a product for six months, they're going to pull their hair out and quit. That stuff is you want avoid that as much as possible. I agree with you wholeheartedly.
00:31:52 · Lee Silverstone, Rob Woodbridge
[00:31:52] S1: Yeah, exactly. Again, if you're just two guys or two women or two people or whatever who have good rapport and you're on the same level in wavelength where you're just wake up one day, you look at each other and you go, this isn't going to work, right? Cool, super easy, go do something different or change it or go back to the customers and be like, hey, we realize we're idiots. Let us talk to you more and do more customer discovery, but man, imagine saying that to a software developer who's been working on a product for six months, they're going to pull their hair out and quit. That stuff is you want avoid that as much as possible. I agree with you wholeheartedly. [00:32:29] S2: Now, I just – I don't want to jump too far forward in the story here, but now picture this, that I have given up everything on all my other companies and I've come to work as the CEO of this company. There's six of us in a room and we're nine months into this new experiment and I'm sitting at my desk and we've moved from that big office to the smaller office and sacrificed all the gym equipment and sold that for rent. This is where we are, right? Pablo, feet up on the desk, he's like, hey, yeah, this isn't going to work. That's what he said to me. He told me, he says, I'm like, what? What do you mean? What's not going to work? He's like this, I just did the math. This isn't going to work. This isn't going to work. [00:33:17] S1: But that's four years into building the company. Would have been nice to have that conversation four years ago.
00:33:17 · Lee Silverstone, Rob Woodbridge, Pablo Srugo
[00:33:17] S1: But that's four years into building the company. Would have been nice to have that conversation four years ago. [00:33:20] S2: I'm like, what do you mean, Pablo? You're out of your mind. No, this is going to work. He’s like, dude, this isn't – this is not going to work. [00:33:29] S0: This was V2, and this is funny because – story from there. Lee, you actually – so Lee had just, for background, Lee was what – at one point I think we brought Rob in, you stayed around for a while, and then at one point you said, you know what, guys? I think I want to go do something else and you left to do something else, right? [00:33:46] S2: No, the story with that is that it wasn't ready, right? I came in to do marketing and lead that and then – I mean, the product wasn't ready.