A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:33:46 · Rob Woodbridge, Lee Silverstone
[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. [00:33:56] S1: Yeah, that was the first time. That was the first time you came to Gym Track. Then you were like, hey guys, you don't need a marketing team. Yeah, don't waste your money on me. You guys got to go find product market fit. We're like, okay, cool. We did that for a while. Then we were like, oh, my God, our backs are up against the wall. We're burning too much cash. We had done this pilot with Anytime Fitness in the US, which is a whole other story that we should totally talk about, but then we came back and we were like, we've got to cut board. Then we did that and the board was like, what are you guys doing? It's like, hey, I think we should bring in a new CEO. I'm not the right person for this turnaround thing. Then you came in as the CEO and then you and I had a similar conversation with [0:00:34:35], you're the CEO. I don't know what I'm going to do here. Pablo was running the product side. I was like, I don't know how to add value anymore. We were like, you know what, man? Maybe you're right. Then that was when I was like, okay, I think we…
00:34:47 · Pablo Srugo, Rob Woodbridge, Lee Silverstone
[00:34:47] S0: Just for context, at this point, we had gone through the near acquisition that failed. We then laid off – we went from 30 to 8 people. Obviously, the board was just super upset in general, which is why we brought – and we start – I don't even remember, but legally we're like, man, we can fight this. We could just push through. Then it was like, you know what? This is going to be so terrible to say let's bring someone else in. Rob was the only person we could think of that just made sense, knew the business, we knew him. I'm like, this could really smooth things over. We did that. Then we had some money in the bank, but we didn't have an idea, right? [00:35:23] S2: No, you did a small round, right? You did a small round, $1 million came in from existing investors. [00:35:28] S1: We had done a round I think actually before doing layoffs. We had done this Anytime Fitness pilot and then we were like, hey, there's some user engagement, people are using it, but we need to build a… [00:35:41] S0: Let's go through, let's dive in because – so Anytime Fitness, just a background story even because it was a big deal.