A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:46:49 · Lee Silverstone, Pablo Srugo
[00:46:49] S1: We agreed to go, but we signed a contract but didn't pay. They were like, you're coming. [00:46:54] S0: We're like, but listen, we have no product. We have nothing anymore. It's like, well, you’re paying for it. We're like, okay. We started working backwards from that. It was like, okay, well let's get something together, presentation together that we could at least pitch to these gym owners. We moved up a little bit because all of a sudden it was like, okay, let's at least have these real conversations. Let's ask them what they think. Let's really care and listen. Let's go through pricing, which is another thing that we went through, but the problem was we still jumped the research phase. We actually didn't do any real research. We had our idea and we were just validating the idea. What happened was, Rob and I go, we meet 20 gym owners and of real chains, solid people. Everyone loves it. I don't know if you remember, Rob, I was elated after Day 1 because every meeting was like, oh, this makes total sense. I don't know what equipment – the idea was to be clear, these little sensors, they go on every piece of equipment. They can measure when it's used or not used. Then they can report a dashboard to gym operators so they can buy equipment more intelligently instead of buying it blind, right? Our motto, by the way, this is total tangent, but it was called “Free the Reps.” They’re stuck in your treadmill. You’ve got to get them to the cloud. Free the reps. We make shirts. I still have it. I still have it. I still have them.
00:46:54 · Pablo Srugo, Lee Silverstone
[00:46:54] S0: We're like, but listen, we have no product. We have nothing anymore. It's like, well, you’re paying for it. We're like, okay. We started working backwards from that. It was like, okay, well let's get something together, presentation together that we could at least pitch to these gym owners. We moved up a little bit because all of a sudden it was like, okay, let's at least have these real conversations. Let's ask them what they think. Let's really care and listen. Let's go through pricing, which is another thing that we went through, but the problem was we still jumped the research phase. We actually didn't do any real research. We had our idea and we were just validating the idea. What happened was, Rob and I go, we meet 20 gym owners and of real chains, solid people. Everyone loves it. I don't know if you remember, Rob, I was elated after Day 1 because every meeting was like, oh, this makes total sense. I don't know what equipment – the idea was to be clear, these little sensors, they go on every piece of equipment. They can measure when it's used or not used. Then they can report a dashboard to gym operators so they can buy equipment more intelligently instead of buying it blind, right? Our motto, by the way, this is total tangent, but it was called “Free the Reps.” They’re stuck in your treadmill. You’ve got to get them to the cloud. Free the reps. We make shirts. I still have it. I still have it. I still have them. [00:48:11] S1: I'm going to get a T-shirt that says Free the reps. Free the reps. I got to get a T-shirt that says... That's so funny.
00:48:11 · Lee Silverstone, Pablo Srugo, Rob Woodbridge
[00:48:11] S1: I'm going to get a T-shirt that says Free the reps. Free the reps. I got to get a T-shirt that says... That's so funny. [00:48:17] S0: Anyways, the real, the important part of that is… [00:48:20] S1: I forgot about that. No, that's the important part. The important part is the “Free the Reps” motto. [00:48:25] S0: That's a win. That's a huge win. Then by the second day, to the point that we sit down with people and they're like, oh, you're the GymTrack guys. X, Y, Z told me about it yesterday over drinks. Super interesting what you guys are doing. This makes total sense. We walk out like, man, we've got it. We really nailed it. Dude, we got I think exactly zero sales, maybe one, maybe one pilot out of that, 20 people being like, yes. [00:48:52] S2: The University Of Calgary, they were interested in it. That's what we – that was the follow-up.
00:48:52 · Rob Woodbridge, Pablo Srugo
[00:48:52] S2: The University Of Calgary, they were interested in it. That's what we – that was the follow-up. [00:48:55] S0: Why do you think that is? Why do you think, when you sit down with customers, they want to tell you this stuff to your face? What's the lesson? Yeah, so here's the thing. When you skip research and you go to product, obviously we thought it through. It's not like it was a stupid thing. It was like, listen, you have 30 treadmills, it costs you $10,000 a treadmill. That's $300,000 and you could have bought 25, you could have bought 35. You have no idea. That makes a lot of sense. When you go to somebody that's a gym operator and you're like, doesn't that make sense? First of all, they see all the work you've put into it. They're just predisposed to be like, yes, but you know what? It does make sense. They're like, dude, that actually makes a lot of sense. I should really pay for this. Then when you call them and you're like, hey, let's move forward, they're like, well, I got to open up a club today, so sorry. Well, this thing happened with my members, sorry. What you didn't discover because you started at the idea instead of at the problem, whether it's, yeah, it's a problem, but it's Problem Number 10. That's the problem is that you're solving Problem Number 10 and you keep hearing next quarter, come back next quarter, come back next year until they just ghost you because they're just like, whatever. I'm not interested anymore.
00:49:58 · Lee Silverstone, Pablo Srugo, Rob Woodbridge
[00:49:58] S1: Because there's always going to be, in any business, there's always going to be pressing issues. There's always going to be new issues that come up. If you are not this severe pain point that they have, you're always going to get pushed to the bottom of the pile. It's going to happen over and over. [00:50:15] S0: Customers don't buy any ROI, they buy the best ROI they can get. If you are ROI Number 10, but they got one, two, three, they're always going to go back to one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. [00:50:25] S1: Yeah, that's why a lot of times, when you're thinking about a competitive landscape for a product, there's a whole other set of competitors, which is they're solving problems for their customer that you're not even thinking about, right? They're not direct competition, they're just competition for dollars. [00:50:39] S0: For wallet, yeah, 100%. [00:50:40] S1: Yeah, for wallet and for mind share, wallet share. They're not direct competitors at all, but they are because they're solving a bigger problem for the customer. [00:50:47] S0: The big revelation was of… [00:50:50] S2: There was three other – two other companies that were doing similar things, right? Remember that we had competitors out there and they were doing it very – it was very costly to implement them and their technology was very costly to maintain or they were doing it manually. There was one guy who would go to all the gyms and sit there with a checkboard. Remember that? [00:51:10] S1: Oh, I forgot about that guy. The consultant, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:51:10 · Lee Silverstone, Rob Woodbridge
[00:51:10] S1: Oh, I forgot about that guy. The consultant, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:51:12] S2: We got friendly with him and he was a nice guy. We were trying to sell him our sensors to make his job a lot easier. We were looking for ways to partner but we looked at the competition as well. Here's another lesson not to do. We were saying like, how can we make it cheaper and easier than what they're doing, right? We had this idea of what it was we did. We got to three of ten in research. We got the feedback, the visceral feedback from the conference. Then we came back and we started looking at the competition. We said, okay, we're going to make it cheaper and easier and we did. We made it cheaper and easier to use our technology, but the problem was that the total market for this was just those two guys and their three employees. We didn't realize that it wasn't as big a problem. Can you imagine going to a gym and saying, we're going to put all these sensors on and we're going to tell you how much you overspent on the equipment you already bought. That's what we were telling them. [00:52:08] S1: It's also true. It's not like it’s sensors for a restaurant to tell them how much produce to buy on a daily basis that they're constantly doing. A gym buys equipment and that they never buy equipment again for 20 years. If you don't understand your customer intimately, it's so easy to make these logical – come up with these logical fallacies in your mind that you're just like, take these leaps that make no sense at all.