A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:26:12 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:26:12] S0: Yep. [00:26:13] S2: And then you got businesses, care about making money, ROI, right? And then you got these in the middle where it's, depending on the situation, depending on the politics, depending on whatever. They have different priorities and a lot of times. At least from a startup perspective, it's always a bit of a hard mode situation. Because you're like, it's hard to scale, it's slow, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think has worked in your case? You're deep into it. This is the perspective of somebody that's outside, the thing that gets said, right? You're actually in there. What are some of the pros and cons of selling into these types of buyers? And what helps you crack it in the way that you have, and be able to actually build a scalable business? [00:26:50] S0: Yeah, and I think some of this is very much hard lessons learned over time. The go to market motion for Peregrine was a very hard one. I'd say it was one of the hardest challenges that we had to overcome in the business. We had this phase of the company where I'd say we were in the wilderness trying to find that Product Market Fit. We had that product market fit, we were trying to expand more and then getting that scale. That go to market scale, was really, really hard and that took a lot of learning, and understanding on how government processes work. It took a lot of learning and understanding on building the pipeline. I think there are little tricks in every single state and county that you have to learn. It's hard to enumerate every single one.
00:26:50 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:26:50] S0: Yeah, and I think some of this is very much hard lessons learned over time. The go to market motion for Peregrine was a very hard one. I'd say it was one of the hardest challenges that we had to overcome in the business. We had this phase of the company where I'd say we were in the wilderness trying to find that Product Market Fit. We had that product market fit, we were trying to expand more and then getting that scale. That go to market scale, was really, really hard and that took a lot of learning, and understanding on how government processes work. It took a lot of learning and understanding on building the pipeline. I think there are little tricks in every single state and county that you have to learn. It's hard to enumerate every single one. [00:27:34] S2: What did you learn? Ultimately, what was the go to market that started to actually work for you guys?
00:27:34 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:27:34] S2: What did you learn? Ultimately, what was the go to market that started to actually work for you guys? [00:27:38] S0: Yeah, the go to market that actually started to work for us was one, simplifying down the message we were, what we were trying to sell. I think Peregrine is a complex piece of technology. It could be hard for maybe a person not familiar with technology to explain that value prop. So it was really important for us to make the value prop of Peregrine very clear and have our champions kind of go to bat for us. And the way we got scale is by hiring account executives, you know, across the country and teaching them. And it was card carrying, knocking on doors and doing this at scale and building the pipeline, going through the nine to twelve months sales cycle and doing that enough times over and over and over again. And these things get easier as you do more of it, because as we've generated penetration within certain areas. The next customer is that much easier. That state is more familiar with you, that city is more familiar with you, and so they have a snowball effect, but. [00:28:39] S2: How fast did things ramp? How fast did you get to a million and then $10 million, for example, in ARR? [00:28:43] S0: Yeah, we went basically one, three, ten. [00:28:47] S2: Yeah, I mean that's the kind of classic, used to be the classic, right? Triple, triple, triple, double, double. Now it's one to a hundred in a year. [00:28:53] S0: It took a lot. It took a lot and there was not an easy button question.
00:28:53 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:28:53] S0: It took a lot. It took a lot and there was not an easy button question. [00:28:57] S2: Well that was going to be my question, right? It's like, did it ever, easy is the wrong word because nothing's ever easy. You know, even the startups that are high flying, like revenues, it's not easy. I'm sure if you go and talk to somebody at Anthropic, it's not easy. Even though all the revenue is coming in. So easy is the wrong word, but when did it go from a push to a pull? Where did it go from where, at least the growth, the top line, was not the number one, most principal worry? It was other things. And was there ever, like, did that ever kind of start a shift or was it always, okay, how are we going to make it this quarter? How are we going to make it this quarter? Was that just the real life?
00:29:27 · Ben Rudolph
[00:29:27] S0: Look, I think the reality is Peregrine's goals are always very ambitious, and so it's always top of mind. How do we expand? How do we build? And how do we grow? And what we did last year, by definition, we have to do something new and different. And we have to either build the fleet out more, we have to train the regional sales manager, train the account executives underneath it. Now, I will say we're at a point where we have an engine in the state and local space. It can always be better. We always want to grow faster. We're now expanding to different types of verticals. That takes a whole different type of learning. Our whole idea of Peregrine is deeply understand a vertical, so that you can be successful in it and then when we are expanding to emergency operations or expanding to health and human services. We also have to go and do the hard work of learning that vertical, and learning the way we go to market because it's different. It's very difficult to just kind of copy and paste. Of course, you can take some of those learnings, but you got to do the learning.
00:30:22 · Pablo Srugo
[00:30:22] S2: But it's always been, the challenge has always been, like you've never been in a position, just to be clear. Where it's like, wow, we have so much pipeline, whether it's outbound or inbound generated. We have so many contracts closing. How are we even going to deliver on this, right? Which is typically the classic quote unquote product market fit that you read about or whatever. That market trees would talk about. Like was that ever the situation, or was it always okay how, okay we're going to triple again therefore, da, da, da and you do. Like most startups that I see, at least, like they live in that. Frankly, whether they say they have problems or not, they live in that world where it's like, OK, shit, how are we going to make this quarter? How are we going to make next quarter? And like, well, if we do this and we do that, maybe we'll make. We're off by twenty percent and then the one in ten are the ones where it's like, yeah, I'm not worried about making the score. I'm worried about maybe retention. I'm worried maybe about like hiring. I'm worried about, raising money cause whatever. I'm worried about all the other things, but not growth. So I'm curious, obviously at the beginning, it's never like that but did that ever happen?