A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:31:15 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:31:15] S0: Yes, I specifically remember the next bottleneck for Peregrine was that deployment motion that you talked about, like, how did you scale that? When we started getting, you know, not like single digit customers, but dozens and dozens? And then it was like, oh man, how does this even work at scale? And I think that was a big moment for us. I would say the year of 2023, is. [00:31:15] S2: You're now in the tens of millions, right? At that point, could you point to something? There's probably no good answer to this question. I'll ask it anyways. What took you from more of a push, hey, we're doing numbers, we're doing great, one, three, ten. That's awesome, to like, wow, we're growing so fast. I've got these other problems? And I'm asking it, you know, just for my client. That to me is that, you know, we talked earlier about the product market fit moment. Which is really like a value delivery moment, right? The first time it was an action, you solve the cold case, like, okay, this thing works. That's not necessarily the same as there is so much demand for this. I'm drowning in demand, which is kind of what you're talking about in the 2020s, and I'm curious if that's just a matter of, well, at some point you sell enough. People know you, like you said, commanders, tell the commanders, captains, and word of mouth takes you there, or if something changed, either in a product or the market. That all of a sudden demand just kind of took a step change.
00:32:27 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:32:27] S0: That demand, it's a mix of all of those and the moment that I really felt that we needed to teach it is, we were operating off of a spreadsheet for resourcing and how, who goes where. And, we just had this big list of customers and we had this small list of deployment folks. And they were all tied up in current customers. And we feel very strongly that like, as soon as the contract is signed, we got to start work on this. We got to start integrating data, we got to start providing the value and we were taking engineers off the line and doing core product work to be able to do these far deployed motions. And that is when we were really testing the scale of how we could develop that playbook to make it more efficient. How we could hire rapidly to be able to meet the demand. [00:33:10] S2: And is that also when, just looking at your fundraise history. Would you say that that was also when fundraising really took off? Now you're raising massive rounds and I'm sure it's probably not hard for you to raise. I mean, you want to optimize and all these sort of things but I'm sure you've got more demand than supply in terms of fundraising. And obviously it wasn't the case when you're raising a million dollars. Was this around the time when that changed as well? Is that correlated? [00:33:31] S0: Yeah, absolutely. I think whenever you can show that kind of snowball of growth year over year, month over month, quarter over quarter. At a certain point, the business is starting to be judged on its metrics and when you can show those, that's when it becomes.
00:33:31 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:33:31] S0: Yeah, absolutely. I think whenever you can show that kind of snowball of growth year over year, month over month, quarter over quarter. At a certain point, the business is starting to be judged on its metrics and when you can show those, that's when it becomes. [00:33:47] S2: Yeah and it's also when you can go to somebody and say, listen, I need money because I got so many deployments coming. I don't have enough engineers to fulfill those deployments. Okay, here you go, how much do you need, right? That is a low risk proposition and that's the beauty of, that's what product market fit does to you if and when you can truly get it. [00:34:00] S0: Yes, yeah, absolutely. [00:34:00] S2: So let's do, we did one of the tackle areas, right? We went on kind of the FTE side and why you did that and how that worked. The other thing that you did that was very different, when we were talking before was the amount of research. You know, people talk about, you know, you're going to do enterprise sales, you have to, you know, research and whatever. But there are gradients into just how far you can take that and, you know, you went to the point where. I think it was for that first deployment. You looked at every single captain across the entire Bay Area. You saw all the records, all the cases they handled. Tell me a little bit about your research driven enterprise sales motion.
00:34:00 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:34:00] S2: So let's do, we did one of the tackle areas, right? We went on kind of the FTE side and why you did that and how that worked. The other thing that you did that was very different, when we were talking before was the amount of research. You know, people talk about, you know, you're going to do enterprise sales, you have to, you know, research and whatever. But there are gradients into just how far you can take that and, you know, you went to the point where. I think it was for that first deployment. You looked at every single captain across the entire Bay Area. You saw all the records, all the cases they handled. Tell me a little bit about your research driven enterprise sales motion. [00:34:42] S0: Yeah, I think this goes back to our mentality of over investing for success and even when you say that. The moment that comes up for me is it was Christmas 2020, something like that. Where everybody was still home for Christmas and we had this RFP opportunity. And it was one of these situations where it wasn't written for us. We didn't write it and those are always high risk opportunities to begin with. But we read it, we thought it was great. [00:35:10] S2: Yeah, because you assume they wrote it for someone else. So you're already in a backseat.
00:35:10 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:35:10] S2: Yeah, because you assume they wrote it for someone else. So you're already in a backseat. [00:35:14] S0: Exactly, and it was shown to us from somebody who was like, hey, I think this is a good fit for you. But it was working with an agency in the state of California and they had these four scenarios that we had to demonstrate. And this was for emergency operations, and doing wildfire rescue mission. Things like this, and we basically sprinted for three weeks to get our platform to a place where it could show these different demos. One of these demos, Lake Berryessa is a lake up in Northern California that I have memorized by heart. Because one of the demos was to show how you could build a path of travel through Lake Berryessa if these roads were closed off due to wildfire. Very, very detailed and we spent so much time preparing for this RFP, and it was basically a four stage process. We transformed our entire office into an emergency operations center. So when they like called in, we have these cameras that mimic the same emergency operations center that they had in California, and then demoed exactly, you know, all these scenarios. And really went, I would say like a hundred and twenty percent on the effort there. We won that contract, probably shouldn't have won that contract. I'm sure it was written for some other billion dollar company. That has been a lot of our strategy, for. [00:36:33] S2: Now, that's different, to be clear. Than the research piece, but this is kind of the amount of prep that you put into every engagement.
00:36:33 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:36:33] S2: Now, that's different, to be clear. Than the research piece, but this is kind of the amount of prep that you put into every engagement. [00:36:39] S0: Yeah, it's different in like the tactic, same in the principle of, you know, if we expect to win these kinds of. Especially in areas that were unproven, like the word that I think we always talk about and think about is earn. And we have to earn the right to be able to work with these folks. [00:36:57] S2: So walk me through it, right? Because the whole point of this is somebody needs to be able to copy it, right? So you want to go and you want to win a certain organization. What do you do? What are the sort of things that you're doing to do that a hundred and twenty percent to earn it? What would you do? Imagine me, I'm a founder. I'm like, dude, I think they would be a great customer because X, Y, Z reason. I want to go sell to them. What are the sort of things you would do?