A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:36:57 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[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? [00:37:20] S0: I mean, we've been in a lot of situations where for an organization that we worked for, we did a bunch of research on what their priorities are, listen to their speeches. We would get as close as possible to kind of open source data that they might have. That looks like their data potential we would integrate that, put together a whole demo that solves and speaks to an exact problem. That we know that they have talked about and showing up for a first meeting where you can demo, and speak to somebody about, pretty much their own data and own problems is really powerful. And we use that technique often when we're trying to go work in a place that we don't know as well. [00:38:00] S2: I think the other example that we get to dive into is how you source the first captain that you mentioned. What sort of work did you do at the beginning?
00:38:00 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:38:00] S2: I think the other example that we get to dive into is how you source the first captain that you mentioned. What sort of work did you do at the beginning? [00:38:06] S0: Yeah, and that similar approach was, you know, this is just research work. And we spent, you know, we were in San Francisco. We isolated kind of the cities in the East Bay that we thought were interesting that would probably have a higher level of crime. So we kind of had a whole map of where we thought that the ideal city was, then we decomped who was working at these different police departments. Where were they on the stack, what had they done previously, and so we had profiles of all these different police captains, commanders, lieutenants. And started tailoring very custom, and purposeful messages for each of these folks. And your hit rate's still low, especially when you don't have a product or any, you're just kind of two guys. [00:38:52] S2: But I assume even when you get that first meeting, you already are coming at it with a lot more information. Whether that's building rapport, whether that's going in and, not wasting any time and getting right to the crux of it. Because you know, and then that shows preparation from their side as well.