A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:32:33 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Lockhead
[00:32:33] S1: What did you find out from these conversations with bloggers? What were some of the main pain points around what you were maybe offering? [00:32:41] S0: A couple of stuff, most of them use hyperlink, and one of the biggest pain point they had is they had to manually change those things by themself. Whenever there was a 404 error, one of the Airbnb or Vrbo was not available anymore, they had to go change manually all of those links. Sometime they had hundred if it was not thousands of link, so okay, we're going to use the Stay22 one. We'll be able to change those 404s. It's going to work great. Okay, cool, that's about 20 hours of work. I will do this in Q5. I'm like, nah, that's not going to work out. We're going to make company culture. Give us access to your platform. We'll make it for you. Screw you. There's no way I'll give you access to my bread and butter. [00:33:20] S1: These were affiliate links. They would write 10 beaches in Ontario. Here's where you should stay. Here's a link to an Airbnb, to a hotel, whatever, and they'd make some… [00:33:27] S0: Yeah, you got it or nicest treehouse and so on, and we're just making money out of this. [00:33:27] S1: Got it, okay.
00:33:27 · Andrew Lockhead
[00:33:27] S0: They were having most of that problem. After about a week of work, my co-founder is like, cool, we're asking for all of those stuff, but this is not what I would actually need. I'm like, cool, thank you so much. Like a Ford, just like they’re asking for horse and the fastest horse and you came with a car. I'm like, “What are you thinking?” He's like, “We're going to create a script that's going to replace all of their link for himself.” “Okay, keep going.” He’s like, “They're going to embed this on their webpage, and we will take control of everything on their webpage.” “Eh, I’m not sure they’re going to trust us, but keep going.” We will replace all of the link for themselves. They don't have no work to do. They don't have to worry anything at all. It will take five minutes of the creation, and we’ll be able to generate more revenues for them. They'll have all of their script in one single page. In one dashboard, they'll be able to have all of their providers in one place, and this is exactly where we pitched to the market the following morning. Most of them hated the idea. They're like we're still not giving you access to a platform. Some of them say you know what? I'll give it a shot. We'll give you access. Show me how it work. Those first two customer were the one that we used for the beta, and after about two weeks of working with them, they fall in love with the situation. They just love how easy it was, and from there, we were able to just expand and get more notoriety because they were the one that we built the case studies on. We're able to use their word of mouth, use them as reference, and from there, this is how we managed to get our second hockey stick growth coming out of the pandemic.
00:34:52 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Lockhead
[00:34:52] S1: Tell me a bit more about how that works. Now you would write a blog, 10 beaches in Ontario. You would plug your solution in. You would find the stays for them, or they would still tell you which ones and you would switch the link? [00:35:03] S0: We do a bit of both. Right now, if they're writing – if there's a previous blog about 10 beaches in Ontario, we're going to just look at all of their previous links, see which one is broken and which one redirect where, and we're going to take over those links for themself and show to whoever best provider we think will convert or bring more reviews. If they don't have any type of content already, they don't want to waste their time to look at the nicest one, we take care of it. We have hyperlink solution right now with ChatGPT and Gemini. We’ll be able to read the information from the page and just add hyperlink on top of it for whatever we found, so they have actually nothing to do else. They can finally focus on their work, which is writing down about where they like to travel, and we take care of the manipulation for themself. [00:35:46] S1: That makes a lot of sense. By the way, what happened with Airbnb? Were you not able to link out to Airbnb in these blogs? [00:35:52] S0: We can still link out. We're just not able to monetize it as much. [00:35:56] S1: Oh, okay. [00:35:56] S0: It's impossible for us to provide value as much for a provider. [00:35:59] S1: Does that mean you try and favor others like Vrbo and booking and for the blogger as well?
00:35:59 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Lockhead
[00:35:59] S1: Does that mean you try and favor others like Vrbo and booking and for the blogger as well? [00:36:04] S0: Exactly. Whoever is going to pay more, just an extent, we’ll be able to get more traffic because of this. It just a lot of supply and demand. [00:36:12] S1: You finally get this out with a few beta customers. We’re, I don't know, mid-2021. When do you feel like this really starts working and, again, this starts taking its own kind of momentum?
00:36:12 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Lockhead
[00:36:12] S1: You finally get this out with a few beta customers. We’re, I don't know, mid-2021. When do you feel like this really starts working and, again, this starts taking its own kind of momentum? [00:36:23] S0: Not so long. Probably about three months. At first, most of the people in the company were making fun of it. They called it Monopoly money. We used to get paid so much faster in the event industry. People were booking 30 days in advance. They were booking their travel at the same time, so it was super-fast. Now, with the travel community, people are booking months ahead, like 90, 120 days. We're getting paid 60 days after this, so it takes so much more time. Maybe we'll see money at one point, but maybe we'll never see it as well. Plus, cancellation rate is higher. It was a total different industry for us. The team was like, eh, maybe it's going to work, but probably just a waste of time. Let's keep working back on the event that we're slowly starting to pick back up, and in the end, we decided to stay on it, focus on exactly what we were good at. When we're talking with customer, it was solving a real pain for them. We had no churn. In a couple of months, we managed to get from 5 partners, to 10 partners, to 50 partners, to 100 of partners, and to this day, we almost have about 2,000 partners using those product. It’s really like a hockey stick growth. [00:37:25] S1: How quickly did you grow, let's say, from zero to a million? Do you remember what that path was like?
00:37:25 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Lockhead
[00:37:25] S1: How quickly did you grow, let's say, from zero to a million? Do you remember what that path was like? [00:37:31] S0: Good question. We moved back from, let's say, 2020 was zero back in the days. After this, we managed to do $5 million. Yeah, we lost money in 2021 again. In 2022, we did manage to drive about $5 million in sales. [00:37:44] S1: Wow. [00:37:44] S0: 2023, 15 so about 3X, and 2024, we're hoping to go about another 2X out of that so almost $30 million. [00:37:54] S1: Oh, that's incredible. Did you move back? What about the events? I'm thinking, the Justin Bieber concerts, I mean, they're whatever. Taylor Swift, they’re all back now. Are you serving that market again too? [00:38:05] S0: Still serving the market. They represent about 15% of revenues to these days. Just to give you a good understanding, if we had kept in our previous market, we were doing about 15% of revenues we're doing today. It’s still growing. Just a matter of tiny fraction versus a new market that we just expand with bloggers. [00:38:24] S1: Awesome, man. Now you're doing about $2 million in revenue a month after to 10K in revenue a month. [00:38:31] S0: Pretty good. No? [00:38:31] S1: It’s pretty incredible, yes. [00:38:32] S0: Feels much better. [00:38:33] S1: Much, much better. Listen, Andrew, we'll stop it there. I'll ask you the two questions that we always end on. The first one is and especially on this kind of V2 play with bloggers and media, when did you know that you had true product market fit?