A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:16:12 · Pablo Srugo, Surojit Chatterjee
[00:16:12] S1: You're such a selfish person. I actually can't believe how selfish you are because, like, you've been listening to the show. You listened to this episode. You loved it. You've listened to a bunch of other episodes, and you haven't told anyone about it. You haven't told any of the many founder friends you have about it, think about how many founders have helped you out when you're building your startup. So don't be selfish. Tell your friends about this episode, tell them about the show, and help me help them. With these big ideas, on the one hand, they're obvious in the sense that if you can say to someone, hey. If I could create AI employee that costs 10% of what a normal employee does and works twenty four seven, would you buy it? Yes. Of course, I would. Today, people are like, maybe you could do that. You were starting, it was more far fetched. And so how do you go from that huge idea to something tangible? When you start prototyping, what is the first version that you build? What's the first thing you wanna test out? [00:17:01] S0: Yeah. Great question. See, the technology has moved and improved a lot in the last couple of years. But at that time, a lot of things did would not work. So you have to have a belief in where this technology will be in a few years and start building with that future. It's like, you know, early days when e commerce got built. People would have a lot of doubts. I can only say they'd probably buy some books. Will I ever buy, you know, dress online? [00:17:29] S1: Let alone a mattress. Yeah. Things have changed.
00:17:32 · Surojit Chatterjee
[00:17:32] S0: Yeah. I mean, look, for me, I'll give you a little bit of context. I've always worked on things that are in the frontier. So when I was working on mobile, now it is very obvious. Right? I mean, my kids, they have not seen a world before mobile. So mobile phones, so they're like, you know, how did it look like? But when I was starting, like 2007, mobile advertising at Google, then I remember, like, first few years was was struggle to convince even internally, this will be big. Forget externally. I had a discussion, I remember early days, this was still like 2010 or something with like, you know, CMO of Macy's advertising customers. I'm like, you know, mobile advertising will change the world. You need to make sure you have a mobile app and or a mobile site that actually works and people can transact. And he was like, yeah, I see it. But I don't think anybody will buy a dress on a mobile phone. They may just browse, maybe see the picture, but they'll come to the store. So I like your enthusiasm, Suri. I still remember it. He's because I was kind of much junior. I was given 10 in the end of a, like a two hour meeting. The last guy comes in or he's kind of mobile guy, but it's still early. And he's like, I like your enthusiasm, but I don't think it will be true. Crazy. That's crazy. Right? I mean, now you're like, do I ever go to a store unless I really want to, you know, give some time or something. Right? We felt I felt the same way about this technology when we are starting. Right? It was not working, very broken, a lot of things will go wrong. But the trends were there. We started building actually early on some customer support agents. And there's a lot of problems, lot of challenges, right, to make it work, particularly in taking actions. See, answering questions was still possible, but taking actions was super hard. Integrations with with applications, making kind of creating dynamic plans. And the biggest thing is humans trusting AI also. That, oh, I'll open up my system of record for you to kind of come and do some surgery identically. That was a big leap of faith. But I think today, are all at that future already. We are seeing that it's very much possible, and we are seeing attraction of a different kind.
00:19:54 · Pablo Srugo
[00:19:54] S1: So then what was the the first thing that you built to show that this could be possible, to take a step in the right direction?
00:20:01 · Surojit Chatterjee
[00:20:01] S0: Yeah. Actually, I mean, you know, we always talk about things that work. I also talk about things that didn't work. Thing we built, it didn't work at well. Our initial idea was like, we wanted to build a horizontal platform, but we were very clear. We want to showcase that this platform works by building actual applications, actual kind of solving some problem. Right? Like what we are doing today with HR or finance. So we were initially trying we tried for a couple of months like analytics area. You know, the spreadsheet jungle every every enterprise has today. Can you actually declutter it? At that time, it was very difficult. It it was just I mean, today, it's much better in getting there. And we thought, okay, this is not probably the right application to build today. We have the platform. We're building the platform, but we should go and build some of the other applications first. I think the two applications where we saw a lot of good resonance, one was HR, which again, we didn't know or I mean, we saw it in other companies. HR is very fragmented. Right? There are like think of just onboarding an employee. You have to touch like twenty, thirty systems to onboard an employee, giving access to different areas, you know, l and d, you know, compliance training, all kinds of stuff that you have to do for that employee. It's a in a large company, it's nightmare. Look at every stage of an employee's journey from like, you know, recruiting, sourcing, recruiting, onboarding, day to day just employee experience, all the way to maybe like offboarding or any change, like the change of role, change of location, right, all the way to like, you know, offboarding. And even post post offboarding, employees have questions, oh, I wanna get my tax form from last year. Right? Can you give me employee verification letter that I worked for you for last ten years? I mean, every employer has to fill those requests as well. We felt this is that there's just so many broken windows, right, in this area. Agents are our AI employees at the right solution. And we started seeing a lot of traction. We are seeing same thing for say something like finance where similar broken windows, lots of different things you are touching. The other big thing here is every enterprise is unique. And this is a kind of a realization, right, which is, look, I'll give you an analogy.
00:22:26 · Surojit Chatterjee
Back in the day, maybe you and I may not remember, if people needed to get a trouser or a shirt, right, you'll go to a teller. You couldn't go and buy a shirt. You'll go to a teller, they'll take the measurement, they'll build actually create a good shirt for you because it's up to your measurement and fit. It'll take a long time and take cost a lot of money. The ready made shirts, of course, you know, it doesn't quite fit exactly because every one of our bodies are unique and different, but it's cheaper and faster. So you're like, okay, we'll ignore. And if we have the time, maybe we'll take it to a teller and and tweak it or whatever. Right? I think ready made software today, SaaS software is like that. Software, same thing happened back in seventies, eighties. You will get a teller made software, which will cause cost tens of millions of dollars. You'll probably call IBM or somebody to look at your enterprise and say, okay, build an HR system custom for me. It's very expensive. Takes long time. And, of course, you know, you can get any SaaS app today quickly, you know, up and running, but it doesn't quite fit your business or your enterprise. So then you call hordes of consultants, internal people, IT, etcetera, to do patchwork around it or train people on how to use it in the way you want it or want to use it. I think we are going to get into the era now where the Telemade trousers can be cheaper and faster than ready made. So Telemade software, right, can be is cheaper and faster to deploy, actually. And that's a big step forward. I think the entire enterprise stack is going to get disrupted. That's what we are excited about. Back in the day, two years back, two and a half years back, I wrote a blog that SaaS will be dead. Before Satya or anybody else, actually said that, you can go and check. We are at that place today. The entire enterprise software stack I I mean, by dead, I mean, they need to evolve. Some of them will be dead and some of them will will evolve just like any previous era of technology. But this also presents opportunity to to rethink how enterprise stack look like and also how enterprise organization structure should look like.
00:24:40 · Pablo Srugo
[00:24:40] S1: One of the key things, like, you're working with very large enterprise and, you know, once you have a product that works and you have case studies, there's a motion you can get into for enterprise sales, actually we'll go deep and talk about. But before you can even get there, you have to have some enterprises that give you the time of day for you to experiment with them in a way that's just The bar is much higher than when you're doing consumer SMB because you can just run ads, get some customers, they use the product, they churn out, you move on, you just kinda keep doing that. With enterprises, you obviously can't do that. Tell me about how you got the first one, two or three customers to say, you know what, yeah, here's access to something and let's see if you can build something useful and deliver ROI, before you had a real full fledged product.