A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:25:23 · Surojit Chatterjee
[00:25:23] S0: Yeah. Great question. I think for us, you know, first few customers was probably the biggest hurdle, which is exactly what you were saying. Like, you know, why do should I believe you? Is your product fully built? The challenge is unless I touch your data, I can't really show you a product. So we had to figure out steps. Okay. We'll show you the product using lots of proxy data say we create. It's not exactly the same that it shows. Then we'll do very contained POCs and pilots. Right? Then we'll touch maybe a few production systems and keep the blast radius small. And so step by step, there are a few things we did early on that created a lot of confidence in our potential customers. We went and got all our certifications compliance done within the first few months. Right? Of course, some things take more time, but like SOC two, type one, type two, you know, ISO 42,001, GDPR, HIPAA, anything and everything. If you go to trust.mr.ai, you can see that anytime. A lot of people will tell me, oh, why are you doing all these certifications? But that investment really paid off. The other thing we there are architectural decisions we took that really helped and that those are hard things to do. Look, if you are building a consumer application, you'll build it on your cloud. Right? It's multi tenant. It's like deployment, etcetera, is much easier. It's fully under your control. Right? Enterprises are different. So we made our product in such a way that it can work and run on any cloud, fully containerized. It's much harder to do. Not only that, it can run on customer's private cloud, fully air gapped. It's very, very hard to do. Air gap means it cannot access any external service while it's running. It has to be fully contained inside their cloud. Right? All uses native services and then it can run within a box kind of. Right? That's what they need to know or they need to see to be sure, oh, you are not gonna create a security issue for them. Those are very hard things to do. Architecturally, a lot of investment is needed and very hard to do later on in your life cycle as a company. Because once you have built the whole product, then you have to go back and ripping it out and rebuilding, very difficult. So those were things for more than a year, we were under stealth. We didn't even build a website. That's our history.