A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:27:53 · Surojit Chatterjee, Pablo Srugo
Because we wanted to build the product the right way and spend a lot of time doing all of this infrastructure. We built a whole governance layer where any PII, PHI gets auto redacted. Every agentic execution so our AI employees has teams of agents. Sometimes they're like forty, fifty, a 100 agents. Every execution is completely traceable. They're completely a lineage of every decision, right? Explanation of why some agent made a decision and then ability to take feedback and automatically kind of change their behavior. [00:28:26] S1: And how did you like this is kind of all the product side stuff that you do just to be enterprise grade, which I think is obviously critical, it's a necessary condition. But then tell me about the first Was it just relationship based where you maybe knew somebody at some enterprise and they just trusted in you? You kind of took that credibility and said, okay, I'm gonna leverage the time usefully to try and build something here and then they opened the door, like is that how you kind of got in? [00:28:48] S0: For us it was, I'll say a combination of some came through relationship, but many very serendipitously actually came through sometimes even a cold email, I kid you not, I have gotten cold email back, like reach out, hey, I see your vision, it's interesting, can you come and talk to us and show us what you got? One of our largest partners today came through a cold email. [00:29:12] S1: Let's dive into that. Like, were in stealth for a long time. What did you do for them to see what you were doing and and give you that cold email inbound?
00:29:12 · Pablo Srugo, Surojit Chatterjee
[00:29:12] S1: Let's dive into that. Like, were in stealth for a long time. What did you do for them to see what you were doing and and give you that cold email inbound? [00:29:19] S0: Yeah. So look, we didn't spend a ton in marketing at all. Spent very little. I think what has been instrumental for us is projecting our vision out effectively. We do a lot of work with influencers, analysts. So early on, Gartner and HFS Research and Everest Group. We're in the leaders bracket in Everest Group's H and T products for last three years, right, the entire life of our company. All those things help because people will see, oh, this is a credible player. We published a bunch of articles in say, Harvard Business Review, HBR, with some of our, advisors or other thought leaders in the industry and so on. I think creating that credibility is super important. That okay, you you are an enterprise player, you have built technology that is ahead of others. You won't steal my data. You understand what it is to play in the enterprise. So credibility and trust and reflecting that trust in in the product itself. So they can see, our customers can see everything I'm talking about manifest in the product really well.
00:29:19 · Surojit Chatterjee, Pablo Srugo
[00:29:19] S0: Yeah. So look, we didn't spend a ton in marketing at all. Spent very little. I think what has been instrumental for us is projecting our vision out effectively. We do a lot of work with influencers, analysts. So early on, Gartner and HFS Research and Everest Group. We're in the leaders bracket in Everest Group's H and T products for last three years, right, the entire life of our company. All those things help because people will see, oh, this is a credible player. We published a bunch of articles in say, Harvard Business Review, HBR, with some of our, advisors or other thought leaders in the industry and so on. I think creating that credibility is super important. That okay, you you are an enterprise player, you have built technology that is ahead of others. You won't steal my data. You understand what it is to play in the enterprise. So credibility and trust and reflecting that trust in in the product itself. So they can see, our customers can see everything I'm talking about manifest in the product really well. [00:30:28] S1: And then to explore a different piece, like, let's go on tactics. When you think about closing enterprise customers, what's one thing that you've done that has worked particularly well? Whether it's an outbound tactic or inbound? But just, you know, imagine I'm a I'm an early stage founder, I'm selling to enterprise, and I'm trying to get something here that I can copy and start implementing to just get more conversations going. What what would be like a top one that you've done?