A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:27:39 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:27:39] S1: August, September of 2024 is when we were like, wait, people are like asking like these specific questions and I highly recommend by the way, all your sales calls like record it. Have Fireflies in there. Like obviously, you know, Fireflies app. [00:27:52] S0: I don't know who's not doing that right now. I was crazy for you. [00:27:55] S1: It's a good repository of information, right? In isolated cases, it's hard to detect a pattern, right? We as an example, every week, I have a Grok bot that summarizes like our sales calls and it just spits out to me and the product team. These are things that customers are talking about. Existing customers and new customers, right? So one of the patterns that we saw there was like people kept asking, like, you know, how are you using AI under the hood? And another pattern they kept talking about was how they had actually deployed something like a bridge, right? Like a scribe, right? An AI scribe in their office and how patients loved it because the doctor was paying attention to them. They weren't taking notes. Doctors loved it because they didn't have to type and kind of look at their patients over their shoulder and talk to them. And the administration loved it because they didn't have to hire more human scribes. It was a lot cheaper. So they were like, we deployed that and we loved it and now we're just looking at other places we can deploy AI to bring costs down. So it's almost like a trend that you're seeing across. Yes. It's still happening today, by the way.
00:28:53 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:28:53] S0: Do you think that's growing still? Yes. You got to assume that every business owner, every business manager is getting pressure from themselves and from outside to guys, how are we leveraging that? What are we doing with it? Everyone's talking about ROI with AI. You know what I mean? And so they're just looking like, how can I bring AI into my business? And if you're somebody selling AI for a specific vertical, you get to basically ride that. And obviously, there's got to be real ROI behind it, but you're riding that tail when you're meeting customers where they are just by the fact that you're selling AI to health clinics. [00:29:23] S1: And one of the things that we've actually told our go-to-market team is ask the customer. Ask them, hey, where have you deployed AI so far and where have you seen ROI? And that actually starts the conversation off on such a positive note. Right? [00:29:37] S0: Yes, right. [00:29:37] S1: Hey, I did this and it works super well. And then you're kind of like, imagine if you do the same thing but in your back office for this workflow and like threading that needle of like, hey, like this is a value you can see from this when they've already seen value somewhere else is so much easier than starting from scratch. [00:29:53] S0: You got to find like the AI-pilled person in that org. Like just go find that person and they'll break through walls for you. [00:29:59] S1: Totally. And there are AI-pilled people even in super like, I'd say like, non-tech.
00:29:59 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:29:59] S1: Totally. And there are AI-pilled people even in super like, I'd say like, non-tech. [00:30:04] S0: Of course, because the consumer AI is so widespread. Yeah, it makes sense. And it's only getting like with Muse now, Instinct, like all these things, they're only just going to push the envelope more for people to see just what's possible, right? And then they start imagining for their business. [00:30:16] S1: Totally. And like, I wish I could go back to early 2024 and tell myself like, just lean, just lean fully into it. Like, and I think we'd have had a lot more success early on. Yeah. [00:30:25] S0: So how did things go? I mean, just getting through the story, like you launched this thing early, mid 2024. Like what was that original pull? Like how fast did kind of growth come?
00:30:25 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:30:25] S0: So how did things go? I mean, just getting through the story, like you launched this thing early, mid 2024. Like what was that original pull? Like how fast did kind of growth come? [00:30:33] S1: Yeah, we were lucky again that I think we have a little bit of a network where we found like our first customers. Word of mouth was super useful. People were using it and they were telling their friends. Their friends are like, hey, this is like interesting. If I remember correctly, there was a YC guide for healthcare companies. Like how to kind of like get started and like one of the infrastructure companies that were, that was recommended there was us. We were not a YC company, but I remember people telling us, oh, I found you on that whatever internal facing resource. So little things like that helped a lot. I think staying very close to your customers, building a relationship where they're actually referring you to other customers was a super useful way of growing back then. The two customers that I told you about and that sign even before we incorporated, they're still customers today. So nice. [00:31:18] S0: How quickly did you hit like a millionaire R? [00:31:20] S1: It took us about 12 months. Like it took us like an entire year to get to a millionaire R. We had a like early 2025 was when it kind of like truly took off. Like that first quarter of 2025 is where we saw like, hey, two experts. And they're like, wait, we're like a millionaire R. Yeah. [00:31:37] S0: What happened? Do you know?
00:31:37 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:31:37] S0: What happened? Do you know? [00:31:38] S1: Yeah. I think it was a little bit of like reputational gain. It was a big dermatology practice that signed with us. It was our biggest contract at the time. And then we kind of used that name to get a couple more dermatology practices. And we're like, oh, wait, we're this is like such a good vertical for us. Right. And that's another thing within health care. Like a lot of a lot of it is specialty based. So if we close like Mount Sinai as an example, and we went to the largest private equity backed dermatology practice, like that logo doesn't mean anything. Like Mount Sinai doesn't mean anything. They're like, oh, cool. That's like totally different. It's almost like you're it's almost like going and saying, I work in FinTech. Now I'm trying to get like a health care customer. Right. So it's very like specialty focus. And that was a big learning lesson for us. It was like, hey, every time we try to go after a new specialty, like get the first logo as quickly as possible, even if it's a small one, even if the deal terms aren't like super ideal, like that first customer like unlocks an entire like specialty for us. Yeah.
00:32:40 · Pablo Srugo
[00:32:40] S0: It's interesting to think about and I haven't figured it out, like, but what are the products where being super hyper verticalized, which is kind of what you're talking about? You're already in a vertical because you're selling to health clinics, but you're talking about hyper verticalized where it's like dermatology versus, you know, hospital versus this, versus that, where it matters and where it doesn't matter. Right. Like there's obviously many products that are very horizontal. Right. Like you look at the CRMs as an example, the old school, you know, Salesforce, HubSpot. And it's like, there's some verticalized CRMs like Surge Titan, whatever, but it's like, does it really matter? Do customers really care? It sounds like in your case, they do really care. easier than even if the product doesn't change that much, you know, if you'd had Mount Sin or whatever, as you said, but I don't know what the answer, I got, I've just, I always wonder to myself, like, because obviously we meet a lot of founders. It's like, you know, okay, yeah, you're verticalizing. Is that truly competitive edge that you're super verticalized or is actually customers don't really care? It's, you know, whatever, they'll buy whatever they need to buy.