He had paying customers before he even incorporated—then hit $1M ARR in a year and raised a $19M Series A. | Rahul Shivkumar, Co-Founder of Assured

00:55:04 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul ShivkumarPlay from here

[00:55:04] S0: Perfect. Well, listen, let's stop it there. I'll ask the last question. Any piece of advice that you kind of feel like you give first time founders or even just early stage repeat founders a lot, like anybody that's kind of in that early stage finding product market fit, what's something that you'd want to kind of leave them with? [00:55:18] S1: Yeah. This one probably gets said a lot, but one of the things that I think we did really well was we did a lot of the jobs before we hired for them. Right? So as an example, like the BDR workflows, my co-founder and I were BDRs, right? Like we were doing some of that work ourselves. We understood what it meant to be good in that role. Maybe not great, but we understood what it meant to be good in that role before we hired for it. I think mistakes we've done on the hiring side have been hiring without understanding what that role is actually going to do. Right? Like a good example is, I mean, this may not apply super early stage, but later on you're hiring an executive. Investors will often tell you, go hire a VP. Right? But I think you really have to, and what is that VP going to do? And you almost have to do that job first before you can hire someone for it. And I think there's this general tendency to hire quickly and not do the unglamorous work, but I'd say like, do it so you can actually understand it really well. You can understand why you should have a human BDR and serve like an AI, right? And like double down on those decisions.

00:55:18 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo SrugoPlay from here

[00:55:18] S1: Yeah. This one probably gets said a lot, but one of the things that I think we did really well was we did a lot of the jobs before we hired for them. Right? So as an example, like the BDR workflows, my co-founder and I were BDRs, right? Like we were doing some of that work ourselves. We understood what it meant to be good in that role. Maybe not great, but we understood what it meant to be good in that role before we hired for it. I think mistakes we've done on the hiring side have been hiring without understanding what that role is actually going to do. Right? Like a good example is, I mean, this may not apply super early stage, but later on you're hiring an executive. Investors will often tell you, go hire a VP. Right? But I think you really have to, and what is that VP going to do? And you almost have to do that job first before you can hire someone for it. And I think there's this general tendency to hire quickly and not do the unglamorous work, but I'd say like, do it so you can actually understand it really well. You can understand why you should have a human BDR and serve like an AI, right? And like double down on those decisions. [00:56:17] S0: Perfect. Well, Rahul, thanks so much for spending time, man. You've been amazing. [00:56:20] S1: For sure. Great. Thanks for having me. Listen,

00:56:20 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo SrugoPlay from here

[00:56:20] S1: For sure. Great. Thanks for having me. Listen, [00:56:22] S0: when you go to like a restaurant, you eat a nice, you know, meal, maybe a fancy one, maybe not. Do you leave a tip? I assume you probably leave a tip. You probably leave a tip 100% of the time. Well, guess what? A review is just like a tip. And I know you haven't been leaving one. So just like the waiter that doesn't get a tip after hours of great service, I'm getting a little frustrated. So take your phone out and leave a review. It helps the show move up rankings. It helps us get better guests. It doesn't just help me. It helps way more founders. Thank you.