A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:29:14 · Pablo Srugo
[00:29:14] S2: You know, another thing that you mentioned there is this idea that nobody wants to have ten AI vendors. In the old world, like five years ago in the SaaS world. People would talk about nobody wants to have ten, fifty SaaS apps, you'd rather have all in one. It sounded right, but it wasn't true, except for the enterprises that bought Microsoft. In most cases, you did have this world of best-of-breed apps. Everybody's in a silo. They're great at what they do and you end up with a large enterprise would have fifty of these apps. And that's just the way the world works. And so many different people try to come in and stitch them together. It's not a thing, again, unless you're Google or Microsoft. In this world of AI, that seems to have changed. You know, we had, for example, Serval on and Jake was telling me about how he's rebuilding ServiceNow. This entire behemoth of a twenty-year-old company, instead of building on top. In the past, you would say, okay, take ServiceNow, you're not going to move that. I'm going to build AI on top and yeah, it's a dependency, that's annoying, but what else am I going to do? And now you're like, I'm going to rebuild ServiceNow. In your case, something similar where like, you know, you started with this Slack bot and maybe, you could have verticalized and stayed, okay, well, we're just going to own operations, somebody will do finance later and yet what customers are demanding is, no, you need to be across. Maybe tell me more about what you're feeling on the field, what you're hearing from customers around this concept of one platform that can kind of do it all.
00:30:26 · Sean McCarthy
[00:30:26] S0: Yeah, I'd be happy to and I think there's probably a lot of synergy with the way that Jake looks at it as well. I think what we're hearing from our customers is if this thing is going to be really effective, it has to take the end-to-end of that entire workflow and so if I have to insert a human in the beginning to take the phone call and understand what the tracking ID is, and whatever the problem is, and then at the end. Finance or whatever department has to go do all of these additional actions, it's not that beneficial. You're actually selling or solving for a very small sliver of minutia that is not that impactful across the company, and that means that I'm going to have to go get either more humans or other vendors to service the rest of that. So what they've been adamant on is like, not that you necessarily have to, let's say it's a forty-step process. Not that you have to take the entire forty-step process across five business units right away. But the ability to maybe start from the beginning and build a classification system, and then kind of take that piece by piece is important. Because they are trying to establish relationships with AI vendors that they trust that are taking more and more as it relates to not only complex workflows, but maybe there's opportunities like the claims where only twenty percent are getting filed. They're looking to hand those off to a reliable person that is going to take the end-to-end and so for us, that has been something that we've really indexed on and making sure that is it possible for us to actually take that entire workflow. And if it's not, we'll tell the customer too and say, hey, there's actually a dependability here or there's something that might block this. But that's been super impactful and I think that that's really where it goes is all of these point solutions will become a commoditized layer here very quickly. And you have to think the simple ones are going to be able to be solved with things like cloud code, and we're seeing a lot of that already today. And so, I think that where a lot of our moat and where the customers look at us as a more of a one-stop shop is the fact that we can go deep, and we don't need API access as an example. And we can call and email these carriers, and gather documentation, and do a lot of the things that before they had to have humans do.
00:32:29 · Pablo Srugo
[00:32:29] S2: I think it's interesting to compare the before and after, like the SaaS app world and this world. As much as synchronization always mattered, if you think about the apps we would all know, right? You might've had Slack to message people on your team, Superhuman or Gmail to email people externally, Miro to whiteboard stuff and collaborate internally, Notion to write up docs and yeah, in a sense it'd be cool if they all talked to each other. That's kind of your Microsoft suite option. But it doesn't really matter that the data doesn't go across. It doesn't dramatically change the value prop and in many cases, why these apps are all big in their own right. You'd rather each of these tools be great at what they do than be mediocre at what they do but somehow synchronized. In the world of AI, and as I'm thinking about the value you're delivering. Which is you're taking something that touches many departments and moving and solving the entire problem across, the data sync is critical. If they have ten AI vendors, like they would have had ten SaaS apps, you absolutely are going to need to talk at each step of the way, right? As you do all these handoffs, which every single one, and they're going to have to all fully integrate together. Which then raises the obvious question, well, shouldn't it just be one product? Which is what you've built, but that's a big change. Data has been talked about for a long time. It's not until very recently, at least in my eyes, it's clear. Not just the value of data, but the value of having data that follows a workflow all the way through.
00:33:55 · Sean McCarthy
[00:33:55] S0: Yeah, one hundred percent and I think that that's been another big thing that we've tried to really mitigate against is that we also don't want to be reliant on other companies for this critical data. Where they're owning maybe these ontology layers, or they're owning critical information on the customer success side that we have to ask to make sure that we're getting routed at proper API or whatever it might be and so the more of that that we can pull in, it's a win-win, right? Obviously, we're not relying on somebody else and then the customer doesn't have to pay an additional vendor to perform that same task. And then additionally, what's happening right now is a lot of these enterprises are still testing the ROI from AI. And with that, they're not going to test with ten or fifteen companies, they're going to pick a handful of companies, you know, and test those out. And if you're successful, you can really dig your heels in, and that's what we've done and what we can hope to continue to do.
00:34:49 · Pablo Srugo, Sean McCarthy
[00:34:49] S2: So let's kind of go deep, maybe really tactical on. Because now you're mainly, you started with SMB, as you said, you moved up mid market, you got pulled to enterprise. Now you're at the place where you're winning in enterprise, you're beating well-known large enterprises at that game. Let's go deep on just kind of that enterprise playbook, right? From your vantage point, in terms of now you've done it for a while, you're starting to perfect that. What does it look like? Maybe start with, as an example, you've got an enterprise that you want to win. What happens? How do you make that happen over time? [00:35:20] S0: So we've done a number of things to kind of be scrappy and get in. I wish that I had twenty-five years in and could just pick up the phone, and call one of the C-suites and say, you're going to buy this for me for a million dollars. We've had to dogfight our way into the enterprise. [00:35:36] S2: Just to add more clarity here, these enterprises that you're selling to, is it just like 3PLs, but just bigger ones? Or what types of customers are we talking about?
00:35:44 · Sean McCarthy
[00:35:44] S0: No, we're talking like the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 now and so there was one thing maybe that's helpful is there was a really large switch from in the end of 2025. As well when we kind of made this enterprise grade solution, which was that we were selling primarily to supply chain companies and now we are selling to companies that operate a complex supply chain. So you can think some of the biggest grocers in the U.S., some of the biggest automobile manufacturers, Arma, and what those customers, they might sign kind of all over, but they all operate a hyper complex supply chain, right? So if you take Sprouts or Whole Foods, they're a grocery chain, but they have a very complex supply chain and so that is really who we are selling to now and have found a lot of market pull. And I think we're also not vying to go sell to the same brokerages and some of the other folks that our competitors are, and that's been beneficial for us. So what we'll first do is obviously see if we know anybody. Hands down for us, our ICP has been the senior vice president of operations. I would say ninety percent of the time, so we'll go find that person on LinkedIn. We have sent champagne, we have sent donuts and bagels to warehouses. We will look and see, do we have anybody in common? I'll have as many employees as I can to see, and here's who we're looking to target. Do you know anybody? You know, if we have the cousin's friend's brother's uncle, we'll reach out and say, hey, would you mind saying some words and maybe getting a meeting set up? And so we try to back channel first as much as we possibly can. And when we are approaching these enterprises, we also learned the efficiency playbook and what that means is, going to these customers as an AI company and saying, hey, we're going to make you more efficient. What are your problems? Works almost never because they have so many problems and they usually don't know where to begin. What we've changed to and where we've had a lot of pull is in the grocery example that I gave you, Going with that exact use case to say, we know that you have trucks showing up that have temperature breaches on them, this is exactly what we built, this is what you can expect in the first ninety days, and here's the average that our current customers are saving by doing this.