A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:26:15 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya, S2
[00:26:15] S0: That’s helpful. Then you went through Techstars, so you kind of went through the accelerator. Obviously, you took some money from them. Did you end up raising VC? Did you try to raise VC, or did just go more the the bootstrap route? [00:26:27] S1: Yeah. We did Techstars. We did a few other accelerators too that were equity free, one called Start-Up Chile, the other one called Fit 4 Start and then Luxembourg, and after Techstars – and it just general all the time. I mean, I’ve always like wanted to raise money, especially since being in the accelerator back in 2020 at 21212. There's that demo day, and then just I’ve always wanted that dream of the TechCrunch…. [00:26:47] S2: Hype. [00:26:47] S1: Right, the TechCrunch hype. I've yet to get a TechCrunch article, one day, anyway. No one would invest in us because they're like this is just a lifestyle business. It's services company. I got a lot of the same thing. It's not a SaaS, so it's not scalable. After demo day at Techstars in Germany, Berlin, we tried to raise half a million euros, and it just didn't work at all. Everyone said no, so we decided to focus on customers. We made more than half a million euros in revenue in the last three months of that year. That was just a moment for me to be like you know what? Let's not raise right now and just focus on customers and growth. We did since end up raising – last year, we raised from a firm from Houston, Texas called Golden Section, which has been great. They're much more capital efficient, not so much Silicon Valley VC style.
00:26:47 · Ilya, Pablo Srugo
[00:26:47] S1: Right, the TechCrunch hype. I've yet to get a TechCrunch article, one day, anyway. No one would invest in us because they're like this is just a lifestyle business. It's services company. I got a lot of the same thing. It's not a SaaS, so it's not scalable. After demo day at Techstars in Germany, Berlin, we tried to raise half a million euros, and it just didn't work at all. Everyone said no, so we decided to focus on customers. We made more than half a million euros in revenue in the last three months of that year. That was just a moment for me to be like you know what? Let's not raise right now and just focus on customers and growth. We did since end up raising – last year, we raised from a firm from Houston, Texas called Golden Section, which has been great. They're much more capital efficient, not so much Silicon Valley VC style. [00:27:42] S0: That's great. Let’s stop it there. Maybe we'll just end on the two questions that we always end on. The first one, yeah, I think you touched on this a little bit, but when did you feel like you had true product-market fit?
00:27:55 · Ilya
[00:27:55] S1: Yeah. I think it was when they did the recruiting fair for SkipTheDishes in Brazil. They came to us. I think it was either right before or right after they got bought by Just Eat. I think it was right after, and Just Eat told them scale as much as you can. They had this really big problem of Friday and Saturday nights having huge amounts of traffic. They didn't have that much traffic. You think a food delivery app, right? They don't have that much traffic on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Then Friday night comes, and everyone's ordering food. Saturday night, everyone's ordering food. Their traffic got so big that they ended up crashing. Daniel, one of the co-founders, was telling me that, if they crash, they have this huge – because they're a logistics company, and so everything gets out of work and out of order. It takes them forever to get back. Anyway, it's a big problem for them that they can't have, and at the same time, they were hiring basically every engineer in the prairies. They'd started poaching from their friends startups, and they just became this upward spiral in salaries. It was a big problem for them. We helped them hire, I think, five or six people in a couple of months and realized that we have – we had a good talent pool. They asked me, “Hey,” they’re like, “what can we do to hire as many engineers as, as fast as possible?” I gave them a list of all these things like doing the webinar and a couple other things that I was thinking we could do. Then, as a throwaway at the end, I said, “Well, why don't we fly to São Paulo, which is the biggest city in Brazil, and we can rent a conference room and do a hackathon over a weekend? Then you can interview a lot of developers in person that way and make a lot of hires.” They actually went for that, and we did a hiring fair in March 2018 where we had about 300 engineers come in over two days, work on a hackathon project, and then do speed interviews with their tech team as well as their HR team and end up getting 72 engineers hired from that event. Yeah, this is product--market fit right here.
00:29:45 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:29:45] S0: You’ve helped now 2,000 people, over 2,000 people. Really, you could say find – get a job, but it's much more than that, really. It's like change their lives. It sounds cliché but it’s actually – it's real. As somebody whose parents – for me, my parents moved from Argentina to Canada. Getting a job that enables you to make that transition really does change your life, so the impact that you are having is hard to overestimate. Maybe the last question then, which is, if you could go back to your younger self starting VanHack around 2014 with one piece of advice, what would it be? [00:30:25] S1: For me and it still applies today is I'm very much in my head and always wanting next step and thinking the – how's the future going to be? I think the biggest thing is just stay in the moment because you can only really control what you can. The future is never as good or as bad as you think it's going to be. I remember early days and still to this day thinking about what it’s going to be like in the future, how it’s going to – how are we going to solve this problem, etc.? I think just being grounded and stay in the moment is a big one. Yeah, I think that’s the biggest thing. There's a bunch of other stuff too. [00:31:01] S0: I'm sure. I mean, after 10 years, a lot of things to learn, man. Look, Ilya, this was great, tons of stories, tons of details, and even some outbound tactics that I think a lot of founders hopefully can steal and adapt in their own startups, so thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.
00:31:01 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:31:01] S0: I'm sure. I mean, after 10 years, a lot of things to learn, man. Look, Ilya, this was great, tons of stories, tons of details, and even some outbound tactics that I think a lot of founders hopefully can steal and adapt in their own startups, so thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. [00:31:20] S1: My pleasure. Yeah, if anyone wants to talk outbound strategy or anything like that, it's always fun for me to do that so happy to reach – if you reach out, happy to chat. Thanks, Pablo, for having me. [00:31:31] S0: If you've listened to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. It's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact. Whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to Product Market Fit Show, and leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me, to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover this show because the algorithms – whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews, and the reality is, if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. Please, take literally a minute. Even if you're just writing great podcast, or I love this podcast, whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously, the longer the better. The more detailed the better. Write anything, leave five stars, and you'll be helping me but, most importantly, many other founders just like you discover the show. Thank you.