A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:07:52 · Pablo Srugo
He tells me an example where he picks up a call at 2:00 AM and he closes the sale from two to 2:30 AM Again, it's insane, but it's insanely focused. Clearly the only thing he cared about was delivering incredible quality and consistency of service. And that's what he was doing. And that's obviously a huge reason why his brand took off. What are the concepts that came outta this episode that I thought was particularly interesting is what he calls a zero feedback loop. And so he tells me that first of all, to this day, he'll spend some time driving trucks himself and spend some time like in customer service, like in a bunch of different parts of the organization. He'll drop in for like a day just to see the day-to-day of that job and more importantly, to be that close to the end customer. And he says every single time he's done that and he has a thousand employees, he's still doing that. Every single time he does that, he comes back with pretty, pretty game changing ideas. In fact, it reminds me, so the, you know, Uber, today's a hundred billion dollar company, thousands and thousands and thousands of employees, 140 million monthly platform customers. And Dara, the CEO will still spend time every now and then as a driver because he wants to experience the day-to-day of what a driver experiences. And there's just no substitute for that. This is called small data. We're all obsessed about big data and kind of taking data from a bunch of different systems and analyzing in a bunch of different ways. And that's important. But you also need to go at the other end of the spectrum and think about small data, which is going in and getting as close as you can to your customers, to other people in your organization, to your employees and what they see day to day . Because as ACEO, you don't wanna lose touch with the day-to-day reality. And what you're gonna see coming outta that oftentimes can be game changing. And so what he created was this zero feedback loop because back then he wasn't just dropping in , he was doing it all. He was customer service, he was marketing , he was operations. You could argue it was too much. And even he said, you know, maybe I should have hired some kind of generalists earlier.
00:09:46 · Pablo Srugo
But there was upside to it because he saw every single thing in his business and he had a zero feedback loop between all of the , these different parts of the business. Instead of having a VP operations, a VP customer success, a VP marketing who each are going to see their kind of silos, and then you hope once a month you bring 'em together and you brainstorm and whatnot and share information that's obviously way slower. And in the early days it's not about perfection, it's about speed, it's about agility. So tightening that feedback loop and making sure that what one part of the organization sees is quickly available to other parts of the organization means that you're able to adjust and react much faster. And he observed that he had created that. I don't know that it was on purpose, but I think looking back, he realized that he had created that. And this is where again, being small has an advantage. Because if you get too big too fast and you hire too many people, you can get them to do more things, but you can't get them to react any faster. You're actually going to react slower because again, the feedback loops, the overhead increases, and the feedback loop actually lengthens, it loosens up as you add more people. So keeping the feedback loop tight in the early days is probably more important than just getting more things done. One of the final things I'll leave you with is that by the end of it, he, he said this to me, he said we could tell the story in a different way and make it seem like it was all planned and purpose-driven and sounds super Harvard , MBA McKinsey esque . But the reality is we just made the best decision possible in that moment in time. I think that's particularly important because it's very easy. Most founders are smart, they're high IQ types. And the problem with high IQ types is high IQ types are very good at creating narratives. And that's a skillset , but it's also a problem because the person who's most likely to believe that narrative is yourself. And the more that you share that narrative, the more you're actually convincing yourself that it's true. And so when you make these kind of long-term visionary plans and you start believing them, you effectively put blinders on and you stop noticing when your plan actually might be dead wrong. The more precise you are, the the higher the risk of being precisely wrong.
00:11:48 · Pablo Srugo
And so what he did instead, it was full organic. He was just, he started with services, He started delivering value to a customer, said that he understood well, and then that led him to a bigger market that led him to a bigger market. But he didn't plan that. He didn't say at the outset, you know, this is my smart , my marketer students, and then I'm gonna grow to this bigger market and then I'm gonna grow to this, you know, enterprise market. He just, he didn't have that planned out. It just happened sequentially and organically. And so my point isn't like, don't plan at all. Don't have a vision. It's more so that it's just not that important. What really matters is how much value you're actually delivering today. And really to think in steps like the reality is that next step does not get unlocked until you solve this step. And so all that really matters is crushing it today, right now, delivering value to your current customers and spreading word of mouth so that you even have an at bat at getting to the next place. If you listen to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor , but it has huge impact. But whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take It Out, go to a product market fit show and leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just gonna 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. So please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing like 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. But 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.