A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:21:30 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:21:30] S1: Yeah. It's gone pretty big. [00:21:32] S0: Exactly. So so again, it you really have to find founder market fit. I think that's crucially important if you're really in it for the long run. Because if you're successful, you're going to be in it for the long run. So you better like what you're doing. Otherwise, you're kinda stuck. So I did all these things. I kept getting drawn to infrastructure, and I kept getting drawn to productivity and especially developer productivity. And that, to me, was a realization of, like, okay. Well, I keep coming back to this. I guess I need to solve this problem of application developers putting their apps online. And I realized it was a pretty big task. It was very ambitious over the long term. I was going up against the hyperscalers. I was going to go up in a very crowded market. But it was a very large market, and it wasn't serving application developers well. So there are very large markets where some people are served really well, but there's a whole underserved segment in that market that is being served somehow suboptimally. What was happening and what still happens a lot with the hyperscalers is in every company, you end up building some sort of DevOps team that manages the nitty gritties of the hyperscalers. But all they do is give you a sort of poorer approximation of render so the application engineers don't have to worry about infrastructure.
00:22:57 · Pablo Srugo
[00:22:57] S1: I'm really worried because, listen, like, you've been listening for, like, what, ten, twenty, thirty minutes now. Clearly, you like it. And the thing is, the next episode is way better, and you're gonna miss it. You're gonna miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. I have a big question on this because with some of these problems, like, however you get to them, maybe not obvious. But then a problem like this, like, I'm just trying to pull my way back to 2019. Right? And you come to me and you say, I've got this idea and I wanna make application developers go to production with one click. It's one of these ideas where you hear it, you're like, well, yeah, of course. You could do that, no brainer. My natural question is, you mentioned the hyperscalers, Don't they want people to spin up applications as fast as possible, start using compute, maybe some of those grow and they use more compute? Like, why wouldn't they have invested in in making this process as smooth as possible?
00:23:48 · Anurag Goel
[00:23:48] S0: So at the time, I had some theories, and I think I know this space better now. And it all comes down to organizational DNA and organizational incentives and where the money is coming from for these people. And for AWS and GCP and Azure, all the money is in massive enterprise contracts with companies that have massive DevOps teams. So guess who they're building for? They're building for DevOps engineers. And they've tried they've tried to create products for application developers, but they probably don't put the right people on it. They probably put the right people on it, but these people don't get the resources that they need. It's not an organizational imperative. And they always have these low level products. Right? And so even when they build a higher level products, these products don't solve all the problems because you can always go tell the user, well, if it doesn't do this, then just use Kubernetes because you can always use Kubernetes. And for Render, that was never an option. We said, look, if you have to use Kubernetes for something, that's a failure. That's a thing that Render should fix. Even though we can offer managed Kubernetes, the best managed Kubernetes in the world, to anyone given everything that we've done over the last several years, we don't want to. We want to give people the power and the scalability and the flexibility of what they would get from something like Kubernetes, but at the application layer. So they don't have to think about what's so all the configuration that's needed because that's not part of what they're trying to do. They just wanna get their applications online. And so it's very cultural is the short answer. And it's not like they haven't tried, but I think for them, the
00:25:38 · Pablo Srugo
[00:25:38] S1: market isn't large enough. It's a great answer and I think a very true answer. And for some reason, an answer that oftentimes unless it comes from, like, you know, a proven exited founder, then then it's whatever. But a lot of times, you know, these kind of why wouldn't Google do it? Why wouldn't ChadGPT do it these days? Why won't OpenAI do it? Anthropic do it? Whatever. Like and the answer is just because, like, they could. They a 100% could. You know? A lot of times, oh, it's gonna take them long. They could obviously do it. They just won't because, like, you can only have so many high priority things that get the resources, that get the mindshare. You only have so many even these big companies, like, true leaders that can really divert massive resources, there's only so many, and they they have to go a certain way. And so if you're taking them on on an area that is not the top importance, you're not really taking on AWS. You're taking on, like, this small team with a limited budget with the fiftieth best PM on it at AWS. And that is that's actually doable.
00:26:35 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:26:35] S0: Absolutely. So So we're not trying to build out massive data centers and spend $80,000,000,000 on buying more GPUs and megawatts of electricity. That's not who we are. We can't do that. That's what AWS is really good at. And that's where they're competing with Google and Microsoft and all the others right now. And so our goal then is to continue to focus on application developers, and like I said earlier, increasingly agents that developers are using, and just focus on helping them run their applications in production with ease, with control, flexibility, scalability, and reliability. [00:27:16] S1: So now we've got kind of the idea of how that came about. Walk me through launching the product, you know, the first users, and then I don't know if you did a beta or how you did it, but that whole structure of from, you know, idea to MVP to, like, really launching, what was that like? [00:27:29] S0: Yeah. Well, first, you have to hire people. So I'm an engineer. I built a lot of the early stuff myself and continue to build the platform even after we had a team. Did you raise once you [00:27:39] S1: had the idea, or did you raise later? How how did you structure
00:27:39 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:27:39] S1: had the idea, or did you raise later? How how did you structure [00:27:41] S0: structure that that site? Side? No. No. I I raised raised after after I I had had a working version, and then I went and hired our first engineer who's still at the company. And then we built out a team of total four people, and we said, okay. This is it. This is a team that we're going to use to launch the product. So we had a designer and three engineers, and that was it, including me. And we worked on the product for well over a year, almost, I guess, two years, got it to a point where it had a lot of the requisite features that you would expect from something like this. I was still pretty underfeatured at the time, but that's when we got to TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2019. And that was when we sort of really launched it to the world. And we got a lot of sign ups, a lot of attention. A lot of it fell away because we didn't have a bunch of features, and that's fine. [00:28:37] S1: And how did you do that? Like, was it besides tech you went to TechCrunches route, you know, you you end up winning that, that gets you PR. Did you do a bunch of other things as well, or was that really the only kind of launch move? [00:28:47] S0: I think that was the biggest launch move you can have as a startup. And so then we relied on just word-of-mouth. And in the very beginning, actually, we just enrolled our friends. I went and spoke to everyone I could, and I was like, you need to move your site to this. And often, I just did it for them. That's how you do it at the beginning. Right?