A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:39:26 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:26] S1: Yeah. I have to imagine, especially for product led growth type product, like like you're I mean, the product is your growth engine. It's always important. I mean, great product's always important. But, frankly, depending on your your sales motion, how you go to market, who is the user, the buyer, like all these different things, it can matter more or less. I mean, but when your product when you're doing product like growth, you're not even spending on marketing, your product is a growth engine. It's the the the only thing that matters. And I just think about when I used to have those product roadmap type discussions internally and even when I look at the companies I work with, the CEO, the salesperson, they've got this edge. And the salesperson is often not even in those meetings. So it's like but the CEO in the early, early days is almost the only bridge, you know, and you're hearing the engineers and what they wanna do and the designers, what they wanna do and and the marketers maybe, and you're the only person that can kind of bring that voice of customer. But you can imagine a world where you're having that discussion and everybody at the table has a firsthand opinion, right, of reality, how much better those discussions are and and, you know, the outcome of that should really show up in the product. Not just what features build, how you build them, everything about
00:40:31 · Anurag Goel
[00:40:31] S0: it. Absolutely. Yeah. And it did. And even after we hired support engineers, we we don't have, like, level one support where folks are not technical. We only hired people who were able to understand coding and were able to, like, actually even code. But they weren't coding all the time. They were mostly answering technical support questions and helping customers with sometimes maybe even with their applications. And so we made sure that the people who were answering customer support requests had enough technical grounding to then give the right kind of feedback to the product team, to the engineers. And so they would bring these things back to the team with with a filtered lens. And they would actually have really good suggestions on how to fix a problem even because they had seen, you know, customers go through different versions of the problem. And so they they could actually sometimes come suggest a solution that would serve multiple people at the same time. So again, it came down to, like, who you were hiring and what kind of profile you were hiring for. And I think we definitely made the right decision to hire support engineers as opposed to first line support.
00:41:45 · Pablo Srugo
[00:41:45] S1: And then maybe the last question, because you're a pre Gen AI company that is still, you know, doing really well, of post Gen AI. Like, you know, there's three buckets. Like, there's the ones that are clearly I've got a company portfolio company that they were always using AI, then when AI got better, they just exploded. Like, just went it took them up. It was a crazy way for them. There's other, like, classic b to b SaaS companies, like, you know, the SaaSpocalypse that are clearly suffering, and there's some that have no impact. Like, the way AI just didn't really change fundamentally their business. What camp would you say you're in, and and then how have you kind of adapted to this to this AI world? Like, if if at all, like, if it's even been a big change for you?
00:42:19 · Anurag Goel
[00:42:19] S0: Oh, yeah. It's been massive for us. We're definitely in the first camp. And that's because fundamentally, the number of applications being created has ballooned, exploded. And people are able to build things now that they always wanted to build but didn't have the time for, the resources for. And I'm not even talking about people who don't know coding. I'm talking about people who know coding, who had all these bad projects, and who wanted to build these things, and now they're able to. And it's they're able to do many of them. And the same thing is happening within companies, where companies wanted to build these tools, and now they're able to. So so much more software is being created, and a lot of it needs to be hosted in a way that is largely self serve. Because the DevOps teams within these companies either don't exist because these are earlier stage companies, or they're so stretched by all the engineers writing more software, all the engineers creating more pull requests, and the CI systems are no longer working. And there's only so many new applications that as a DevOps team, you are equipped to put in production. Because in the old days, you barely put, like, one application in production over a period of a quarter, if that. Right? And now you're being asked to do everything. And so what we're seeing is more and more people, more and more companies are turning towards platforms, self serve platforms like Render instead of their DevOps teams and saying, look, we just want all our builders to have access to self serve solutions that are also enterprise friendly, that are also giving us a level of control, a level of observability, compliance, security. And then there's just a bunch of builders who love what we do and who rely on us to keep their applications and side projects, whatever it is, online. And so we've seen as of the end of twenty twenty four, we just started seeing a lot of traction and many, many, many more applications being deployed to render. And then that continued through 2025. And then we saw a huge spike, bigger than anything we'd seen before, at the beginning of this year because a lot of people found that, you know, the latest version of Cloud Code and Codex
00:44:33 · Pablo Srugo
[00:44:33] S1: Oh, yeah. When you when you can walk your dog and talk to Cloud Code and have it build stuff for you, it's you're gonna build a lot more stuff.
00:44:39 · Anurag Goel
[00:44:39] S0: Yeah. And so our revenue has just changed. It's like even at a much higher scale of revenue, we're growing much faster than we did before, which is great. And then one other thing has changed, which is the kind of applications that people are building is changing. And so they need new primitives. And they need things like render workflows, which is a way for you to run agents that need to go through a series of steps. And you need to make sure that each step can be retried, that you have concurrency limits, and then you can sort of observe each step, and you can have a parent task and a bunch of child tasks. And so we built that product. It's going to be in GA by the time this goes live. And then the next thing we're building is sandboxes Because, again, you have a lot of code that is machine generated, and you want to run it in a contained isolated environment, and you wanna do that at scale. And guess what we've been doing? We've been running untrusted code. Because from our perspective, code has always been untrusted because we don't know what the customer wrote. And so we've been doing this for ages at a scale that is higher than any sandbox providers right now. And so we think that will be our sandbox products are gonna be really powerful and scalable for what the industry needs right now. But more generally, we are expanding Render to serve the needs of people who are building AI apps and agents because, again, it goes back to serving the needs of application developers. And if they need us to build more primitives for helping them build these agents and deploy them faster, then that's what we're focused on. That is actually what we're doing right now.