A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:04:14 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:04:14] S0: I think people have to love it enough to tell other people about it. So you have to have this viral word-of-mouth growth. It doesn't even have to be viral. It has to be word-of-mouth. And so every person who uses it is like, why isn't my friend using it? Or why am I not sending it to this other person who could also use it? And this doesn't happen with all domains. Right? For a lot of products, you typically don't have other people who need the product. So for Render, though, it was very clear because fundamentally, we allow application developers to host their applications online. And when you think about it, application developers love trying new tools. And when they find something they really like, they love to tell other people about it. And it might not be one to one. They might write a blog post about it. They might write on Hacker News about it. And so you have to create natural growth. You can't just rely on ads and feed people into the funnel. All of that is useful and necessary as well. But you don't really have product market fit until you're growing naturally. And that usually happens when your users are spreading the word. [00:05:28] S1: And what would you say, having been through it, lived through it, is the number one driver of word-of-mouth? Because I agree. If you get word-of-mouth, it's a huge tailwind for well, frankly, as long as you have it. It is a massive strategic competitive edge, whatever you wanna call it. But what do you think is the main driver of getting that?
00:05:47 · Anurag Goel
[00:05:47] S0: I think it's a combination of all the different things that make your product sufficiently differentiated and sufficiently valuable for the right audience. So it can't be everything to everyone. You really have to pick who you're building for. And then you have to make sure that it's different enough from what it already exists out there because, you know, you know, you might as well use the other product. What's special about yours? And then different in the right ways that creates value for your customers. So you can't expect different results if you're simply building what the other folks are building. So you have to think about what your difference is, whether it's developer experience in our case, or it's some combination of pricing and how all the systems how how your different services connect to each other. It's the set of features that you provide at that price point. A lot of those things have to be collectively different. So people are saying, okay, well, I've tried all these other things, but this is the thing that works best for me. And it's really important to identify who that customer is. Because until you do that, you can't actually build a differentiated product that that customer needs. So I would say a lot of startups end up making this mistake early on of trying to build everything for everyone. And I know that everyone talks about this mistake, but you have to make tough choices. And you had to start with a segment that you think you can build the best product for and the most differentiated product for.
00:07:24 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:07:24] S1: Based on many of the founders that I've interviewed on this show, I've got a a bit of a theory and frankly, from some of the founders that have told me themselves, like, that time to value itself is a big indicator, leading indicator of word-of-mouth. I'm curious for your product, is that true? Do you get value quickly? Like, where does a developer see the value? How do they see the value? [00:07:43] S0: Yeah. So we optimize for people getting to running a live application as quickly as possible. So all you have to do is connect your GitHub repo and render spins up a server for you with your URL, all the certificates taken care of, all the settings. You have to do basically nothing to get a simple server up and running other than connect your Git repo. And that to us is the fastest way in many ways to get a server up and running, which is why if you go to our website today, our hero image still says the fastest path to production. [00:08:19] S1: What was the before and after? Like, things have obviously changed a lot. But when you launched this in, like, 2019, 2020, what was the was it a current state unfair you gotta do all that manually? Or, like, what were people used to relative to what you offered?
00:08:19 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:08:19] S1: What was the before and after? Like, things have obviously changed a lot. But when you launched this in, like, 2019, 2020, what was the was it a current state unfair you gotta do all that manually? Or, like, what were people used to relative to what you offered? [00:08:31] S0: Oh, I think people were really used to having to configure a bunch of things. Yeah. I mean, it depends on what you were using, but, like, AWS was and kind of remains a nightmare if you wanna spin up a simple server. And then there were some tools that worked for the front end. I think Netlify and Vercel at the time were good for the front end. But there was nothing that lets you spin up this combination of a simple server really quickly along with the database and also a, let's say, a Redis instance or a background worker, all of that together, especially at a reasonable price point and with modern features, like things like private networking built in, things like HTTP three, HTTP two protocols built in. So there were some other tools, older things that had been around for a while, but they were kinda stuck in the past. And so modern developers really responded to what Render had to offer, and they still do. And that's still driving our word-of-mouth. I mean, we're signing up hundreds and hundreds of thousands of developers every month, and that's all word-of-mouth. We're not driving that through ads.
00:09:39 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:09:39] S1: And to be clear, even back then, that would mean you go from doing that manually, which is not just takes a long time, but it's just like annoying stuff that's preventing you from getting your app to production, which is what a developer well, they're doing it for themselves or somewhere else. Like, that's what they wanna do with the thing they've built. And now you can just you connect your repo. It's live presumably minutes. Like, is it that quick? Or was it that quick? [00:10:00] S0: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's less than a couple of minutes in a lot of cases. And I think the main thing that Render gives you, when I think about it, isn't just the ease of getting started. It's also the reliability, security, stability that you need as your application scales. So there's a bunch of platforms out there that'll make it easy to get started. And when you need features, when you're getting more users, when you're getting production scaling, then they are either not reliable or they don't have the features or something else happens and that forces you to migrate away to something like AWS, and then you have to build everything yourself. The render promise is that you don't have to. That we continue to build capabilities into our systems. So you can start out at paying us $7 a month, but then you can also become a company that is so big you're paying us millions and millions of dollars every year, which companies do now.
00:11:00 · Pablo Srugo
[00:11:00] S1: That makes sense. And, you know, I'm I'm driving at the time to value thing because I think what you're talking about now is what affects usage and retention and expansion and all that also critical thing. And you you mentioned earlier the difference between virality and and word-of-mouth. Right? Like, virality, social network, you need other people on that product to make it better for yourself. Word-of-mouth, you don't really get anything. You're not doing it for the, you know, the referral bonus points or whatever, generally speaking. You're just doing it because you you wanna be the first to know. You wanna tell your friends. You wanna help you. Whatever it is, but it it isn't like a clear transaction. So when do you do it? You do it when you're so wowed by the product so quickly, and you expect the person you refer or you tell about this product, they're gonna be wowed quickly. Like, if you know they're gonna have to onboard for three weeks or two weeks or even four hours, you're like, yeah. You may know, try this thing, but it's gonna be a bit of work. You know? Like, you you don't wanna be the guy that whereas if you know, hey, you're gonna do this thing, and right away, you're gonna see value, you might tell 10 people, guys, you have to try this thing. And that's, you know, that's just one thing the founder can always think about is whatever your longer term value is, how do you get them to if you really want word-of-mouth, it's not gonna come from the referral incentives almost never. I mean, Dropbox maybe, but rarely. Right? It's it's gonna come from getting somebody to that wow woman quick that they organically just want to do it. They wanna tell their friends because the the social cost is low.