A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:26:01 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:26:01] S0: Absolutely. That that that was the biggest lie. Like, we had a ton of logos that we signed that could just never onboard. And because we didn't have a great process and we could never take them there. But if you have the onboarding right, it's a sticky customer. At the [00:26:12] S1: time when somebody buys is when they're most excited. And then if time rolls and later on you hire a CS person and they're like, oh, this account is dead for three months. Let's... You can't reengage. Like, your champions moved on to the next thing. People are like, oh, this tool doesn't work. I tried it once already. It's shit. You know, it's just like minds are made up. So you've kinda lost your window. [00:26:29] S0: It is really hard. Like, that is the moment. Like, when you sell, you have whoever is buying the product. If you don't do anything in the next two to three weeks, like set them up, get them excited. Anything after that is 10 x harder. Basically, you have to go through the whole sales cycle all over again and you're setting up yourself up for failure. [00:26:47] S1: When did you hit like a million ARR for example? [00:26:50] S0: Mid twenty twenty four. Okay. That makes sense.
00:26:50 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:26:50] S0: Mid twenty twenty four. Okay. That makes sense. [00:26:53] S1: Yeah. So that first key customer takes you a year to get to that million, and then '25 is when things really take off. Yeah. Okay. So let's let's jump into kind of the the tactical pieces that that... Know, this is where we really go deep and, you know, I think the the hope for founders listening is that we give them something they can they can copy. Right? One of the things you you talk a lot about is how the product evolved over time and how you... Obviously, iteration and, you know, listening to customers is key things. Every founder knows about it at a high level. But then it's like, you know it at a high level. How do you really implement it? You were talking about... You had a process early days, maybe still now, but early days about listening to your customer and acting on that feedback exceptionally fast so that the next demo was different than the previous demo based on the things you heard. Maybe tell me a little bit about that, and we can try and go deeper just kinda pull out as many of the learnings and and the outcomes of that.
00:27:38 · Tushar Mishra
[00:27:38] S0: Yeah. So what we would do is, number one, we were very clear about we want feedback from strangers, so people who don't know us. And we want feedback from strangers in the notion that they are looking to buy the software, not just for helping out a startup. Right? Because that's when you actually get real feedback. So we used to send out a bunch of these sort of emails and we had a system for that. It was by industry. We had two different kind of messaging. And when we would get a demo book, it could be a real sales call. You show them the product and we would actually even though we do not have that built out, it would be a Figma prototype. And now you could probably build a prototype on cloud or something. But back then it was a Figma prototype, like clickable prototype. And that's when we get real objections. We usually talk about pricing. Okay, here's how much it costs. This is the product. So that's when people would actually say, oh, but my system is this, can it have... So I wrote some of these things down. But one interesting one that came out of that was when you complete a task, so we had you click a picture to basically show an evidence of you've completed the task. Now this prospect asked us, what if somebody uploads a picture from... Like, they clicked yesterday saying they key in the restroom. We're like, okay. Now that is... That is true that that could happen. So that's when we decided to... Basically, in the next prototype, we did not have a option to upload anything. It was when you click the button, it automatically just opens up your camera. Then to further titrate, we said, okay, every picture that click... Gets clicked here is actually geo stamped and time stamped. So now, you know, it was clicked when it was supposed to happen. So these are the small iterations that you are doing while sort of you're doing this. And then within that, you also have to be very clear about what are the things you don't want to do. So in these calls, would also often hear one popular request was scheduling. Do you also have scheduling as a feature? And we knew that's a big space, but we knew that there's so many vendors doing scheduling. That decision is not made in HQ, but it's made at the location. So I'm selling to HQ, that feature is useless for me. They aren't going to pay for it.
00:29:42 · Tushar Mishra
And then most importantly, there's not a lot of differentiation in what I can do in scheduling today. So I can do scheduling, I'll be another scheduling vendor and it'll just confuse my go to market. So we started ignoring some of those things. So as you start to do those iterations, being very clear about your hypothesis, the problem that you're solving, and your ICP becomes important because that's how you stay disciplined. So that was one thing that came out of these conversations. We would make those changes, the Figma prototype. And in the next demo that we'll have, we show the new one. And we'll reach back to the old one saying that, hey, okay, we added these things. Do you wanna look at a new demo? Sometimes they would say yes. And some of those conversations would actually turn out to be an actual customer.
00:30:27 · Pablo Srugo
[00:30:27] S1: Yeah. The the thing or the dive deep, you you touched on it a little bit was, first of all, you only take feedback from true ICP customers that are actually thinking about paying your product. I think this is something that, especially first time founders get wrong too often is they'll ask just about anyone and everyone, hey. What do you think of this product? Like, what do what do you think is missing? Right? People that are tangential, this and that. And asking is not a problem, but taking the stuff too seriously is a problem because then you end up adding a lot of things from people that have no no skin in the game. So they'll just say things just to kinda say things, and and there's no reason why their opinion, frankly, is relevant at all. So I think that's one piece. But the other piece, maybe a little more nuanced, you talked about scheduling. How do you tease apart customers, even legitimate customers, ICP customers, will very often... Especially if prompted. Right? So it depends maybe that... That's part of it. But, like, especially if prompted, they'll they'll give you advice. They'll give you opinions, feature requests, whatever. How do you tell which ones to build and which ones not to? Like, what's the framework for for teasing those two apart?
00:31:25 · Tushar Mishra
[00:31:25] S0: That's a great and a very nuanced question. Right? So the way I think about that is there are two things that you are trying to balance every day. And this is why when you talk about product management, a great product manager is not the one who is just making a list of all customer requests and building that in the product. A great PM is somebody who has a vision, who understands the problem really well and who has a vision for what the outcome of that problem would look like. And now you need customers' help in figuring out the nuances, right? Which is I, on my own, cannot make a decision of what the org structure, that setting should look like on the product without really understanding how these organizations are structured. So that's the approach that we took. So while we were having these conversations giving out demos, we had a perspective on the industry, the ICP and the problems that we were looking to solve. So we knew that our ICP was the franchisor, which is the brand. We understood very clearly what are the things that they care about, what are the things that they care about that they can also pay for that they have the budget for, And what are some of these problems that are common across most franchisors? So that's one sort of vector. The second vector is what does the competitive set look like? Like what's out there in the market? How does that work? What are people using those things for? Why do they buy those things? How much do they pay for it? And understanding that really well also becomes important. So because you have these two, now you have a perspective and a view on things that you want to do and things that you don't want to do. So you want to learn from customers on how they actually work, what their workflow is, and then make an assumption about the solution, build out a prototype of solution, and then see their reactions to the solution and then iterate on it rather than asking for problems and creating solutions to those problems. Especially on the feedback, I think I really like the point that you mentioned, which is, yeah, there are lot of people who would give you feedback, which is great.