A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:30:18 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[00:30:18] S1: And what did this, I'm curious, like the podcast, like what did that lead to from a business perspective? [00:30:22] S0: Well, so we put it out there. And one of the things that we had hoped would come of it is other similarly curious folks would listen to this and be like, oh my God, these are my people and would apply. So back to like that first milestone on that Jeff Rothschild interview, there was an engineer at Meta who listened to that and reached out like less than a week later. And that person would go on to become foundational to building a critical aspect of the system. I mean, it was front and center designing our switch, which is a huge effort. And, you know, we had more folks that were coming in. We had, eventually, we wouldn't know it at the time, but prospective customers that started listening to this thing. And we had these cheesy little Oxide commercials that we would run. And we just recorded like two of them and we would loop them. And people would send in like, hey, can I send you all a new commercial so I can stop listening to that one? Because again, this is 2020. We haven't built anything yet. [00:31:22] S1: Well, I'm curious on that note, like you're doing this podcast, which is content related to Oxide, but it's not building in public in the sense of you talking about, you know, these days you have people sharing like MRR charts and all these crazy things on LinkedIn. What else were you doing around that? Like sharing with the world what you were building and why?
00:31:39 · Steve Tuck
[00:31:39] S0: So that we ripped off while we were fundraising. We like kind of like just like ran through all those episodes while we were fundraising. Then we raised and now we had to go build. And in the build process, we took a break and then we came back and launched a podcast called Oxide and Friends. And Oxide and Friends now was very central to what we were building. And so on the hardware side, you have these steps in the evolution of a new hardware platform that no one talks about. Your first board bring up is usually a tire fire. It is not an event to be celebrated. And we basically had like the step-by-step as we are seeing if this thing is going to light on fire and we're dead or if this thing's going to work. And like going through what it means to do bring up an EBT and then, you know, getting to DBT. And furthermore, then once you've got a product that you think is going to get to PBT and production validation test and get to commercialization, you have to go through compliance testing. The FCC requires that you go through this chamber test to ensure your emissions are within the allowable amounts. This is extremely grimy because inevitably people are just skirting by and they're doing like all sorts of things, sanding down paint, you know, all these things to then go back into the chamber to test. No one talks about this. Everyone's like, this is not going to give customers comfort. We talked about all of it. We talked about the development of the storage service, the development of hardware, the highs, the lows. And, you know, the thing that came out of it, came out of that transparency, was our future customers that we wouldn't know it at the time were listening along. And they began to get real trust behind the team and the thought process and the rigor and the transparency. And by the time we were bringing a product to market, they already felt like they were on the team. Like they already knew us. They'd kind of been through the journey, the highs, the lows. They were just as excited as we were that we were now shipping our first rack.
00:33:40 · Pablo Srugo, Steve Tuck
[00:33:40] S1: Did you feel it? I'm curious in the conversations, like obviously before selling something, you probably met them at events, talked to them, whether Zoom calls, whatever it is that you did, but you kind of had these engagements with them. Was this something that many of them would bring up? Like, oh yeah, I listened to the episode, but whatever, right? And just kind of deepened that conversation. [00:33:56] S0: Well, even better, it wasn't a podcast. It was a show. So we started on Twitter Spaces and that then, you know, like had a good run there. And then as that dematerialized, we moved over to Discord, but they would show up. We'd have in the audience folks that were chiming in in chat and occasionally listeners would join the stage for a particular topic. [00:34:19] S1: So it's like the more, it's like a better version of a webinar almost at that point. Yeah. Because you're not like demoing a completed product, clearly salesy. It's kind of just like behind the scenes, but you can join and ask questions and whatever. [00:34:31] S0: That's right. And it allowed others to see other people's questions. And it was definitely a catalyst. We would then package it up and ship it as a podcast, but you'd have folks showing up to the show, excited about what Oxide was building and just kind of growing group of support, some of which would never be customers because they were an individual, but like they'd be the first ones to jump in and hacker news comments when we'd be the first story on hacker news, you know, at a particular milestone.
00:34:31 · Steve Tuck, Pablo Srugo
[00:34:31] S0: That's right. And it allowed others to see other people's questions. And it was definitely a catalyst. We would then package it up and ship it as a podcast, but you'd have folks showing up to the show, excited about what Oxide was building and just kind of growing group of support, some of which would never be customers because they were an individual, but like they'd be the first ones to jump in and hacker news comments when we'd be the first story on hacker news, you know, at a particular milestone. [00:35:00] S1: You're creating fans. I mean, the simplest way to put it. [00:35:03] S0: That's right. [00:35:04] S1: Were you also posting on Twitter or on LinkedIn or blogging, all these sort of things?
00:35:08 · Steve Tuck
[00:35:08] S0: Yeah, for sure. And making sure that we were showing up, talking about the journey of getting the company off the ground, what it took to fundraise, what it took to, to hit these milestones in the business from getting our first system passing compliance to the all-important first customer shipment, always have been extremely careful about customer information. And we are, you know, you see a lot of companies out there that like will leak stuff about their customers and, you know, on background and we just don't do that. And you'll see sort of these like articles written in publications and, and we're very, very private about customer information, but we have had the good fortune of working with some phenomenal customers. And, and as we got our first rack shift, being able to take a picture in our factory of that thing getting wrapped up and going in the crate, I mean, that went viral on Twitter. In fact, it was funny because like all the different parties came out. It was a picture of one of our double E's, Robert Keith, who's, he had the anti-static wrap. It's this pink wrap that you run around electronics and he's stepping over the, the, the crate door. A bunch of people came in like, oh my God, did he break his ankle? It looks like he's going to step on the corner. So like, you know, medical Twitter showed up. You had, you know, anti-static Twitter show up. They're like, is that going to create a static charge? It's like, no, it's anti-static. But it was fun to celebrate that with what we would learn was a much bigger supporting community than we knew. And with every commercial customer there in, there was someone in that company that learned of Oxide years ago that had begun championing it inside the building.
00:36:47 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:47] S1: What would be your number one piece of advice around building in public in terms of getting into cadence? Because what I see is a lot of founders that want to do this, very few founders do it consistently. Maybe they'll post here or there. They start a podcast at stocks. Like, how did you force yourself to keep putting things out regularly? And the only way this works is if you do it consistently over a good amount of time.