A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:51:53 · Sean McCarthy
[00:51:53] S0: So number one, making sure that the use case that you're talking to them about. I do this whole analogy with our customers. So I'll say, all right, so one to ten. One, it doesn't matter at all to the business. Ten, business goes down tomorrow. Where is this use case for you, right? And you're hoping for the seven, eights, nines, tens, right? Being realistic, they're probably going to give you a seven or an eight, hopefully as kind of like a max starting point. They might not give you the most important critical thing. But if they say, oh, this is like a two, right? Or a three, you shouldn't take that use case. Especially as the first one, because it doesn't mean that much to them. It's not going to make that much of a difference and your pilot is probably not going to go very well. And so what I'll couple that with is, let's say they give me a seven. Okay, great and then I'll ask, how many times a day does this happen? That's the other thing. You don't want it to happen once a month or four times a month. That's also bad. So hopefully it's happening every day. It's a seven, great. Where does this fall for you guys on a prioritization scale? I mean, is this painful for you right now? And if so, you can kind of quantify and back in and on the ELT side, they'll say like, yeah, we're losing money on this. So this is high priority and often they'll say, yeah, this is high priority. We do need to get this fixed. Great, well, let's get it fixed. We can actually do time to value here in probably three or four weeks to get the initial use case handed over to you guys. You can measure it. You can measure down to the second how our AI works. If it's monetary, you're going to see what that is on our dashboard. And you'll hopefully be able to fill the gap here. And this is the best way for you guys to just measure fast. And that's usually where we're pushing it again, especially if we have to get them into a pilot. But if you ask them, how big of a priority. Especially if they're giving you those six, seven, eight, nines, they're going to tell you it's a priority and so you can play off of that. Like, hey, you just told me this is a really high priority. So let's get this in flight for you.
00:53:40 · Pablo Srugo, Sean McCarthy
[00:53:40] S2: Perfect, let's stop it there. I'll ask the last question, which is what would be a top piece of advice? Maybe a piece of advice you wish you knew when you were starting, you know, two years ago. [00:53:50] S0: I think the biggest piece of advice is to be honest with yourself as a founder as well. It's very easy to convince ourselves that either the problem that we're solving is really, really mission critical. Even though it might not be, or that you get one customer telling you that it is like super important to your business. You just take that and run as a blanket statement for like that entire vertical. Because one customer told you that. I think you need to make sure you do enough diligence and be honest with yourself on a retro the feedback that you're getting. And I tell you that is like an important lesson because I've made those mistakes in blitzing our entire team based on one or two customers telling me some product feedback and going off the rails. And quickly learning like it was just those one or two customers. It was nobody else that needed that and so I think that that principle from the very earliest stages, like you're trying to raise a pre-seed round and just figure out what you're going to do. All the way through, even past where we are from an organization, you have to make sure you have a decent sample size and that you operate off data, and not gut checks. And that's been, for me, probably one of the most powerful lessons. And frankly, one that, you know, I still make the mistakes on today.
00:53:50 · Sean McCarthy, Pablo Srugo
[00:53:50] S0: I think the biggest piece of advice is to be honest with yourself as a founder as well. It's very easy to convince ourselves that either the problem that we're solving is really, really mission critical. Even though it might not be, or that you get one customer telling you that it is like super important to your business. You just take that and run as a blanket statement for like that entire vertical. Because one customer told you that. I think you need to make sure you do enough diligence and be honest with yourself on a retro the feedback that you're getting. And I tell you that is like an important lesson because I've made those mistakes in blitzing our entire team based on one or two customers telling me some product feedback and going off the rails. And quickly learning like it was just those one or two customers. It was nobody else that needed that and so I think that that principle from the very earliest stages, like you're trying to raise a pre-seed round and just figure out what you're going to do. All the way through, even past where we are from an organization, you have to make sure you have a decent sample size and that you operate off data, and not gut checks. And that's been, for me, probably one of the most powerful lessons. And frankly, one that, you know, I still make the mistakes on today. [00:55:04] S2: Sean, thanks so much for jumping on the show, dude. It's been great. [00:55:07] S0: Thanks, Pablo. I appreciate you having me.
00:55:07 · Sean McCarthy, Pablo Srugo
[00:55:07] S0: Thanks, Pablo. I appreciate you having me. [00:55:08] S2: So picture this, it's months from now, years from now, and one of your founder friends. A really close founder friend of yours, guess what? Their startup went bankrupt, and it turns out if you had just shared the Product Market Fit show with them. They would have learned everything they needed to, to find Product Market Fit and to create a huge success. But instead, their startup has completely failed. You have blood on your hands. Don't let that happen. You don't want to live like that. It is terrible. So do what you need to do. Tell them about the show. Send it to them. Put it on WhatsApp. Put it on Slack. Put it where you need to put it. Just make sure they know about it and they check it out.