Pablo Srugo (00:00:00):
Startups are so random. Like, honestly, the more I look at this stuff. There are so many different ways to find a problem worth solving.

Previous Guests (00:00:09):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:00:21):
Do you think the product market fit show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you.

If I just look at the last four episodes that we did. So one of them is Carbon6. Kazi started this company, sold it within three years for like $210 million. Just an insane situation. And when you look at what he did. It was completely different than your common path of how, you know, startup founders kind of go seeking for problems. He actually, in a sense. Didn't really build a startup at all in the normal way. It was a roll-up strategy. I mean, this is stuff that you see very commonly, like, in private equity and in the non-tech world where people will go and go buy a bunch of the same sort of companies and roll it up and kind of get economies of scale and sort of thing.

And he, it was interesting. I mean, he kind of. When e-commerce was really kind of booming. I mean, it's still obviously growing. But it had a really hot period, you know, maybe five years ago or so. And there was these companies, coming up like Thrasio. That would aggregate a bunch of sellers together. They'd acquire a bunch of products in the same category. And the idea is they get economies in scale. That company by the way failed. What he realized at that time. What Kazi realized was aggregating the sellers actually missed the point because it turns out that the most valuable asset in e-commerce wasn't the products. It was the founders. And in fact, many times these founders would sell their companies for laughably high prices to Thrasio's of the world. And then they go and spin up a new product. A new category completely and do well once again, because they actually understood the machine of e-commerce.

And so what Kazi did was instead of aggregating products and sellers. He found small software vendors that were selling pretty niche point solutions. And he started acquiring them. He raised money to acquire them, put them all together. And then started doing things like cross-selling, cost cutting, and things that are pretty, I would say, not simple. They're hard to do, but well understood. These are playbooks. But look at that, like look at how Kazi went and found this problem. I mean, on the one hand, it's total serendipity. He was literally talking to people that happen to be in e-commerce. And he realized that there were these point solutions that could be aggregated. And he didn't build a product. He just went out and bought products and stitched them together. Compare that to the others.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:47):
So look at Lightspeed. Lightspeed is another one we did recently. This is a company doing a billion dollars in revenue. It's a public company. Dax started this company, literally 20 years ago. And part of it was because he understood. He was really early in the Apple ecosystem. He happened to work at Apple stores. He built like Apple software. He just understood that ecosystem back in the early 2000s. When Apple was not at all what it is today, right? This is pre-iPhone and pre, like, the big success that Apple is today. Obviously it was a big company still, but Windows was by far the dominant player. And he ends up getting pulled into building an operating system for retail stores that runs on Apple computers.

He benefits from this tailwind that Apple absolutely dominates and so more and more retailers actually want to end up running on Apple computers. And then later on this is all on-prem for the first like decade. Then later on he benefits from the second tailwind. Which is that everything moves over to the cloud. He doesn't know idea that these tailwinds are coming. He doesn't even know that Apple is going to become huge. He just happened to really like Apple and he was working in the Apple ecosystem. He actually worked as on-site support for Mac dealerships. So these are companies that are selling Mac computers to businesses and he was like doing support for them. His company that's doing that kind of falls apart and the customers that he knew asked him to build software for them. And instead of building custom software. He decides to build a product. It's not planned and it's not foreseen. And you can already see like, just how different his evolution of coming up with a product, was compared to Kazi.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:27):
And then Merrill from Graphite. This is kind of the, I would say these days. Whether you see this story often, whether it actually happens often, or whether at the very least. This is like the standard. If you want to call it that. Standard playbook of how things are supposed to happen, you know, this is a Harvard graduate. He's working at Square. He's working at Oscar Insurance, and he decides to leave with his co-founders. To leave these kind of big companies and bring tools that big companies have to small companies. But he stumbled a bunch of times until he actually got to a real problem. The first one was this Loom for developers idea. That let like developers and users, like. record bugs. And it was a real problem. He built that out and got, like, basically no usage. So then he pivoted.

His second idea was this rollback idea, right? The idea that you could, you know, when you launch a website. You can always kind of roll back to the previous version if something fails. He wanted to bring that same functionality to mobile development, and so he had, like, rollback for iOS apps. It does okay, it gets a little bit of traction. We're talking about severally 100K ARR. He makes a few hires. These hires are from, like, Meta and they see how broken their own development process. And they bring in some process from Meta. And these developers basically hate, like, the GitHub PR workflow. And so they want to build. They're going to bring in the process from Meta. How Meta works with PR. It's called like stack PR. It doesn't really matter, and wants to bring this into the company. The founders realize how big of a potential this is, and they decide to build a product to let the entire market and actually sell this out so that people can use this alternative way of kind of creating pull requests and effectively deploying code at scale. And that absolutely takes off. 

Pablo Srugo (00:06:04):
And then the final one, right? You look at Jordan from Vapi, and he drops out of school. So again, more kind of startup lore. You see more of these, but it's not actually that common. But he drops out of school and he starts this like calendar plugin that lets you join meetings instantly. You know, kind of gets a little bit of hype early on and then flatlines for half a million dollars for years. Like, for three years. He decides to abandon and not build it anymore. He moves from Toronto to SF. And he's literally just, like, messing around trying to come up with a new idea. He still has this revenue stream happening. So he's got runway, but he has no idea what he wants to build and he's spending no time on it. He's going to hackathons. Then you kind of the voice AI stuff happens. He starts playing with voice AI. He talks about kind of walking around the park and talking to kind of, as he would build with voice AI and just iterating and iterating. But he had no, he wasn't even solving a problem. He didn't have any customers, like, there was no clear way. He didn't understand where any of this was going. Until you like haphazardly meet some other company that's trying to build an app that requires voice and he realizes that he's already built a lot of that layer himself. And so he can kind of be this stack on top of you know foundational models that enables. Kind of the last mile he calls it. The last mile of voice AI so people can build voice AI apps and that absolutely takes off. He actually grew to $10 million ARR in a year. Which is exceptional. 

Pablo Srugo (00:07:27):
But look at these four different ways. I'm talking, like if you were to do a hundred startups. You could probably bucket the way the ideas happen into a few different. Into not a hundred ways, but some. But it's not going to be like three or four different ways. There's so much randomness and serendipity that play into these origin stories of these startups. So from a roll-up strategy to a simply following kind of one step after the other for Lightspeed and just not even, like, just letting yourself effectively get pulled by what you like. To the more, you know, deciding to start a startup. A little bit more crafted playbook. But even then having to pivot, and pivot, and pivot until you stumble upon a problem. Because, not because of something you figured out. But because of somebody you happen to hire to build another of the pivots that was actually a failed pivot.

And then finally to just abandoning everything. And just playing around with tools, with products, and again serendipity leading from one thing to the other. I think what you learn from this is like there is no straight line here. There really is no straight line. I think as a founder I remember, you know, you come up with an idea. You think it makes just so much sense, you craft a pitch, you craft a deck, a business plan and so on. And you just kind of go for it, and you don't realize just the successes that you admire. How many zigs and zags. And how much randomness there was for them to end up where they truly ended up and just how many different ways.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:55):
And the other thing is, sometimes you kind of hear. Especially on podcasts and whatever, like, VCs and founders tell you, this is the way it's supposed to be. This is the wrong way of doing it. As though there were truly like one path and then a bunch of wrong paths. And I think what you realize when you hear these stories is, there are so many different paths to success and paths to failure. Frankly, but fundamentally, you're always trying to get to the same place. Which is this concept of true product market fit. Which is where you have a product, however it is that you ended up there, that really is getting pulled by the customer. And this is another thing that I do think when you look at commonalities, here's something you'll see. Which is you hear about, and obviously we look at the titles of these companies, like, you know, the AI Voice 1 going from 10. You know, zero to $10 million in a year. You look at Graphite, it's also like zero to one in like 10 months.

But, before that. Before he went either of these, right? One of them was three years on basically flat before he then went to $10 million in a year. The other one was also a couple of years and three pivots before he went from zero to ten. From zero to one in 10 months. And then Lightspeed actually took three years to get to a million. You know, Carbon6 is a little different because the roll-up. But I think there's this big misconception in startup land. Which is around getting to a million as fast as you can. There's a lot of pressure. I think, in the early stages of going from zero to one, like, in a year, right? Zero to one under a year is top decile. And I used to put a lot of weight on this myself, to be honest. And it is, like, when it happens and you do go to zero to one in a year or even faster. Zero to 10 is obviously, like, an amazing situation. And it's not a bad thing at all. Actually, it's most likely a good thing. But it's most likely a good thing if it is, a byproduct and not the focus itself. Because I think what's happening in many cases is this has become so important, the two things happen.

First of all, the founders that don't get from zero to one to a million fast already get dejected and feel like they're doing something wrong. And the second thing is some founders get from zero to one million fast. Because they are making it the objective, and if you just think about it from first principles. Like, if my goal is to get to a million in ARR. What am I gonna do? I'm gonna find a market that's well-defined. I'm gonna find a product that has clear demand. I'm going to probably make it 10, 20% better. I'm gonna go crazy on sales and marketing. And that's probably the easiest way, not to say it's easy. But that's the easiest way to get to a million in ARR fast. But is that the goal?

Pablo Srugo (00:11:19):
Do you think there's a strong correlation between how fast you get to a million and your likelihood of getting to $100 million top line? Because I don't think there is. Looking at all these different 150 episodes that we've done. All these founders that we've spoken to. The reality is some get to a million fast. Some take, like, I've seen one that took seven years. Like, Ola was a public company now. Over a billion in valuation I think $300 million or so in revenue. Took seven years to get to a million. Now I don't recommend and I'm not saying you should try to take as long as you can to get to a million. That's obviously not the case and you do have to wonder. Why it is, if it's taking you a long time. Why is it taking you a long time?

But there are good reasons. Sometimes the market is just only moving so fast sometimes if you're bootstrapped it might take longer. Sometimes the inflection that you're waiting for just hasn't happened yet. There's so many different pieces to the puzzle. The important thing isn't how fast you get to a million, but whether when you get to a million. You have clear, insane product market fit so that the rest of the journey is a tailwind. Going back to that thought example. If my goal is to get to a million and I start in a well-defined market. And I just do copycat type product, 10, 20% better. I go crazy on sales and marketing. I'm not really building a strong asset. So at some point, there's just going to be 10 times as many players. The difference that I have is going to be smaller. And the impact that I can have through pure sales and marketing. All that stuff is going to wither away. The CAC is going to get worse. My efficiency is going to get worse. All that stuff is just only scalable up to a point.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:47):
They're all levers. Great sales and marketing is a lever. But only if you have a solid product to begin with, and if your product is differentiated enough. And you have enough of a difference of approach between what other people are doing, different enough positioning, then you can keep that difference for longer. And that's going to be a tailwind for you long term. It may not get you to a million ARR fast. But it'll help you get to $10 and $100 million later on, and that is a real goal.

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