Oct. 23, 2023

Andrew Tai, Founder of MotoInisght | How to Pivot to Product Market Fit

Founders are told to pivot when things aren't working. They're also told to never give up. So how do you know when to push through and when to completely change course? Like most things in 0 to 1, it's more art than science. And unfortunately, most founders can't figure it out until after they experience it themselves. That's why on this episode we spoke with Andrew Tai, the founder and CEO of MotoInsight. MotoInsight was acquired by Autotrader after it grew to tens of millions in revenue. B...

Founders are told to pivot when things aren't working. They're also told to never give up. So how do you know when to push through and when to completely change course?

Like most things in 0 to 1, it's more art than science. And unfortunately, most founders can't figure it out until after they experience it themselves. That's why on this episode we spoke with Andrew Tai, the founder and CEO of MotoInsight.

MotoInsight was acquired by Autotrader after it grew to tens of millions in revenue. But Motoinsight is the result of a major pivot. It took Andrew 3 years to realize that his initial marketplace solution was not going to work. We dive deep into the signs he saw that drove him to pivot to enterprise software and how doing so helped him go from 0 to $10M+ in just a few years

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

02:42 - The Marketplace Idea

08:04 - The Challenge of a Two Sided Marketplace

14:16 - Fundamental Problems

15:55 - Play to your strengths

23:44 - You have to be in the market to win the market

27:47 - Revenue is the ultimate indicator

30:39 - Constraints Set you Free

33:34 - Pivoting to See More Opportunities than Challenges

37:45 - True Product Market Fit

39:44 - One Last Piece of Advice

WEBVTT

00:00:00.149 --> 00:01:28.280
It's really common as a founder to be told that if things aren't working, you should pivot. And frankly, it's obvious. The hard part isn't actually making the pivot, isn't making the change. It's realizing whether you should pivot in the first place because the reality is while you're told to pivot, and pivot, and pivot, you're also told to never give up. How do you find that balance between continuing to push, and continuing to power through, to be relentless on the one hand, and on the other hand realizing, hey, this thing's never going to work, let's switch it up. That's really what we dive into here with this episode. I spoke with Andrew Tai, who's an amazing founder. He started Motoinsight, which was ultimately acquired by Autotrader for tens of millions of dollars. He grew that business to about $20 million in revenue. The interesting part of his journey – it was a long journey, 12 years, actually, in the making. He started off launching this company called Unhaggle, which was a marketplace. Then he shifted and pivoted into what was ultimately Motoinsight, which was an enterprise software play. Both in the auto industry, but obviously quite different. It took him three years. He did the first marketplace for three years before deciding and realizing that he should pivot. We dive deep into that part. I think by listening to how Andrew Tai thought about it, it can help you figure out when it might be time to pivot. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show.

00:01:35.530 --> 00:01:37.359
Happy to be here. Good to be with you, Pablo.

00:01:37.870 --> 00:02:33.080
It's a pleasure to have you here. Andrew. Just for quick background, I mean, Andrew is a founder and father of two kids now, as I was just chatting with him earlier. His first startup, called Motoinsight, was acquired ultimately by Autotrader, the group that runs Autotrader. And it was a pretty long journey. I mean, it was about a 14-year journey, grew the company well into the eight figures of ARR. It started a bit differently. Ultimately, the business was around selling software to dealerships, classic B to B SaaS, even more enterprise type SaaS. It started off as a marketplace. Today, we'll be talking about how to pivot and the journey from going from, and pivoting specifically from, a marketplace to B-to-B SaaS, two very different business models, and just walking through how to do that but also why you did that. I think that that's where we'll uncover a lot of insights that founders might be able to use. With that said, let's start at the beginning. How did you come up – what was Unhaggle, actually? Maybe let's start there.

00:02:42.719 --> 00:03:10.400
It’s funny. I always think about it as, man, that was a long journey. You think he said 14 years. By my count, it’s probably 11 or 12 depending on how you actually count it. It started really as a marketplace to help consumers find and buy new cars easier, faster, more transparent. There was a bit of a Priceline inspiration there were – dealers would compete for your business. You can configure the exact car that you were looking for and get local dealers to offer you the best prices on inventory that –

00:03:14.639 --> 00:03:24.800
What was happening? Maybe just walk us through. Today, the world of car buying, there's just so much innovation happening there. What was alive back then? Was Carvana a thing? How big was Autotrader? What were the options, really?

00:03:26.360 --> 00:04:30.879
The market was way more static back then. This was 2011 when we started. As of late, you see all of the big names like the Carvana and the likes that have garnered a lot of attention both up and – up and down through the cycle. In 2011, none of that was reality. It was still very much a classified listings model. Autotrader was in existence. I think back then Autotrader, actually, a component of their business was still printing paper books, Autotrader books. I remember reading those growing up. This was a very different time. The concept of bringing the buying experience online was a major step forward in and of itself. We wanted to really transform the model. Instead of you shopping around and negotiating to be able to eliminate that and bring transparency in pricing. In addition, the convenience of being able to do much of the transaction at home. And it started as really a scratch your own itch moment. I was going through the process of buying a car. For someone like me that grew up on the internet, the traditional process made very little sense. The light bulb was just, hey, there's got to be a better way. And, and technology should be able to help.

00:04:42.338 --> 00:04:55.160
Before jumping into the, the, the big change and, and the thing that really worked. Let's talk a bit more about what didn't work. What was the original conception, the thing that you saw that was broken in terms of the car buying experience that you desperately wanted to fix?

00:04:56.870 --> 00:05:49.879
Yeah, so I think the first part of it was just the tremendous inefficiency. Literally driving from one dealership, to another dealership, to a third dealership, and maybe a fourth dealership to literally just ask, hey, what's the price on this vehicle, and then have a bit of a back-and-forth negotiation. I think we had heard stories of people where they would fax a description of the vehicle that they were looking for and what they were willing to pay, and then see what would come back, out to a whole bunch of dealerships. Then email, some people would do that. Fax machines were actually still a thing with dealerships back in 2011. But that was the first part of it, which was really the inefficiency and the lack of transparency. I think beyond that was everything was moving online in terms of transactions. Yes, buying a car is more of a complex transaction should you be able to do it from the comfort of your own home and through a matter of clicks, I think those were the initial inspirations behind it. It was an experience that I wish existed, going through the car buying experience myself.

00:06:03.459 --> 00:06:13.120
And what was that ten-star experience? Was it you go on a website, you put in I want a Civic from this year, whatever, and you get asks back and then you can bid on them? What – or you just shop through all the dealerships’ inventory in one place?

00:06:17.220 --> 00:07:35.360
So we thought we were being tremendously innovative in that. This was a new car focus experience. We thought we were being tremendously innovative in that you don't have to look through a whole bunch of listings. You just configure the exact new car that you wanted. Back in 2011, maybe it would've been a 2012 Honda Civic XE in this color with this options package. You configure that, select the local dealers in your area. You would get offers back, firm, final offers for either the exact car if they had it or similar cars, maybe a different color. You pulled out your credit card. You reserved it online. Whether you had selected a cash finance lease, whatever the terms, those were the terms that you would be getting. You knew pricing transparency. You knew you were getting a fair deal because there was competition. You basically completed the whole process largely online. Now, that's where we actually started learning about dealership and customer behavior. Oftentimes, the customer would go into the dealership, and it's a sign the paperwork and pick up the keys experience. Bulk of it completed online, buy online, pick up in store. That wasn't a really popular concept back then. That's essentially what we saw happening. In some cases, we saw dealers actually delivering cars to customers. You’ve got to remember; this was back in 2011. You see the ads about all of the online car buying experiences now, where this has become much more commonplace. In 2011, it was a fairly pioneering concept.

00:07:43.819 --> 00:08:02.279
And let me ask this. Starting off, you started from the consumer's perspective. You knew your own niche and probably just speaking and knowing a few other people that bought cars. How much did you know about dealerships, and how dealerships work, and how they operated, what they cared about, what they didn't care about? Would you go in blind, or did you do any discovery, or did you have insight into that as well?

00:08:04.480 --> 00:08:53.279
Did a ton of discovery. I think we thought we knew the market really well. I think that's the inherent challenge oftentimes where when you go talk to someone about, hey, this is my idea. What do you think? Oftentimes, the answer is naturally just biased towards the positive. When we got really into it operationally is when we learned the nuances of what really works and doesn't work. We spent a ton of time talking to dealers. We spent a ton of time talking to customers. I mean, it's no surprise. You go pick 10 random people in a parking lot. You ask them, hey, do you the car buying experience? Nine out of ten of them will probably have some story about how they don't like the experience. It's just one of those cliches. When we talk to car dealers, naturally the first reaction is hey, anything that helps me sell more cars is a good idea. On the surface, we thought we deeply understood the space, the problem set. That was a lot of learning as we actually built the company and had actually people use the product. That's where the devil's in the details.

00:09:10.419 --> 00:09:20.340
Then let's jump into that. How did you think through building that marketplace? Which side did you – I assume you went after inventory first. How did you try to get that on?

00:09:20.659 --> 00:11:09.820
I think that's the challenge that we learned very quickly of a two-sided marketplace. It's funny where, or poetic in a way where the journey came full circle. After we were acquired by the parent company to Autotrader, I spent a bit of time at Autotrader working on the marketplace. I saw the marketplace at big scale. That was the inherent problem with the marketplace at the beginning was creating this two sides, matching the supply and the demand. There's no easy answer for it. It was just tough. That was one of the biggest challenges for us. I think, on reflection, part of the reason I think we were successful once we pivoted into a different model, a vertical SaaS model, was just knowing what we were built for, knowing what we were good at, and knowing where we could find opening in the market, if you will. One of the challenges with building a two-sided marketplace is creating the brand first and foremost. Getting customers to come to the marketplace, Unhaggle. Listen, it's been well over a decade now. Unhaggle has a pretty nice cult following in the car community now. But that didn't come overnight. And we certainly – we realized very quickly that we were not capitalized to go out and spend the big ad dollars to compete against Autotrader to get mind share of people that were thinking about buying cars, or to compete against the automakers themselves who were advertising to potential car buyers, or the dealers themselves. We weren't capitalized well for it. We realized we weren't built to build a big brand in that way. The dealer side was a little bit easier that they – at the end of day, the dealers just wanted to sell cars. Matching them at the same time was the problem because when there weren't enough customers on there – you could have lots of dealers, but dealers would fall off when they didn't get a lot of immediate value.

00:11:25.279 --> 00:11:34.379
How long between the time that you decided to start Unhaggle until you decided the marketplace isn't the way to go, we're going to sell direct to dealerships? How much time are we talking about?

00:11:35.659 --> 00:11:50.549
Yeah it's probably, I'd say maybe almost three years where we really focused hard on it. The problem sometimes is it wasn't going terrible in the sense that we were growing revenues. We were growing month over month, and year over year. It's just not exceptionally quickly.

00:11:56.269 --> 00:12:35.759
That's what I want – that's what I want to dive into. I think when we look back retrospectively, and we summarize the history, it's easy to gloss over a three-year period. Three years, first of all is a serious amount of time, but also not uncommon, especially when you had the reception you're talking about, which is not black or white. It's easy if you put it out and you just two months in, three months in, there's nothing happening. Nobody wants to sign on. You kill the thing. Through the roof, you're the next Uber, amazing. Most of these startups fall in between. I want to dig into that a little bit more. What was that looking like? Which parts, as you go back and you think through those three years, were some of the things that were working and kept you going towards it, kept you in the marketplace frame of mind?

00:12:40.558 --> 00:12:55.000
Yeah, I think, listen, at the end of the day we were making money. We were generating revenue. We were adding customers. We were even getting decent press. Those were encouraging signs that kept us going. I think the realization was we – and we tried all kinds of levers to accelerate growth.

00:13:02.000 --> 00:13:02.480
What were some of those?

00:13:03.178 --> 00:13:40.720
Everything from partnerships to straight up advertising. I ran a campaign on radio for a while. We tried traditional advertising, we tried digital advertising, we tried partnerships, we tried – we actually had a lot of good PR and earned media. It’s not that we didn't try a lot of different things. We did a lot of different things, but realized that hey, the trajectory that we're on, we could keep going. If we do, if we just keep going on this trajectory, we end up with a lifestyle-type business. We realized that the Unhaggle business had a certain potential. It wasn't necessarily bad, it's just not what we had set out to build as a company. We learned a lot in that the problem that we were solving is a real problem. Consumers want greater transparency.

00:13:56.940 --> 00:14:13.360
Was that the fundamental problem is just that consumers, as much as their problem wasn't solved, there was just so much ads spent on them in terms of car buying, that it was just hard to – the signal to noise was really weak and just hard to become top of mind? What would you say was the fundamental problem that didn't let it really take off?

00:14:16.240 --> 00:14:33.440
I think one, it was super hard to get mind share. I think two, keeping dealers engaged at scale was challenging. If you're not growing rapidly, and you're just this tiny little part of the dealer's business, you're not fundamental to the dealer's business. Sometimes they'll pay attention, sometimes they won't. And so the two-sided marketplace was hard to fully keep intact.

00:14:37.919 --> 00:14:40.240
I guess that's a liquidity problem. Is that how you summarize it?

00:14:40.320 --> 00:15:14.649
Yeah, there was a bit of a liquidity problem. That just inherently goes back to two-sided marketplaces. I have a ton of admiration and respect for entrepreneurs and businesses that are able to make it work. For us, it was just headwind after headwind. I think what we looked at was like, okay, it's a big market. There's a big problem here. If we solve the problem differently, can we create a much bigger business? Is there a much bigger opportunity that we can capture? And that's where – the vision always stayed the same. It was about how do I make the car buying experience better, more transparent, faster, more convenient. That vision always stayed the same. It's just how we actually accomplished that vision evolved.

00:15:23.250 --> 00:15:47.610
Let me ask this. Now, you're building a second startup. I'm sure you don't want to spend three years on a go-to-market that you then realize is not the best go-to-market. What sort of signs might you look for now? Think about somebody listening here who's early-stage founder, maybe in this gray area, trying to figure out is this the thing, keep pushing, or this is not the thing, shift. What early indicators would you look for, generally speaking, not tied to auto specifically, generally speaking that, that this might just be the wrong go-to-market.

00:15:55.639 --> 00:17:13.170
Yeah, it's interesting. I think hindsight 2020, as I've been thinking about the next business, the way I'm assessing problems is I flipped it on its head. I don't start with the solution anymore and say, hey Pablo, what do you think about this solution that I I'm working on and I'm building? What do you think about it? Most of the time, now, it's actually – there may be a space, or an industry, or a sector that I'm particularly interested in. I think I understand the problem. But where I start now is just understanding what the problem is. Like having the principle or the subject matter expert talk about what the problem is. Hey, if I built this really cool tool to help you buy a car, do you think you would use it? Do you think it's a good idea? There's just a lot of inherent positive bias there. Going back to know what you are good at and what you are built for. I think for us, in hindsight, for me, in hindsight, I now have a much greater appreciation. If I'm going to build a marketplace that requires mass consumer adoption, to build that type of mind share, I'm going to need to be exceptionally well capitalized and be prepared to raise a lot of capital. Those are all elements that I know better the second time around. I think if I was more thoughtful about it even the first time around, probably would've shortened that journey.

00:17:20.809 --> 00:18:38.720
That resonates in two ways, actually. One of the things is, reminds me of when I was working at Gymtrack, my last startup, which was effectively a mini magic leap. It was just a research shop because we were building hardware, and AI, and stuff 10 years ago, and all these sort of things. I remember, distinctly remember at one point I was like I'm a business type. Here I am running, effectively, a research shop with 30-some engineers. I should be out doing sales and marketing. I should be out doing BD, these sort of things. I'm not an engineer, and yet – so I'm not playing my strengths at all. I'll never forget that because I think that's a totally valid point. Whatever go-to-market and start up you start, it needs to start from a problem. At some point, you also need to think about are you the right person for this? It's a competitive environment out there. The right person's going to be working on this. If they're stronger than you at the core things, they'll probably, well, beat you . That's the first part. The other thing is totally – one of the things we say all the time here is before startup mode, there's research mode. I think that that's exactly what you're describing. I think it's super common with first time founders to start off with this wouldn't it be cool if idea. Wouldn't it be cool if, in your case, you could just do this, and that, and get a car?

00:18:43.880 --> 00:18:49.960
And that was how the light bulb came, right? I was buying a car. I'm like, wouldn't it be cool if I could have just done this? That is often a trap, I think.

00:18:53.799 --> 00:19:28.319
I think so because you end up starting with the solution first, as you said. Just naturally from there comes a solution. Then you try and fit that into a market. It's not too bad if you're just solving it for yourself. If you're a consumer, and you assume there's many other consumers, maybe that's not too bad. In your case, you have dealerships that are a huge part of it. Even on the consumer side, there's so much before that part of the funnel that you need to think through. I think starting with problems first. I would assume if you had gone into dealerships and interviewed them high level around what problems they deal with on a day-to-day basis, how they – you would probably find that this thing might be hard to make top of mind for them.

00:19:32.950 --> 00:19:58.839
Yeah. I, I mean, I think there are other things as well. I mean we spent a lot of time on this, but I'll give you one more, really understanding the pain point that we're solving, as you said. Buying a car, yeah, in many cases it's a frustrating experience, but it's also one that happens every 4, 6, 8 years for a consumer. And so when you think about from a marketplace standpoint, for me as Unhaggle, to actually have to find your attention at the right moment in time in that 4, 6, 8 year time span where you're buying a car, and then actually convert you properly. It just became an exceptionally expensive and difficult endeavor. It wasn't a persistent problem that I as a consumer face every single day. It's something that I might always be interested in. That was just another headwind, not to say that any startup founder should be opportunities and ideas for startups now. I look at it through that different lens. I'm looking for tailwinds over headwinds. I'm looking at deeply understanding a real acute problem as opposed to something that feels like it's a cool idea.

00:20:46.210 --> 00:21:20.480
Makes sense. It actually reminds me, I always see these startups probably every few months or so, trying to fix renting, right? Inevitably, some young person goes through this renting cycle. They're like, wow, renting really sucks. It's one of these things, how often does it happen? Once every three years? What's the status quo with DG and Facebook marketplace? It's not great, but it's also not that bad. So it becomes a really, really hard problem to 10x – have this 10x better solution and these sort of things. Anyway, so you start. You're kind of three years-ish into this Unhaggle marketplace. It's going well, but not so well. How do you start – you ended up at vertical SaaS selling just to dealerships. How do you get –

00:21:25.480 --> 00:21:25.960
Dealerships and automakers.

00:21:26.150 --> 00:21:39.160
Dealerships and automakers, but do you start hearing things – because you're working with them already, are you hearing things from them that kind of inspire you towards this SaaS platform? Or how do you start to go and lean that way?

00:21:40.069 --> 00:23:20.680
Yeah, I think what's interesting is the experience that we delivered through Unhaggle. We realized we are creating real value here. There's a very positive customer experience and in many cases efficiency and a positive experience on the dealership’s side as well. It was very difficult to get that positive experience that happens one time or 10 times or 100 times and have it happen 10 million times. So we knew we had something there. And really, what we did was okay, instead of trying to get all the consumers to come to Unhaggle and experience this experience and that experience being, hey, you get transparency online in terms of pricing and be able to complete much of the transaction before you even step foot into the store, right? Or ultimately even buy it online. We were early to that game. But we could see that there was real customer delight when it actually happened. It just wasn't happening at the volumes that we wanted to through the marketplace. And so we saw dealers using it. We saw consumers using it. We just decided hey, what if we actually enabled the dealers and the automakers that we had started working with to deliver that kind of experience to the audience that they already own, right? And that was the just very kind of small – it was almost like we had a solution, which was an easier buying experience enabled online and digital first with transparency at the heart of it. We just kind of found a different delivery mechanism. It was almost like a shift in go to market, if you will. Instead of using a marketplace to go to market directly to the consumer and have it consumer-led or selling it to automakers and dealerships so that they can enable their version of the experience.

00:23:28.440 --> 00:23:43.118
But to be clear, the idea actually came from inside your walls. In other words, the team thinking through what value it had created and how to deliver it versus, let's say, dealerships saying, hey, can I just buy this platform? I don't need your consumers. I just want to do it for mine. It was more of the former.

00:23:44.259 --> 00:24:40.400
We would have moments where we're sitting around and we're like, okay, this is okay. We've got a business here. We're generating real revenues. We're growing. But if we don't do something different, we can kind of see the trajectory, right? And we really thought hard about, okay, we're not going to walk away from this. As you said, it's like if it was – it'd be easier if it was just a complete failure. There was something here. And we really drilled down on what's actually working? What are the moments of delight where there's magic happening almost, right? And how can we monetize that as a business, differently? Part of this is I'm a big believer that having a customer pay for something is the ultimate validation. The one step before that, though, is – you can't just go to a customer and say, hey, what do you – not to contradict what I said earlier about really understanding the problems. But in my experience, it isn't as simple as, hey, Mr. Customer, what problem do you have to solve? And let me try to just, do that, right? You do have to have a bit of a vision to start.

00:24:50.108 --> 00:25:05.118
Once you had this new idea that, okay, maybe we just go direct to auto automakers and dealerships, do you – how do you start? I assume you didn't just go build the product and then try and sell it. There was probably some kind of testing or some discovery type motion there. What did that look like?

00:25:06.430 --> 00:25:34.509
Yeah, so for much of our history, we were bootstrapped, right? And so we didn't have a lot of luxury to go out there to build massive products and see if they worked. I think that's one of the things that I loved a lot about B2B and enterprise is I could go and sit with a dealer or an automaker and talk to them about the vision of where we think the market is going, what customer experience should look like when it comes to buying a car and solution with that product before it is necessarily fully evolved and fully built out.

00:25:47.970 --> 00:26:01.190
And so you had these conversations. How did those go? Did that kind of vision that you explained to them resonate, or with some of them at least? What was from 1 to 10 of wow, we've got the thing, or hmm, I don't think kind of – where did that land?

00:26:03.829 --> 00:26:41.750
So I think with some of them, is the accurate characterization. I think we were still early into the space. I think this – again, it's actually amazing looking in hindsight now today where we are, we're a host of companies that are doing online car buying. And it's become much more ubiquitous in the space. But we were still early back then, right? Many of these conversations we were having in 2014, 2015. Some would be able to see the light and be interested in the vision. Now, not every single meeting would be like, oh, hey, yeah, let's go do this. Some of the meetings were like, hey, yeah, what? This is never going to happen. Other meetings are like it's probably going to happen, but I'm hoping not anytime soon. So I'm not going to pay attention.

00:26:52.559 --> 00:27:42.720
That makes sense. You had this vision, by the way, which is informed. It was informed from your own experience as a customer that the car buying experience had to improve, relative to everything else you saw in other industries. And then reinforced, I think, through three years of being in this market and seeing that when the thing worked, it did provide a lot of value. And so that makes sense. Then it's a question of, okay, delivery and to who, right? In terms of this life cycle, who's on the early adopter side of this curve that is going to get it; is going to be – want to – all the kind of characteristics that early adopters tend to have? What did you do with them when you found them? Did you try to get them? You mentioned paying. Basically the only signature that matters is the one on a check, right? That's the ultimate form of validation. Did you try to get them to pre-buy it, or did you make them – you talk about design partners, is that – what model did you use to kind of get them onto the next step?

00:27:47.099 --> 00:29:18.039
Ultimately, the goal is to get a customer to actually pay for something tangible. That's the ultimate kind of measure in my mind of do you have something of real value or not? Listen, I think that might be biased by my B2B enterprise software experience, okay? I'm speaking in that lens really only. When we started working with some of these early automakers that became our design partners, one is finding just a small number that bought into our vision that where we thought the market was going and where they should go. We worked together to come up with a solution. We hadn't built it yet. We came up with a solution, like hey, this suits your needs, is something that you would buy. We got clarity on what problem we're solving, how we're solving it, how we're going to integrate it into different systems. So we really did deeply understood with our design partners, what it actually needed to be. It matched our overall vision. And so we believed that this thing actually should exist in many of the – those cases where we asked them to pay for. And I think that really is ultimate validation on whether or not they really want it or not. But in many of those cases, our customers helped us finance our growth where they paid for a solution that we designed together. And ultimately that solution became our product. And it scaled. So yes, we're having deep customer conversations to help them shape and form ultimately what our product is. But it's our product because it aligns with our overall product vision and our vision on where the market is going.

00:29:32.579 --> 00:30:32.319
On that custom software piece, it's not uncommon on the B2B, especially the bigger the customer. The more it's going to feel like custom software. As long as you're the one keeping the product and you have reason to believe that 80, 90%, let's say, of these features are going to be very relevant to kind of the next early adopters you're going to sell to, you look at the early days of Athenian, you look at the early days of StackAdapt, right? Which now is doing $100 million plus in revenue, and it was effectively custom software. I mean, it was a design partner. And you're building what that design partner believes they need, and there's guardrails. But yeah, I think that's a pretty common story. Let me ask you one thing around getting them to pay. I'm always curious on the strategies used. Because one of the things that I think founders always run into in this case is like, okay, yeah, they really want it. But they're like, we'll pay when it's ready. And what's in it for them to pay early? Did you have to use any strategies to convince them to pay ahead of it? Or what did you think incentivized them to get in early, so to speak?

00:30:39.460 --> 00:31:50.279
Part of it is actually just having the boldness to ask, right? I think there's almost this hesitancy to ask. It kind of goes to sales. Basically, you have to ask for the sale. That has to be anchored with the confidence that we'll be able to deliver it. And that it is something that the customer deeply wants. It goes hand in hand. If they don't really want to pay for it, you have to really ask yourself how big of an opportunity am I creating for them, or a problem am I – that I'm solving for them? It could either be an opportunity or a problem. You're either solving a problem or opening up an opportunity. I think there's a hesitancy to ask. Make the ask, be confident in your ability to deliver it. And if it's a no, then I think there's, serious reflection to be done there. Oftentimes, it's less about the initial idea. As long as you're in a space where there is going to be a change in your direction and you have a big macro problem to solve, how you exactly go about it almost matters less. It's just about, constantly putting one foot in front of the other, reflecting and adjusting, and reflecting and adjusting. So I don't regret the Unhaggle journey whatsoever. We wouldn't have gotten to Motoinsight if we didn't do the Unhaggle journey.

00:31:56.259 --> 00:33:29.279
That's completely true. I mean, we summarize that by, you have to be in the market to win the market. And the reality is you can do all the customer discovery you want to do. And you should, because you're going to discover problems that are worth solving. You're going to waste, let's say, less time. But at some point, you're going to have to get in the market. And frankly, the unique insights that are going to lead to the actual final solution that truly gets product market fit, they can't be found without being in the market in the first place. So I totally buy that. The other thing I'll point out, actually, is to your point around you have to have the confidence to ask. Otherwise they're not going to pay. That's one of the things that's also, I think, a little bit paradoxical, which is – in a sense, it becomes a bit of an advantage, I think, to be bootstrapped because constraints set you free. The fact of the matter is you don't have the luxury to say, well, they're not buying, but it's because of blah, blah, blah. So let's just go build it and then they will buy it, right? If they're not paying, I'm not building, pretty simple. It actually is powerful. Because, again, it sets you free to only build stuff that clearly does have value and is validated through signatures on a check. Let me maybe like fast forward a little bit. You're going through this. You've kind of moved into this pivot. Describe to me if you think about the first six months or so of the marketplace, right? Of Unhaggle, which ultimately got traction, but not true clear product market fit, versus those first six months – and I'm using six months, could be three, could be nine, whatever, early days of the B2B SaaS, which is the Motoinsight product that ultimately really did get real product market fit, real traction. What are some of the notable differences? What are the – some of the things you start to see, whoa, this is a different world sort of thing?

00:33:34.869 --> 00:35:21.199
There's definitely a vibe difference that you can feel. When it's working, you feel it, right? That entire three years, every single step was a grind. This is not to say that, building a company isn't that it is easy. But it felt like we were fighting battles every single day, left, right, and center and the wins were just so micro whereas on the software side, the wins were just way more tangible. We get a new logo. We get a big check. It felt like a different kind of momentum for sure. So there's the vibe aspect to it. I think it's just, you start seeing more opportunities than challenges. In the marketplace days, especially in the early days, it just – it felt like we saw way more challenges than opportunities. Where in, when we were doing modal commerce, which was our SaaS platform at Motoinsight, these opportunities were far more in abundance. And it's simply maybe – as tactical, I was like, okay, well, I made one sale. And I have a list of other similar customers that I can call. And so I've got actionable tactical, like hey, I know exactly what to do. The next step always felt way more clear when we were doing vertical SaaS and, deep into Motoinsight versus when we were in the early marketplace where we had this really big grand idea, but how to actually put it into action was a lot of feeling around.

00:35:35.389 --> 00:37:41.800
It's funny you describe it in these kind of nebulous terms. Because I think that's just much closer to what reality is. The reality, is zero to one, is always and has been, will be more art than science. Everybody wants a playbook. Everybody wants clear things to do or not to do, and they just don't exist. The picture I get when you're talking about it is the difference between pushing a rock up a hill, right? Classic, if you work at it, you will make progress. But it's always like you feel like if you just happen to sleep for one day too much, it just kind of comes right back down versus running down that hill, which, hey, you're going to trip up. It's not necessarily easy. You can't just not do anything. You got to go. But there's kind of this momentum, right, that keeps you going down as time progresses sort of thing. And yeah, it's hard to get more clear than that. So look, I think that really wraps it up, right? I mean, we've gone through the evolution, the struggles at the beginning, which I think are the important piece. Because as a founder, the hardest part of pivoting, frankly, is realizing that you need to pivot in the first place. That's the piece that I think founders struggle with more – most, is do I go another quarter? Because by the way – not giving up, right? That's the key. It's like you can't give up. And so sometimes you confuse that with not giving up means, oh, if it's hard, it's supposed to be hard and we just got to keep going. And there's some truth to that. Because if you give up too easily on a go to market or in a certain delivery, you're never going to see the other side. You're never going to get to success, right? At the same time, you've always got – every quarter or so, you do have to think about, am I pushing a boulder up a hill, right? And is there some other way to shift things around as you did shift the go-to market around to get a little bit more tailwind, a little bit more momentum? Let me ask two questions that we always end with. The first one, and we kind of alluded to this but maybe you had a bit more time to think about it as we chatted, which is, when was the first time that you felt like you had true product market fit?

00:37:45.119 --> 00:39:00.519
The memory that comes to mind was I was at my desk at this dingy office that we had rented and got a call back, one of the automakers that we had been pitching. And I can't remember if this was maybe the third one. Basically, it was like, hey, yeah, we're in, right? I got the call back that hey, we want to do this, right? And there was still some details that had to be ironed out. It's one – maybe it's luck, right? If you can get some – one customer, maybe it's luck. You get two, it's like, oh. And then you get three. It's like, that's it. That's the pattern now, right? I remember the moment, getting that call. It was like one of those entrepreneurial moments that I live for. I don't know if you golf. But it's kind of like one of those things where when hit that one perfect shot, it keeps you coming back for more. That's the mountain top for me as a founder, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur where we felt breakthrough, or I felt breakthrough in that moment where we – I knew we were doing something valuable because a third customer, major customer just decided to send me a lot of money for a solution that we're delivering. And we knew we were on the right track at that point.

00:39:17.639 --> 00:39:40.840
I love that. I mean, being a founder fundamentally is all about turning an idea to reality. And that happens once customers buy and adopt the product. So the feeling you get when that happens is irreplaceable. Last question is, if you could go back and kind of – maybe you're doing this because you're starting a second one. But if you could go back to the early days taking everything now, what's one piece of advice you would give yourself 11, 12 years ago?

00:39:44.949 --> 00:41:10.199
Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned it earlier. I'll expand on it. I think it's like, know what you are good at and what you are built for, right? I think, as you mentioned, as I think about what's next and,explore all kinds of different ideas and opportunities. There's really cool stuff out there that I'm like, oh man, wouldn't it be interesting to do that? Or that seems like such a really cool idea, right? Really understanding what my strengths are, right, as an entrepreneur. You’ve got to build the business that, and I think you said it well earlier, that fits you, that this founder fit for. I think we learned that in hindsight in the earlier part of our journey. You have to deeply have conviction about where a market is going. And I think that was one thing that held true through our entire journey. We knew that the car buying experience was broken. We knew that it could – it needed to be better and it would be better. And we knew that technology was going to modernize a lot of it. And a decade later, that all played true, right? How we actually created value in solving that evolved over time. But if we got anything right, was like we picked the market that we had deep conviction on that it was going to go a certain direction. And we stayed. You have to – what was that saying that you had, you have to be in market to –

00:41:14.679 --> 00:41:15.960
You have to be in the market to win the market, yes.

00:41:16.019 --> 00:42:03.800
You have to be in the market to win the market, right? So we got that part, right? We picked the space that was – we knew it was going to go in a certain direction. How we went about it at the beginning, you could say maybe we picked wrong, right? Maybe if we were better at sussing out that early concept, we may have done things differently. I don't really regret any of it, as I said. Because it led to the right place. But we were right in the market. We were persistent in staying that – in that market, persistent in staying in that market, but not ignorant to signs when it wasn't working, right? Or wasn't growing to the potential that we thought we could capture. So I'd say, yeah, know what you're good at and what you're built for and pick a market and a company and an approach that fits that. And then to have deep conviction about where space is going and get in that space and stay in that space.