March 14, 2023
Aydin Mirzaee, Founder of Fluidware (Bootstrapped to ~$100M exit) | How to Find Product Market Fit
There's nothing quite like going from 0 to an 8-figure+ acquisition, especially on your first startup. And 100% bootstrapped! Aydin, the founder of Fluidware and now founder of Fellow, shares the story of his humble beginnings as a Jr Engineer, to launching a startup that would compete with SurveyMonkey and ultimately join their ranks. Notably, Aydin never raised money at Fluidware. While it had its downside, it enabled him and his team to solve customer problems without worrying abou...
There's nothing quite like going from 0 to an 8-figure+ acquisition, especially on your first startup. And 100% bootstrapped!
Aydin, the founder of Fluidware and now founder of Fellow, shares the story of his humble beginnings as a Jr Engineer, to launching a startup that would compete with SurveyMonkey and ultimately join their ranks.
Notably, Aydin never raised money at Fluidware. While it had its downside, it enabled him and his team to solve customer problems without worrying about the market size or the big picture. Each step helped them discover new insights and led them closer to product-market fit.
Want to get a feel for what it takes to bootstrap to PMF? Check this episode out.
00:32 - Intro
02:00 - Early days of FluidWare
07:52 - The Fluid Survey Prototype
10:56 - Serendipity is key
13:47 - The First Big Pitch
17:06 - That First Contract
28:17 - Competing with SurveyMonkey
32:31 - Product Market Fit Life Cycle
38:46 - Raising Destroys Optionality
42:47 - Recap
WEBVTT
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Ray Dalio's thing is all like, people think it's all about forecasting, knowing what's going to happen.
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It's really just about reading what's going on today.
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You don't need to know what's going to happen tomorrow.
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It's just if you recognize you're in a really good environment, well, you might as well get some liquidity now.
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Whatever happens, if it's going to be even better i n six months, t hen so be it.
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If it's already really good, j ust capitalize.
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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by M istrial, a seed-stage firm based in Canada.
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I'm Pablo; I'm a founder turned VC.
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My goal is to help early s tage founders like you find product market fit.
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Today we have Aydin, the founder, and CEO of Fellow, a meeting management platform.
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Fellow is based in Ottawa.
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They have about 65 employees and have raised over$30 million.
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Before Fellow, Aydin was a founder of Fluidware, an online survey tool, which was acquired by a SurveyMonkey for high eight figures.
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That's actually the company we're going to be digging in today.
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So first and foremost, welcome, Aydin to the show.
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It's a pleasure having here.
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Yeah, I'm excited.
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I've watched a lot of your previous episodes and you've had a lot of great people on this show.
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So excited to do this.
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Awesome.
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I think it's going to be a really insightful episode.
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Today the topic is a pretty broad topic, how to find product market fit.
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We'll be going through the story of Fluidware and, and the changes that you made throughout to kind of get more and more fit over time.
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I think one of the lessons that'll be apparent today is we tend to think of product market fit as a single point in time, your pre-product market fit, and then your post-product market fit, and you're done.
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The reality is in talking to many guests through the show is that that process really never ends.
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The market is constantly evolving, and so your product has to constantly evolve to keep up with it as you open new channels, as the competitive landscape changes and so on.
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That's, I think, what will come out through this story.
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Maybe just for starters, if you could take us all the way back to the early days of Fluidware how did you come up with the idea and what was kind of the-- what did the landscape look like at that point in time?
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Yeah, I mean, I think that was a long time ago, but I think that we did a lot of things that I would never do again.
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I mean, it's a long story.
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So we had a lot of pivots before we narrowed in on working on online surveys.
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To save you a lot of the back and forth that went there, what I will say is that when we decided that we wanted to work on an online survey product and once we figured out that that's the thing that we wanted to do, I didn't so much as search on Google to see how many other online survey tools there were, because had I searched on Google to see how many other survey tools there were, I would've told my other co-founders hey, we probably shouldn't do this because there's 10 pages worth of search results of other online survey tools.
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It's so common that as a matter of fact, when you first learn how to program or you become a developer, one of the first things that people often learn how to do is to make an online poll.
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This is one of the most commonplace things that exist, one of the most commoditized areas of software.
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Here we were.
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We were going to do-- build the same thing.
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I think notionally, we had heard of the-- we had heard of SurveyMonkey, but this is kind of how naive we were.
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We didn't so much as just look to see if there are other tools that basically do this and how many there are.
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We basically had an idea and we wanted to build a much easier online survey creation process.
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We started to do that.
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We thought that there would be-- there was a lot of new changes that were going on and now a lot of things were moving to SaaS.
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SaaS was still new back then, so it's not like everything had become SaaS software.
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So we had this idea of we're going to take survey software and we're going to build a SaaS-based survey tool, but what we're going to do is we're going to make it super easy to use and create.
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Very specifically back then, I mean, we're talking about the year 2008 now, so it was a long time ago.
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To have basic authoring tools-- a drag-and-drop editor was super novel.
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So if you saw something like that, whoa, you can build a survey by dragging in question types, moving them around, editing them, and then seeing the changes live as you're making those changes, that would've been novel.
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Even to the extent that you were building an online-- that you had used an online survey tool, to do anything would've been multiple clicks.
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It would've been like, click to add, click here, click here.
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There'd be nine clicks before you could do anything.
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So there was a lot to be developed just on making it an easy to use way to do things.
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Was that something that you-- I get it.
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At first you didn't really even look into it, but I'm sure pretty quickly you realized there were other players.
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That's something that you dissected and started looking at the other products and said, oh, we can improve in this and that, or how did that even come about that you decided to do this kind of easy to use drag-and-rop editor and the other ones were a bit more complicated
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Yeah, I mean the story's pretty long one, but I think we-- the original idea of the company was something else.
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We were going to build this other-- yeah, we were going to build this other product.
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The original company was actually called-- this other tool called-- we originally called it Chidet.
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It was supposed to be the world's first anti-social network.
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It was about creating a place where people could post ideas and have other people criticize it and offer feedback, right?
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So that was the first thing that we wanted to do, the very first idea.
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As we started to research into that and start building the first versions of it and started showing it to users and to customers, everyone hated it, right?
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What they didn't like was the word-- they didn't like the word criticism.
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They didn't like the idea of, hey, we're going to post stuff on this website and other people would criticize it.
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So we quickly moved away from criticism and said, okay, well, what if we called it feedback?
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Would people be more interested in a feedback platform?
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As we started talking about a feedback platform, people would say things like, well, I don't know if feedback is the right thing.
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We do surveys.
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Is that what you can help with?
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We do this type of survey and that type of survey.
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That was something that they were definitely interested in.
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Again, this was a long time ago, so a lot of the surveys would still be done.
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There was a lot of pen and paper surveys.
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It wasn't like-- online surveys weren't as prevalent as they are today.
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We just saw that there was an opportunity.
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As we were talking to customers or potential customers, there was appetite for an online survey tool.
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We said, okay, well, this thing that we're working on right now is failing, so let's try to build an online survey tool.
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As we were thinking about it, we said, well, there is this other online survey tool.
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There was a couple that were more well-known back then.
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One was obviously SurveyMonkey.
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The other one was Zoomerang.
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When we looked at those tools, we just thought-- saw that in the state of where web development was at that time, there was the new frontier where you could build these very dynamic interfaces.
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By the way, building a dynamic interface was really hard, too, because you had old browsers like Internet Explorer 6 that most people were still using.
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To do a lot of these things, you really had to think about cross-browser compatibility.
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You had the different browser types.
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We thought that the value that we would be able to add in order to differentiate was to build a much easier, a much better survey creation environment.
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So it would just be a lot easier to build surveys on our product, which was called FluidSurveys, versus any other product.
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That's how we thought about it.
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Got it.
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Okay, perfect.
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What did-- what kind of market-- I mean, you talked to a few customers.
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You had identified there was this pain point.
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What's your first idea of who you're even selling this survey tool to?
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Yeah, so again, when we first started, I don't know that we had really good ideas around all of this stuff.
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We just started talking to everybody that we could, right?
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As we were starting to talk to people, once we had the first prototype available-- again, the very first prototypes were quite modest.
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I think we had three or four question types.
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W had an interface and you can drag questions in from the left onto the right and move them around and you could change the fields dynamically and publish the survey.
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We built this thing that looked really good.
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It looked like something that was easy to use.
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As we started to show this to other people, they would say, oh, that looks really interesting.
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Yeah, I've never seen people do that in the browser where you could drag and drop questions.
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That seems pretty novel, right?
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Then we would ask them the question of okay, so you say that this is easy to use and what are you using today?
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They'd say, oh, we're using SurveyMonkey as an example.
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We'd say, okay, since ours is way easier to use, would you be willing to switch away from your current product.
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They say, well no.
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We'd say, why?
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They'd say, well, I know yours is easier to use, but the truth is we're already using this tool and we know how to use it and we've got our data in it and we've got all these things.
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It's just not enough.
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It's not enough of a differentiator for us to switch off our current platform.
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Maybe if we were looking from scratch and we were looking for something, then maybe we'd consider FluidSurveys, but since we're already on this platform, this is not a thing that we want to do.
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Of course this was pretty disappointing.
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Again, not knowing very much about business at all, we spent a bunch of time building this thing and then going to customers after the fact and all on the hypothesis, not really talking to very many people and then being shut down.
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To be honest, it was very depressing.
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Those very, very early days.
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I remember I used to-- just the backstory of this, I used to work at Nortel, and so I remember leaving Nortel and having probably, I would say, 10 to 12 months of savings.
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I could live off of that for that amount of time.
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As the months passed by, you're looking at this and you're like, oh, my savings, they're less and less and less.
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It's your personal runway, yeah.
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Yeah, it's your personal runway.
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We never raised money for this company.
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It's very stressful.
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What happened was-- it was a very lucky series of events, but we were working at-- Algonquin College had this program, the applied research program, and they let us work out of their classrooms.
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So we were effectively getting free office space.
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It was summertime.
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There weren't as many students who were working out of there.
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We met this one professor who was a professor School of Business and he had this contact at the federal government and he said,"Oh, you're working on surveys.
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I can introduce you to this guy at the federal government who is-- who does stuff with surveys.
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He into public opinion research." We didn't-- at that point we would've met with anyone.
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Anyone you would've introduced us to, we would've met with.
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So we meet with this guy and we do our standard demo and there's not that much to show, but it's hey, you can drag and drop things and it's easy.
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It's easier than anything else out there.
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He looked at that and he's like,"Okay, that's coo, but more importantly, where do you host your data?" We said,"Well, I mean, we host our data in this server at our house." I mean, we said we hosted on a server.
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He's like,"But is it in Canada?" And we said,"Yeah, yeah, it's in Canada." We didn't have AWS or cloud computing.
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It's very early on.
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Then he asked us another question which was,"Okay, when you create a survey using this tool, is it accessible?" We were like,"What do you mean?
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What's that?" He's like,"Well, there's these accessibility guidelines.
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They're new.
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The federal government recently implemented these rules so that Canadian citizens, when they visit websites of the government of Canada, they can access these things.
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So if you're visually impaired and you're using the screen reader, then you will be be able to see and read the content." He said,"Well, are your surveys accessible?" We said,"Well, no, but I mean, that's easy.
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We can make that happen, no problem." Of course, we didn't necessarily know that much, but he's like,"Oh, really?""If your surveys are accessible, then I need to introduce you to some more people." We said, okay, sure, introduce us to more people.
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At some point, I hope one of these people actually buys the software.
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That'd be really nice.
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We went away and we started to work on some of this accessibility guidelines and it turned out there was a series of things.
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The government called those things common look and feel.
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We had to make some other changes.
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It's really-- I don't know that it's the type of work that developers are super excited to do, but it was-- didn't have that much runway, so this was our best shot, and so we did that.
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Then we get invited to this meeting.
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We get a calendar invite and we don't know what we're walking into.
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This is the most random thing, but we get invited into this room and there's like 20 or 25 people.
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It happens to be the heads of public opinion research at each and every one of the federal government departments in Canada.
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All of the decision-makers that buy survey software across the federal government of Canada, we're all in one room.
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Then they're like, okay, show us this demo.
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He starts off by saying,"This tool is hosted in Canada and it's accessible and meet your common look and feel guidelines." That was maybe stretching the truth a little bit at the time.
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Then we start to do a demo.
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Again, this is very begin-- we had four question types.
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There's not that much to demo.
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We have an hour-long meeting and we hadn't built the other things.
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When you create a survey, then you deploy it.
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There's some deployment settings and then there are things like you have to analyze the data; you have to send it out.
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There's all this stuff, and we had built none of those things.
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We had the authoring and then you could see the survey and there wasn't much else.
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I spent so much time talking about the very little-- those four or five question types and just-- I don't know.
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We took up that time so that there was very little time for them to ask us about the other things.
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Then when they asked, they were like,"Okay, well, you haven't showed us any of the analysis yet." I said,"Well, if you like what you see here, when we show you the other stuff, you're going to love that." It was-- anyway, so the demo went really well, but then someone asked the question about pricing, like tell us about your pricing.
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Up until now, believe it or not, we had not thought about pricing.
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My co-founder Ellie Fati-- Ellie was-- he's 33 years older than I am.
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He's a been there, done that guy.
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I turned to him and I said,"Pricing," and I looked to him and then I got worried because he also hadn't thought about pricing We were all caught off guard.
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Then the person asked us the question,"Is it less than$25,000?" We paused and we're like, 25, 000?
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That's like so much money.
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What do you mean?
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Then he is like,"Oh, yeah, because that's the threshold after which you have to get this other type of approval." We're like, oh, yeah, it's no problem, under 25,000.
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So anyway, that was our first thing.
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I think we walked out, Ellie and I started high fiving.
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We thought we'd made it.
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We started doing the math.
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There's 25 people in the room, 25,000 each.
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This is the greatest day.
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This startup stuff is so easy.
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Is that all we had to do?
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Everything is going so great.
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It turned out it was a lot more complicated.
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What I think was not communicated during that meeting was, oh, everybody was used to getting software and installing it on their own servers.
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This is, again, 2008, so SaaS was not really a thing that the government subscribed to.
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To say that we're going to take Canadian citizen private data and store it on someone else's server that's not in our own firewall was a crazy concept.
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I want to say that we met each one of those departments five times and nobody wanted to take the first step.
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Nobody wanted to take the risk of giving us that first contract.
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I think, Pablo, if I were to say-- there was this one lady at Health Canada and I think she just felt sorry for us.
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She's like-- and she had come from private sector and she was like,"If I don't give these guys a contract, literally they're going to shut down.
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It's going to be over, so I'm going to like take the risk." Then, by the way, this process took a year and a half somehow.
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Remember, I only had one year of runway.
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Stretch that one, yeah.
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Yeah, it had to be stretched.
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Yeah, it was really rough.
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Once we got the first one, then everybody else was more comfortable and we started getting other ones.
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Very soon we had this basis of revenue from the government, from the federal government.
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That's what I would call stage one of the company.
00:18:02.320 --> 00:18:16.480
It was like we had product market fit as a survey tool built for the federal government, not because our software was so great, but because it meant these accessibility guidelines that nobody else met at the time.
00:18:18.040 --> 00:18:20.720
That's what it took for us to get to that first stage.
00:18:21.289 --> 00:18:30.720
Because we had no venture financing, we had nothing, it was like whatever gets us to any form of revenue so that we can survive is good, and so we will do that.
00:18:30.900 --> 00:18:41.680
Let me ask about that because that's exactly the question I had, which is you had product market fit in a niche market and you got it by meeting that niche market specs, which is accessibility and whatnot.
00:18:42.368 --> 00:18:56.319
If you had been a VC-funded startup, let's say you'd raised the pre-seed round or whatever, especially these days when that's so common, I think there's probably going to be a huge pushback against doing any of that, say this is a waste of time.
00:18:56.040 --> 00:18:56.880
Hundred percent, yeah, it's a waste of time.
00:18:56.529 --> 00:19:01.039
Now as we'll learn, Fluidware was ultimately a success.
00:19:01.401 --> 00:19:03.599
This led to the next thing and so on, and we'll go through that.
00:19:03.881 --> 00:19:07.200
Just maybe just to go on a tangent here, what are your thoughts on that?
00:19:07.359 --> 00:19:12.960
In other words, by not being tied to this big market thing, you just went step by step and listened to customers.
00:19:13.079 --> 00:19:17.920
If customers were interested, you just solved that problem and it led to something which then, as we'll see, leads to something else.
00:19:17.921 --> 00:19:21.680
That optionality wouldn't have happened if you were in this VC market world.
00:19:22.420 --> 00:19:28.509
Yeah, I think if you had invested in Fluidware, you would've told us you're not allowed to do that.
00:19:28.510 --> 00:19:30.390
Let's do the math here.
00:19:30.391 --> 00:19:33.868
So 25,000 times 25, what is that?
00:19:35.210 --> 00:19:36.789
625,000.
00:19:38.059 --> 00:19:39.349
That's your whole market.
00:19:39.631 --> 00:19:40.868
You're doing all this for that?
00:19:40.869 --> 00:19:42.190
You can't do this.
00:19:42.710 --> 00:19:42.910
Are you guys crazy?
00:19:42.911 --> 00:19:45.190
You're right.
00:19:45.431 --> 00:19:55.630
We would've been stopped from doing that and we would've-- they would've-- we would've been asked to to dream bigger or look for a bigger market or have some broader strategy.
00:19:56.250 --> 00:20:03.430
Really we were-- I think when you-- I guess where we were, again, we were very inexperienced and young.
00:20:03.431 --> 00:20:06.069
We were just trying to survive.
00:20:06.550 --> 00:20:09.309
For us, it was just like a survival game of how do we do this?
00:20:10.150 --> 00:20:19.029
Remember, I had left my job at Nortel and it was this different place where my parents were like, you're an entrepreneur.
00:20:19.310 --> 00:20:19.789
What is that?
00:20:19.790 --> 00:20:21.630
Is that like you're unemployed?
00:20:21.720 --> 00:20:22.829
It wasn't cool back then.
00:20:24.790 --> 00:20:24.910
Yeah, it wasn't cool back then, right?
00:20:24.790 --> 00:20:29.868
This was a big, risky deal and it was just-- you just wanted to survive, live to see the next day.
00:20:30.911 --> 00:20:32.829
Obviously all this stuff was really good.
00:20:32.830 --> 00:20:37.750
So now we actually had some revenue and because we had some revenue, we kept making the product better.
00:20:37.750 --> 00:20:47.440
The next thing for us was as we were talking to a lot of these users, we start to dig into this we also have to be hosted in Canada thing.
00:20:47.961 --> 00:20:49.000
We're like, what's that about?
00:20:49.840 --> 00:20:52.118
They'd say, well, there's this thing called the Patriot Act.
00:20:52.140 --> 00:21:02.519
Effectively what it means is that if you have Canadian citizen data and it's on an American server, in theory it could be accessed, right?
00:21:03.840 --> 00:21:07.599
Realistically, is anyone going to access this data?
00:21:07.930 --> 00:21:10.279
No, but theoretically it's possible.
00:21:12.000 --> 00:21:14.599
We took that and we said, well, who cares about this?
00:21:14.601 --> 00:21:36.480
They'd say,"Well, anybody who is funded by government in any way, shape or form." So municipal governments, provincial governments, colleges and universities, I would say nonprofits that have government funding of any sort, any sort of public organization would care about this.
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