He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails

Pablo Srugo (00:00:00) :
When did you feel you had found true product market fit?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:00:03) :
In that week that we sold four customers in one week, it was almost the same amount of customers that we had in five years, and this outbound motion took us from zero to $1 million in the first year, second year from $1 million to $5 million, and the third, we got to almost $20 million in the outbound. At some point in the third year, we started to develop also the inbound, but the outbound. One hundred percent outbound, took us from zero to at least $15 million a year. I think the most important thing in building a company is to start rolling the ball, right? You need some traction that you can start the momentum of, okay, I listen, I hear, I fix, I listen again, I fix again.

Previous Guests (00:00:53) :
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 (00:01:06) :
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. Didi, welcome to the show.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:01:22) :
Thank you for having me.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:23) :
I'm excited to do this, man. So, you know, you're the founder of Datarails. We have these days actually more and more of these just insane ramp companies where they're hitting a billion in two years. Stuff that I had never seen before, certainly not in the B2B world. It is like not normal, right? Wiz was, you know, the first one to do it in an insanely fast way and then there's so many that have come, and it's still the outliers. But the reality of it is, for the ninety-nine percent of businesses that do succeed and do get big, it is a ten year journey, and I think you're a great example of that. You started, if I'm not wrong, in 2015, correct?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:02:00) :
Yes in 2015, and then we spend actually five years before we found the product market fit and started to grow. So you can split our journey for a very clear to a part.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:14) :
And this is much closer to the reality. And a lot of the time, especially because the headlines focus on the insane stories. As a founder coming into it, you can have wrong expectations. I mean, most startups don't work at all. Forget it, they just don't work out. But even the ones that do tend to take a long time. So maybe give us a little bit of that background. If you go to that 2014 - 2015 era, what were you doing, and what led to the start of Datarails?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:02:42) :
Yeah, so in my background, I'm a software engineer from a very, very early age. I was in an engineering position, a team leader, VP of R&D, then I moved to a more management position as a COO, and then I worked in a company that was acquired by Cisco. And I spent a few years in Cisco as a general manager and managed a large business unit in Cisco in Israel. Then, I decided to leave Cisco and start Datarails and try to solve a problem or an area that I experienced in Cisco. Which is how the big Cisco and every other enterprise can deal with spreadsheets. How they can manage all the data and all the processes that actually run outside of the systems. And that was the thing that I thought would create a significant impact. And I thought that there is a huge potential in trying to solve this huge challenge and problem. And I started Datarails with not even a product, but with a concept. Let's try to connect all the organizational Excel files, all the organizational spreadsheets, into one centralized database and then something good will happen. Then we will have a database. The organization will have control. I can give you the whole pitch that I had back then with all the benefits and the thing that we solve in the world of one billion Excel users, OK.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:20) :
And what was the landscape? Because FP&A, you know, the financial planning kind of area. It gets reinvented all the time. There's a lot of players today, you've got Runway, right? Which maybe the newer ones, maybe five years old or so. And there's probably ones that are newer than that. You had Venice Solutions back then. Maybe, what was around, and what did you see as the key gap that wasn't being filled?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:04:39) :
Yes, so you moved forward very fast from 2015 to 2020. When we founded the company in 2015, honestly, I didn't even know what FP&A was. The solution or the concept, or the technology that we developed was nothing related to finance. It was related to business users that use Excel, that's it. Because when I started the company, I was in the mindset that I need to find a huge and very wide problem. And every conversation that I had with investors, potential investors, advisors said, you need to focus, you need to find one single use case, go vertical. I said, what? Are you crazy? There are one billion Excel users. You want me to give up millions or hundreds of millions of them? I want to solve the whole problem, OK. We tried many angles and use cases and verticals, from compliance to consolidation to aggregation of data and many, many different aspects. Until 2020, when we had another pivot and we got into the FP&A space, then we actually found the product market fit and started to build the company. The go to market, customers, and everything.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:14) :
So then tell me a little bit more, we'll jump into the second half of the story, you know, post kind of finding FP&A and getting product market fit there. But maybe what was the first kind of use case, the first idea of what you wanted to solve, you know, out of Excel?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:06:27) :
Okay, so we had, and until today it is one of our core technology advantage. Is the ability to connect Excel to a database. This is the core promise of Datarails. You have the flexibility of Excel and the robustness and the power of a database. And once you connect these two pieces, you get something with endless capabilities. And when we shifted, and pivoted the company to the FP&A space, we actually came to the market with a very clear promise. You are a CFO of a two hundred employee company. You have used Excel for fifteen years to run your finance. You will never leave Excel, so all these web-based FP&A solutions, web-based financial systems. You will never even think to move from Excel to the web. We offer you a full blown FP&A system with consolidation, automation, analytics, dashboards, everything, but you can stay with Excel. You can stay not only in Excel, but also keep using your existing templates, existing models, existing spreadsheets. This is a promise that, as a CFO, you almost cannot say no. I mean, this is the solution, how they actually make this technology transformation, digital transformation, from spreadsheet to the cloud but still benefit and enjoy the flexibility, and familiarity of Excel. Keeping the best of both worlds and with this promise, we actually started to build the successful company that we have today. And started to build the product, and the platform, and all the products that we have today. And then we will get to that probably later. What we came from is the journey that we had from this singular point of taking the spreadsheet platform into the FP&A space and then growing, and creating a wide platform solution for the office of the CFO.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:30) :
What was it about connecting Excel to a database that spoke to you back in that 2015 era? What did you think would come out of that, in general? From a user value, generating value perspective?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:08:42) :
So it starts from very day to day challenges of using Excel, from even version control, track changes, understanding where the data came from. So basic problems and challenges of control, and management of the data. So all this area of a problem around data integrity. This is one thing. The second is once the data is in Excel, the data is disconnected. You cannot analyze it. You cannot aggregate it with other data sources. So you look only at one piece of your data, and disconnected from other systems, and also just very flat. Because Excel is flat. There is only one version of the data, you don't have the depth of a database that you can go into in either dimension, historical data, and all the depth, and power of a database. My mindset and my thought was, okay, if we take Excel and keep the flexibility of Excel but connect it with what the database can provide, then we have a monster. Because you can build any model, you can build anything. You know Excel, you know how to use it. Excel is so powerful. You can build whatever you like, but you have all the power and the robustness the database can provide, and then you have a monster. Once we focus on one use case or one vertical of the FP&A. That was the missing piece of creating a company and revenue, and customers and, building the world data platform that we have today.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:26) :
How much did you raise during that five year period, where you were kind of looking for product market fit 2015 to 2020?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:10:33) :
Raise it, I don't know if it's the right term. Because it was more like crafting or digging in the hard rock. It was very challenging. We raised almost $10 million during this time. Not in a one time. We started with half a million dollars, and then $2 million, $3 million, and the challenge to convince our investors that we were onto something big. That was the real feeling that we had, that we were onto something big.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:07) :
Yeah, tell me a bit more about that fundraise because the first one is relatively easy in the sense that you're coming out of Cisco, you've got this idea, normal pre-seed, seed. The second one, maybe you've got a bit of a product. Now, once you're in year two, year three, and you still don't have real inflection points, what story are you telling? I don't know if you remember back then what was happening. Maybe some anecdotes, but how did you manage to raise that extra $5 million or $6 million before you had PMF, but after you'd already been in the market for two, three years?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:11:39) :
Yeah, it's a great question and I do not wish for anyone to go through this process. But I think it starts from a very strong and, let's say, honest belief that we are onto something big. And my job wasn't to come up with a story or use my imagination, but to try to take what I believe inside, convince my investors, and also new investors. That's why I'm so convinced and over time, we had some evidence, not evidence in terms of revenue, or ARR, or metrics. But evidence that, for example, after a few months of development, we were able to bring a very large customer, for an insurance company. A big insurance company, that understood the power of this solution for compliance. That all the spreadsheets are now connected to the database, so they have full control over the versions. We said, OK, we take it. OK, we take it. Now, I couldn't replicate it. I mean, I got to the next one, and it was like a long process. I had one, but it was so quick and they spoke with my champion in this insurance company, and they also understood the potential. And it wasn't the pitch about what I did and why, I could show them the trajectory that I'm on the right way. But I was able to convince them about the potential of what we are doing and I also, I think I had luck that the early investor that joined our journey was smart enough or strong enough to continue to support us. And I'm sure that today they are very happy. But it wasn't easy, not for us and also not for them. They used to tell me that we are the black sheep of their portfolio. You know, they have these annual events, you come with a nice, and you know that you are the black sheep of their portfolio. You don't show any revenue, you don't show any success, no KPIs, just stories.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:56) :
Late bloomers are maybe more common than you think, but it does take a certain amount of resilience and kind of survivorship, right? Because you have to go through some painful times. Tell me about the story of ultimately unlocking this FP&A vertical. How did you end up there?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:14:12) :
So we collected evidence. We had five, six customers from different use cases, different size of companies.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:20) :
What kind of revenue did you have like at that time?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:14:23) :
$100k ARR or so, nothing, five customers. 

Pablo Srugo (00:14:27) :
Gotcha.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:14:28) :
And we saw that one of the things that customers are really, really happy of, is the consolidation. Consolidation of data. They take data from one system, export to Excel, take it from another system, export to Excel, and when the data join together. Now they have something that they couldn't see before. It was pretty clear that this is a very interesting and strong capability of our platform. When we pitch our solution to potential customers, we started to focus more and more on the consolidation. And we also identified that the reaction for finance people today looks almost obvious, but for us it was pretty new. That finance people have a different relationship with Excel. If you speak with the CIO of the company, you speak with the typical business user, they use Excel but their dream is to get rid of Excel, right.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:33) :
Yeah, they don't love Excel. They don't live in Excel, yeah.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:15:35) :
Yeah, you know what they call it in Microsoft? They call Excel the second best option for anything. This is always the second best tool and so when you go outside of the finance department. They use Excel, but they want to replace it. Finance people want to stay with Excel because it's more than just a tool, this is part of their skills, right? Finance person, one of the things that the product says is "I'm an Excel master," right? So finance people, consolidation and then from these two conclusions, you get very clear, the path to FP&A is very clear. Because FP&A is the classic consolidation use case. Classic, every end of month, the FP&A needs to collect data from multiple systems, consolidate it, and now they can start working on their analysis, reporting, and everything. So these three pieces, finance people, consolidation, and now the FP&A use case. We started to sell to the FP&A and from there, it was very clear that we are on a perfect product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:48) :
This is a bit of an unfair question and hypothetical, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I'm sure people are thinking it, you know? If you talk about Excel and you talk about connecting Excel to a database, you know, finance and even FP&A more specifically. But certainly finance becomes like, oh yeah, obviously this is where you should go, right? Because you said it may be obvious. Do you think you could have found it faster? Is there a reason it took five years? When you go back and think, hindsight 2020, right? About that era, what comes to mind?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:17:13) :
I think that if we were smart enough to start with finance, and, you know, it's very. It's impossible to do the rest perspective, the entire journey. But I think that over these five years, we learned a lot and we developed a lot. I think that the depth of the technology, the platform that we developed, we would never have invested so much in a robust platform that connects a spreadsheet to a database and you can look at our competitors. They have some Excel integration, this and that, but no one is, I would say, stupid enough to invest so much in this capability without this wrong move, maybe. But building a platform where this is the only or the one and only advantage of the platform. And after five years, we developed such a robust connectivity with an excellent database, and then we moved to the FP&A. Now we had something that no one else even gets close to this capability.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:26) :
I’m going to ask you for a small favor, tiny little favor. In fact, it’s not even, now that I think about it. It’s not even really a favor for me. I’m actually trying to help you do a favor for you. Just hit the follow button. You won’t miss out on the next episode. You’ll see everything that we release. If you don’t want to listen to an episode, you just skip it, but at least you don’t miss out. To that point, because there are others. You mentioned before, nobody wants to leave Excel, and there are FP&A tools that try to get people to leave Excel. But there are others, I think Venna might be one of them, that are Excel based FP&A tools. What was in the market in 2020, and what did you have that some of those other closer competitors maybe didn’t?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:19:03) :
So I think Venna was in a pretty advanced stage at this point. I don't know exactly, but probably tens of millions of dollars ARR with a significant number of customers. When we came, we came with such a compelling and impressive technology with this capability that we beat them in every deal. In every deal, we beat them because they couldn't even get close to what we offer with this connectivity between Excel and a database.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:33) :
Even if they were Excel based, they didn't have the same level of consolidation? Because I would imagine that would be the whole point of an FP&A tool.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:19:39) :
Consolidation, connectivity, two ways of connectivity, between Excel and database, supporting existing spreadsheets. I mean, you get to an FP&A department of, I don't know, a factory, twenty year old company. Sometimes the same finance team that worked for more than ten years in the company. They use models and templates, and Excel files that, you know, started ten years ago. The same files. Now, I can offer a product that uses Excel, but I will have to replace them, replace their existing files. They need to build them bottom up again. We offer them to connect the same spreadsheets. So for them, the implementation and the learning curve is almost immediate. Because they use the same templates. So the barrier to start using a database and to implement a database is very, very easy to pass and this is the competitive edge that this platform, with this unique capability of Excel-database connectivity, gave us a very significant competitive edge.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:49) :
Can you tell me the story of kind of the first or one of the first FP&A customers that you closed.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:20:55) :
Yeah, we like all the stories of a product market fit in a company. The money went out, you know, we had maybe a full month of runway, and we just said, another extension from our existing wonderful investors. We tried, I don't remember what kind of pivot, but another pivot of something, and I went to meet one of our investors and told him, look, the pivot that was the reason why they gave us this extension is not going well. So we have two options. One, you can take your money back, what's left of it, we can close the company. This is one option, the second option, we want to check to try another pivot. What is the pivot? The FP&A space, OK, but you gave me the money for one reason. I now use it for a different reason. So I'm very transparent with you. It's your decision. He says, OK, try it. OK, we had one SDR that left in the company. He was the only native English speaker in the company. So we told him, OK, congratulations, you are now an account executive and you are going to sell our product. And we started to generate leads for FP&A with LinkedIn and, you know, some manual picking. And then he started to sell FP&A. He started on Monday, and until Friday, we had four new customers.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:32) :
Wow.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:22:33) :
And we said, OK, there is no question we are on something here.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:37) :
First of all, how did he get these meetings in the first place?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:22:41) :
So we, the founders, we actually sat on LinkedIn approaching people and said, OK, come to a meeting. We have something to show you.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:50) :
But you didn't do the sale. You asked this AE to do the sale for you?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:22:53) :
No, I, as you can hear, my accent and my English, and then when I started the company, my English, it was even there a little bit. We said to the U.S. market, "This is our market." So this guy, before, he was a SDR. He was a salesman in a clothes store.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:14) :
Wow, retail, that's crazy.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:23:16) :
Yeah, in retail and he started to sell the FP&A.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:21) :
And what size of contracts were these four, these first four?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:23:24) :
Okay, so this is an important topic and I think a smart decision that we made back then. We decided, and you know, when you're with your back to the wall, you make better decisions. We decided we are going to remove any obstacles, any barrier, we move from the sale in order to focus only on finding the product market fit. I'm not trying to optimize revenue, to optimize contract size, nothing. Just let's see that we have some repetitive process that we can bring customers that actually love what we are selling. That's it, that was it. So we decided, okay, first, price. The price was hundreds of dollars monthly. We said, OK, no long-term commitment. You can sign on a monthly basis. OK, just swipe the credit card, that's it. So it was $7.90 a month. That was the price, the initial price. That's it, $7.90.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:27) :
Like, $800 a month? That's what you're saying?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:24:29) :
Yeah, $800 a month. It's not significant money, not for us and not for the customer. But it's enough money that it's not a decision that, "OK, I will try it." It's not a $10 trial. It's still something that's $800. It's something. I think that if we tried back then to optimize the price and say, "OK, let's do an annual contract over $15K or something more reasonable," when you think about an FP&A product. I'm not sure that we would have had the chance even to see so fast that we are on the right path and moving these barriers was, I think, a very smart decision. Retrospectively, I would do it even before, that every pivot that I'm doing. Everything, in order to find and to optimize the time, to find the mistakes, and to realize that you're in the wrong direction, also to move all the barriers, price, process, anything. Just to see first that you're on the right path. Then, from then, now you have something to work with, increase price, different contract size, you have process to start some marketing and all these other elements that are more doable, right? The thing that you have no structure and you have no process to find is the product market fit. So once we understood that this is the most important thing in the world to find a product market fit, it helped us to make this decision.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:02) :
You know, one of the things in that early stage that is very important is founder led sales, and one of the reasons is the feedback loop between trying something, seeing something, and feeling that reaction of the customer is instant. Obviously, in your case, you weren't able to do that for language barrier reasons. Did you do something else? Did you record all the calls? Did you watch the calls? How did you try to get as much signal from these early interactions as possible?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:26:28) :
So first, before we started to sell the FP&A for $800 a month. I spent weeks, if not months, in New York, in San Francisco, and meet any potential customer, different size of companies, different, and try to sell it.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:47) :
In FP&A, or this was when you were still doing different verticals, different pieces?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:26:51) :
When we understood the platform.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:53) :
Gotcha.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:26:54) :
When we understood, realized that we need to create some process here and approach people with inside sales, and do it over the phone. Then I said, okay, if we are over the phone and we need some very strong engagement, and very strong selling capabilities here. I cannot be the front of the company and I need a native English speaker that goes with the sales pitch correctly. Of course, you can imagine that all of us were on, even GONG wasn't even founded there. It was still even Zoom, we used go to meetings or something, I don't remember. But we were on the call, listening to everything, sometimes waving to this guy with some suggestions, writing on the notes, say this, say that. But yeah, we were very, very close to everything in the sales process, of course.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:54) :
Is the classic things that don't scale, right? You got three people trying to sell an $800 a month contract. Part of it is getting the sale and part of it is learning as much as possible from those early interactions. A lot of these things are subtleties, right? Where do they dig in and get really interested? What questions do they ask? When do the eyes light up? I mean, capturing those moments because you're in this refining motion and you're trying to figure out your messaging, your positioning, and even, frankly, your feature set longer term. Where are you gonna double down and stuff? And so, how do you get that feedback loop as tight as humanly possible? I think one of the most important things in finding product market fit that I've come across is cycle speed, right? Just how fast is each cycle from trying something, seeing something, changing something, and keeping that loop spinning. Because you never have infinite time. Like you said, you have a back against the wall always, one way or another, and you don't really know until you test the thing. And so, finding a way to keep that spinning as fast as possible, I think, is critical in those stages.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:28:56) :
Yeah, I think the most important thing in building a company is to start rolling the ball, right? You need some traction that you can start the momentum of, okay, I listen, I hear, I fix, I listen again, I fix again, I listen and this process, as you said, this is the most important thing. And I think that sometimes even, you know, it's also the same thing that we did. You try to gain too many things at the first place. Try to gain, I want the revenue, I want the contracts, I want the process, I want the scalability. No, you can't, you can't. Still, I think that what worked for us is first start the momentum, start getting some traction because once you have the traction, you have something to try to develop, start to scale. Now you have the process, you have the product, you have the feedback, you have the price, and you have the evidence even to bring more money, right? From this point, it was much easier to bring money because, okay, we have something. It's not yet about the metrics, ARR, LTV, CAC LTV, who cares at this stage? It's about, okay, we have evidence that we found product market fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:14) :
From that moment until that week where you signed four customers until you hit about a million ARR, how long did that take?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:30:19) :
Eleven months.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:21) :
Maybe tell me a little bit about the go to market in, that kind of going from there to a million ARR. Maybe a million to $3 million, like that's still very early phase. What were you doing? What worked for you guys?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:30:30) :
Once we understood that we have this product market fit and we have a unique advantage in the market, so we were focused on two directions. One is the product, because we had the platform. We didn't have an FP&A product. We had the platform. So we had to shift our R&D. We had five people, right? R&D, five people, but to shift their focus from building the platform to building a product. So we started to hire FP&A experts. We had, you know, knowledge and experience in FP&A, so we hired an expert. This is one area. The second one is we, the founders, were focused on building the process, and we started to build a very powerful outbound motion. And we developed some strong capability on how to approach the market and get first contacts, right? We didn't want to use ZoomInfo or Lucia or all these because the quality of the leads was not very.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:35) :
Questionable.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:31:36) :
Exactly. So we actually worked with the founders mainly on LinkedIn and approached people. Approached people. The potential customer, it’s very easy to slice and dice the market on LinkedIn. Because, OK, I want CFOs from companies between fifty employees to five hundred employees, these verticals and we actually had a huge spreadsheet with all the metrics of territory, company size, and then we split the LinkedIn work. And I even let my kids work overnight on LinkedIn and just hitting, OK, connect, connect, connect, connect, endlessly. Those days LinkedIn was less strict with how many connections and invitations you could send on a daily basis. And we started to approach the market, outbound, outreach, and generate enough leads to start feeding Salesforce. We had one, so it wasn’t so easy to fill his calendar and then we started to hire more and more and more. And this outbound motion took us from zero to $1 million in the first year, second year from $1 million to $5 million. And the third, we got all to almost $20 million in outbound. At some point in the third year, we started to develop also the inbound, but the outbound, one hundred percent outbound, took us from zero to at least $15 million later on.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:07) :
How much of those first couple years were you selling to customers that had no solution, versus trying to rip out a different FP&A solution and bring them on to Datarails?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:33:18) :
So the interesting thing about the FP&A market in mid-size companies, in the mid-market, is that this market is almost untouched. Even today, there are many competitors and many players. So if you look at the North America market, mid-size companies. You have, let's say, five hundred thousand companies, and you can total up the entire customer base of all the players of the FP&A, including Datarails. You will get to, let's say, fifteen thousand customers, OK, or twenty.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:46) :
Interesting.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:33:47) :
So all the rest are using Excel so still the market is untouched the potential there is huge with all the challenges of course getting the mid market with the customer acquisition calls and the retention but the market as a potential untouched market is enormous, is huge.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:06) :
And, you know, since then. Obviously you've grown a lot. You just raised a fresh $75 million Series C. So things are still, you know, up and to the right. Maybe as a key kind of defining moment, if you could tell me about when did you feel personally like you had found true product market fit?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:34:22) :
In that week, that we sold four customers in one week. It was almost the same amount of customers that we had in five years. So in five days, we acquired four new customers. It was so strong and convincing evidence that it was almost eight.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:45) :
You know, it's easy to look back and say, OK, well, we had to go through five hard years. And then, you know, when you think about time like that. Now when you're living in the moment, every day can be, you know, a huge challenge. Do you remember a particular time, especially in those first five years, where you actually thought, you know what, this might just not work out. Maybe we'll just wrap it up and fail?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:35:04) :
I think that one of the things that you don't have, maybe the freedom or the liberty to have when you start your first company at the age of, I started at the age of forty two. So, you cannot fail, you can't. If you start a company at thirty, thirty five. OK, you start one company, you fail, and you start the second one, and you have two, maybe three rounds of trials. I had no even option to fail and I think the mindset that I wear is that there is not even a question. I was one hundred percent convinced that I can build something big based on the same concept that I started this company. I think that what helped us to succeed eventually is that this belief, or call it optimism or whatever. Came along with being very honest and viewing the current reality, the brutal reality, the brutal facts. Without some glorification, I said that everything. But look at what works, what doesn't work, what are strong parameters in what we see, what are the problems, the challenges and I think that this is what helped us. Not just holding the optimism and saying, OK, it will be OK, but still working very, very hard on the pivoting and the changing, and trying to evolve. And still looking again, and again, and again on the potential product market fit until we found the product market fit. And we're still looking every day. We are the founders of this company. Every day we look at the company, and it's very rare to find us satisfied, very rare. Celebrating, even when we raise money, when we hit a milestone, we always focus or look at the brutal reality. And I believe we identify or look very carefully at what brought us here and what are still the things that we need to fix, we need to improve, and the challenges.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:20) :
And last question, what would be your top advice for an early stage founder that's looking for product market fit?

Didi Gurfinkel (00:37:27) :
The great advice for any founder is to find the best co-founder that they can. I mean, it's not a journey that you can do alone. It's not, it's not, it's something that you can do only as a team. Especially when you have so many things that are changing and you need, in every junction, in every decision point, you need more than one opinion. And so I would stick to this advice. Co-founders, this is the key, key, key factor to success.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:58) :
Perfect. Well, Didi, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great having you.

Didi Gurfinkel (00:38:02) :
Thank you, thank you very much.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:04) :
Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.