Aydin Mirzaee, Founder of Fluidware (Bootstrapped to ~$100M exit) | How to Find Product Market Fit

Pablo 0:00 Ray Dalio's thing is all like, people think it's all about forecasting, knowing what's going to happen. It's really just about reading what's going on today. You don't need to know what's going to happen tomorrow. It's just if you recognize you're in a really good environment, well, you might as well get some liquidity now. Whatever happens, if it's going to be even better i n six months, t hen so be it. If it's already really good, j ust capitalize. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by M istrial, a seed-stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo; I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early s tage founders like you find product market fit. Intro Pablo 0:32 Today we have Aydin, the founder, and CEO of Fellow, a meeting management platform. Fellow is based in Ottawa. They have about 65 employees and have raised over $30 million. Before Fellow, Aydin was a founder of Fluidware, an online survey tool, which was acquired by a SurveyMonkey for high eight figures. That's actually the company we're going to be digging in today. So first and foremost, welcome, Aydin to the show. It's a pleasure having here. Aydin 0:58 Yeah, I'm excited . I've watched a lot of your previous episodes and you've had a lot of great people on this show. So excited to do this. Pablo 1:08 Awesome. I think it's going to be a really insightful episode. Today the topic is a pretty broad topic, how to find product market fit. 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. 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. The reality is in talking to many guests through the show is that that process really never ends. 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. That's, I think, what will come out through this story. 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 Early days of FluidWare Pablo 2:00 that point in time? Aydin 2:01 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. I mean, it's a long story. So we had a lot of pivots before we narrowed in on working on online surveys. 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. 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. This is one of the most commonplace things that exist, one of the most commoditized areas of software. Here we were. We were going to do -- build the same thing. I think notionally, we had heard of the -- we had heard of SurveyMonkey, but this is kind of how naive we were. We didn't so much as just look to see if there are other tools that basically do this and how many there are. We basically had an idea and we wanted to build a much easier online survey creation process. We started to do that. 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. SaaS was still new back then, so it's not like everything had become SaaS software. 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. Very specifically back then, I mean, we're talking about the year 2008 now, so it was a long time ago. To have basic authoring tools -- a drag-and-drop editor was super novel. 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. 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. It would've been like, click to add , click here, click here. There'd be nine clicks before you could do anything. So there was a lot to be developed just on making it an easy to use way to do things. Pablo 4:55 Was that something that you -- I get it . At first you didn't really even look into it, but I'm sure pretty quickly you realized there were other players. 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 Aydin 5:13 Yeah, I mean the story's pretty long one, but I think we -- the original idea of the company was something else. We were going to build this other -- yeah, we were going to build this other product. The original company was actually called -- this other tool called -- we originally called it Chidet. It was supposed to be the world's first anti-social network. It was about creating a place where people could post ideas and have other people criticize it and offer feedback, right? So that was the first thing that we wanted to do, the very first idea. 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? What they didn't like was the word -- they didn't like the word criticism. They didn't like the idea of, hey, we're going to post stuff on this website and other people would criticize it. So we quickly moved away from criticism and said, okay, well, what if we called it feedback? Would people be more interested in a feedback platform? As we started talking about a feedback platform, people would say things like, well, I don't know if feedback is the right thing. We do surveys. Is that what you can help with? We do this type of survey and that type of survey. That was something that they were definitely interested in. Again, this was a long time ago, so a lot of the surveys would still be done. There was a lot of pen and paper surveys. It wasn't like -- online surveys weren't as prevalent as they are today. We just saw that there was an opportunity. As we were talking to customers or potential customers, there was appetite for an online survey tool. 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. As we were thinking about it, we said, well, there is this other online survey tool. There was a couple that were more well-known back then. One was obviously SurveyMonkey. The other one was Zoomerang. 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. 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. To do a lot of these things, you really had to think about cross-browser compatibility. You had the different browser types. The Fluid Survey Prototype Aydin 7:53 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. So it would just be a lot easier to build surveys on our product, which was called FluidSurveys, versus any other product. That's how we thought about it. Pablo 8:11 Got it. Okay, perfect. What did -- what kind of market -- I mean, you talked to a few customers. You had identified there was this pain point. What's your first idea of who you're even selling this survey tool to ? Aydin 8:24 Yeah, so again, when we first started, I don't know that we had really good ideas around all of this stuff. We just started talking to everybody that we could, right? As we were starting to talk to people, once we had the first prototype available -- again, the very first prototypes were quite modest. I think we had three or four question types. 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. We built this thing that looked really good. It looked like something that was easy to use. As we started to show this to other people , they would say, oh, that looks really interesting. Yeah, I've never seen people do that in the browser where you could drag and drop questions. That seems pretty novel, right? Then we would ask them the question of okay, so you say that this is easy to use and what are you using today? They'd say, oh, we're using SurveyMonkey as an example. We'd say, okay, since ours is way easier to use, would you be willing to switch away from your current product. They say, well no. We'd say, why? 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. It's just not enough. It's not enough of a differentiator for us to switch off our current platform. 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. Of course this was pretty disappointing. 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. To be honest, it was very depressing. Those very , very early days. 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. I could live off of that for that amount of time. As the months passed by, you're looking at this and you're like, oh, my savings, they're less and less and less. Pablo 10:52 It's your personal runway, yeah. Aydin 10:54 Yeah, it's your personal runway. We Serendipity is key Aydin 10:56 never raised money for this company. It's very stressful. 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. So we were effectively getting free office space. It was summertime. There weren't as many students who were working out of there. 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. I can introduce you to this guy at the federal government who is -- who does stuff with surveys. He into public opinion research." We didn't -- at that point we would've met with anyone. Anyone you would've introduced us to, we would've met with. 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. It's easier than anything else out there. 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. 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. It's very early on. 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? What's that?" He's like , "Well, there's these accessibility guidelines. They're new. 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. 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. 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. At some point, I hope one of these people actually buys the software. That'd be really nice. We went away and we started to work on some of this accessibility guidelines and it turned out there was a series of things. The government called those things common look and feel. We had to make some other changes. 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. The First Big Pitch Aydin 13:47 Then we get invited to this meeting. We get a calendar invite and we don't know what we're walking into. This is the most random thing, but we get invited into this room and there's like 20 or 25 people. It happens to be the heads of public opinion research at each and every one of the federal government departments in Canada. All of the decision-makers that buy survey software across the federal government of Canada, we're all in one room. Then they're like, okay, show us this demo. 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. Then we start to do a demo. Again, this is very begin -- we had four question types. There's not that much to demo. We have an hour-long meeting and we hadn't built the other things. When you create a survey, then you deploy it. There's some deployment settings and then there are things like you have to analyze the data; you have to send it out. There's all this stuff, and we had built none of those things. We had the authoring and then you could see the survey and there wasn't much else. I spent so much time talking about the very little -- those four or five question types and just -- I don't know. We took up that time so that there was very little time for them to ask us about the other things. 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. Up until now, believe it or not, we had not thought about pricing. My co-founder Ellie Fati -- Ellie was -- he's 33 years older than I am. He's a been there, done that guy. 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. Then the person asked us the question, "Is it less than $25,000?" We paused and we're like, 25, 000? That's like so much money. What do you mean? 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. So anyway, that was our first thing. I think we walked out, Ellie and I started high fiving. We thought we'd made it. We started doing the math. There's 25 people in the room, 25,000 each. This is the greatest day. This startup stuff is so easy. Is that all we had to do? Everything is going so great. It turned out it was a lot more complicated. What I think was not communicated during that meeting was, oh, everybody was used to getting software and installing it on their own servers. This is, again , 2008, so SaaS was not really a thing that the government subscribed to. 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. That First Contract Aydin 17:06 I want to say that we met each one of those departments five times and nobody wanted to take the first step. Nobody wanted to take the risk of giving us that first contract. 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. 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. 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. Remember, I only had one year of runway. Pablo 17:43 Stretch that one, yeah. Aydin 17:43 Yeah, it had to be stretched. Yeah, it was really rough. Once we got the first one, then everybody else was more comfortable and we started getting other ones. Very soon we had this basis of revenue from the government, from the federal government. That's what I would call stage one of the company. 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. That's what it took for us to get to that first stage. 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. Pablo 18:30 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 . 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. Aydin 18:56 Hundred percent, yeah, it's a waste of time. Pablo 18:56 Now as we'll learn, Fluidware was ultimately a success. This led to the next thing and so on, and we'll go through that. Just maybe just to go on a tangent here, what are your thoughts on that? In other words, by not being tied to this big market thing, you just went step by step and listened to customers. If customers were interested, you just solved that problem and it led to something which then, as we'll see, leads to something else. That optionality wouldn't have happened if you were in this VC market world. Aydin 19:22 Yeah, I think if you had invested in Fluidware, you would've told us you're not allowed to do that. Let's do the math here . So 25,000 times 25, what is that? 625,000. That's your whole market. You're doing all this for that? You can't do this. Are you guys crazy? You're right. 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. Really we were -- I think when you -- I guess where we were, again, we were very inexperienced and young. We were just trying to survive. For us, it was just like a survival game of how do we do this? Remember, I had left my job at Nortel and it was this different place where my parents were like, you're an entrepreneur. What is that? Is that like you're unemployed? Pablo 20:21 It wasn't cool back then. Aydin 20:24 Yeah, it wasn't cool back then, right? This was a big, risky deal and it was just -- you just wanted to survive, live to see the next day. Obviously all this stuff was really good. So now we actually had some revenue and because we had some revenue, we kept making the product better. 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. We're like, what's that about? They'd say, well, there's this thing called the Patriot Act. 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? Realistically, is anyone going to access this data? No, but theoretically it's possible. We took that and we said, well, who cares about this? 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. What we did for this next phase was, okay, well, let's just go reach out to all of them . Back then, a lot of these things that -- a lot of the rules around just randomly emailing people didn't exist. The Canned Spam Acts and all the rules around this stuff weren't there. Pablo 21:55 So we had the -- we could just look up to see who was using other survey tools and would post public links on their website. We'd find out who they were and we'd send them an email and we'd say, "Did you know that you are susceptible to the Patriot Act and this can happen? You shouldn't be doing this." It was almost -- I don't want to use the words, but like it was a scare campaign . We went out and we just started messaging people and we said like, "Hey, you basically have to use this because there's nobody else that is Canadian hosted and we have all these federal government customers and all this. You should use us." We ended up getting a bunch of those sorts of people. It's so backwards from a VC cliche story. You're selling into government. You're selling into colleges, universities. I mean, these are all the marketplaces that -- Aydin 22:46 All the places that have no money that are long cycles. Pablo 22:48 That's right. What was that like? I mean, was it actually not as bad as people make it seem that it is? Aydin 22:57 I mean, it was definitely not sexy. So if I was at a party and I would say we're making survey software, which isn't very sexy to begin with -- Pablo 23:06 Starting off on a bad foot, yeah. Aydin 23:07 Yeah, we're making federal government survey software. Then we got into we're now making Canadian survey software. What does that mean? Well, it's survey software, but we host our data i n Canada. Pablo 23:20 Our secret sauce is accessibility and hosting. Yeah, that's right. Aydin 23:24 Which is like what a major -- because I think rightfully, an investor might have said, well, can't -- I don't know , can't SurveyMonkey buy some servers in Canada and call it a day ? The answer would've been, yeah, I guess they could. That was enough for us to go on to kind of expand and get a bunch of these clients. Now by the way, this was going really well. I think first year, basically no revenue. I think year two, 125k ARR at that point. Year three, maybe 500K and then year four, I think we got to 1.5 million. Year to year , it ended up adding to meaningful ARR at that point for a bootstrap company. I think what started to happen was as we were getting this revenue and as we were continuously making the product better, we thought the product started to get really good. Obviously we had really great talent on the team and we kept making the product better. People started discovering us and people started using the product. We started to basically be able to compete toe to toe with the other products. Pablo 24:38 Right, for products, things outside of -- it wasn't government and government-funded institutions anymore. It was just -- it started to become just typical use cases. Aydin 24:46 Yeah, exactly. We thought at the time that we had the best product on the market. You should use our software over other software. That's the way that we thought about it. We had superior features, superior UX. We thought we had the best product on the market. The problem is that just because you have the best product doesn't mean that you win. We had a situation where SurveyMonkey was started in 1999. It was arguably -- maybe there was another one before SurveyMonkey, but arguably the first SaaS tool ever created everybody. It was the brand that everybody knew of. When you thought about internet software, maybe the first name that would've come up would've been SurveyMonkey. No matter how great our product was, the way that people got to choose their survey software would've been something like, oh, I need to do a survey. Their friend would've said, oh, you should use SurveyMonkey. They would've never even searched to begin with to find our software and so on and so forth. The only thing that maybe you would search for is if you use SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang or Survey Gizmo or -- again, there were a hundred-plus of these software tools. If you use any one of them and then you start searching, you might search if the thing that you were looking for, you couldn't find. This one time, the company's 800-number was my cellphone number. Someone called me and said," Hey, we're looking to do a survey, but we're looking to do something very different in that we don't want this survey to be fluidsurveys.com/whatever title. We want it to be our own domain name. Can you do that?" This is me, the CEO on the phone. I can make any decision. "Sure, we can do that. It'll cost you $2,000." I was like, we weren't going to really do that, but if he said yes to $2,000, we would've pretty much done anything at that time. Yeah, I could do that. I was surprised and I said, "Okay, well, let me talk to the team here and we'll get back to you." We obviously did that for them . Then it was really interesting because we thought maybe this is a thing. We said, "Hey, what were you looking for? What is this thing? You want us to use your domain?" He said, "Well, I was looking for white label service software." That afternoon, we created a landing page called White Label Survey software. Because nobody else had done it, we were number one in Google. That started to bring in some traffic, not a lot , but as we started talking to those people, they were asking us for other sorts of things. So they would say things like, "Do you have advanced branching? Do you have piping? Do you have looping?" We would say, "What are those things?" They'd say, "Well, we're using this other software. We installed it on our servers. It's enterprise survey software and it doesn't exist in the cloud. Nobody's built a cloud version of this stuff." We said, "Well, how much does that survey software cost that you install on your own servers and you could do these sorts of things?" It was expensive. It was -- I think depending on what you were looking for, you might h ave paid over $100,000 for a license. Again, so this is old school ways of software. You'd pay a big license up front and some maintenance over time , but it wasn't SaaS space . So there was these large price tags associated with Competing with SurveyMonkey Aydin 28:17 it. We thought, oh, so nobody's actually gone ahead and built enterprise survey software in SaaS form and put it on the cloud. So if we did that, we could get these sorts of customers. We started to take a -- at some point we realized this, which was we cannot out-SurveyMonkey SurveyMonkey. We can try to be easier to use, we can try to do all these things, but at the end of the day, their name is so dominant. They have such a brand moat that it will be very difficult for us to compete. It's always going to be an uphill battle because even if I come to you at a party and I say we make survey software, you'd say oh, you mean like SurveyMonkey? We always had to explain away ourselves; how are you different than SurveyMonkey? Even if you weren't computer-savvy, you would've known that name. It was always an uphill battle, but we finally found something that we could actually differentiate on. We started to build these advanced features. So we built advanced branching. So what does advanced branching mean? You used, to back in the day, be able to do, in an online survey, say something like, if the person answers yes, send the user to Page 4. If they answer no, send them to Page 5. We would do things like -- you could put like nine if/then conditions and like complex logic. Pablo 29:34 Here's a key question because I think this is really important and fascinating stuff . You're in a super-crowded space. You're not by any means the first entrant. There's already a very dominant player from a branding perspective that's top of mind, SurveyMonkey. Aydin 29:46 It's the worst market to get into. It's crazy. Pablo 29:48 It's the worst market to get into i t in many ways. You end up finding these differentiated features. I don't k now i f they're even niche features because i t might not've -- a niche market might be e ven bigger than that, but these differentiated features that others aren't tackling. The classic thing is, anybody could do this, and yet they're not doing it, especially even the dominant ones with way more money, more people and stuff are not doing it. I'm sure yo u've t hought about this. Why weren't they doing it? Why do you think SurveyMonkey and some of the other big ones weren't doing it? That gave you this opportunity to lean into it. Aydin 30:17 Yeah, great question. What I've realized about larger companies is they tend to do the things that most people want. So 80% -- you could build the use case for 80% of people; that will be enough. That market is so massive that you could just focus on those. This is what we realized. The people who need the advanced logic and all the stuff that we built, it's very niche, so it's maybe 20% , maybe 15% of the audience. Because it's so niche, those people are actually willing to pay more. So who are those users? They're market researchers, public opinion researchers. This is what they do for a profession. They wake up every day and they make surveys. The other stuff is -- everybody can make those surveys. The difference is if you, as a generic tool, built all those specialized functions, it would become really, really difficult for everybody to use. So you actually alienate your other users. So you're kind of in this circumstance where you have to cater to one market. Either you're that mass market tool or you're the niche tool. The good news about being a niche tool is you can charge more because you're niche. So actually both of those markets are equally attractive. This stuff did exist but because it was so niche, a lot of those players thought, oh, we're so niche. They just hadn't moved to an online version because SaaS was new and a lot of these larger companies weren't comfortable hosting their data on these other platforms. It was just early enough and we were there and we started doing it. That's when everything started to change. So at the time, we were charging $19 a month. Some guy paid us $2,000 a year to do White Label something. We asked him what else he was looking for. We started building those sorts of things and then we changed our pricing model. We said, okay, instead of charging $19 a month, what if we charge $2,000 per year? This was a game-changer because as a bootstrap company, instead of getting a $19 a month, if you get $2,000 on day one, you can spend that money. It's a game-changer. The other thing which was super interesting is those sorts of people, they didn't want one account. They would come in and say, I want to buy five accounts. Product Market Fit Life Cycle Aydin 32:31 So we would sell something for $10,000 and get full $10,000 on day one, which we could then use to keep making the product better and just doubling down and doing these sorts of things. It was a complete, I want to say, three stages in our product market fit life cycle . One was federal government survey tool to Canadian survey tool and then to the last one, which was the enterprise survey tool. Te last one was when we actually got that hockey stick growth. So we went from one and a half million to four and a half million and continued to double from there. It was a completely different use case. Then we could hire salespeople because we were actually selling things for a higher price point. I think our our -- the customer that was -- we were the most excited about and our largest one at the time was Proctor & Gamble. They bought 5,000 seats for one customer, the most crazy thing in the world. Everything from Gillette to Cover Girl , we covered it all for that customer. This was the realm that we ended up in. It was just completely different. We were making profit and again, we were bootstrap. We never raised any external financing. The model -- everything just started to click and s tarted to work. What I will say about product market fit, and I think this is the important point, is that I feel l ike you're always playing detective and it never stops. Product market fit only lasts -- I mean, not that it doesn't last; it can last, but you can, you can find different fit at different stages and some fit is better than other fit. So if you had talked to us before, we would've had fit then as well, but then you find another market and another place to take your product that is even better than the last one. I think like that was the main thing. So we went from a federal government survey tool to Canadian survey tool to an enterprise survey tool. That was our sweet spot. When we realized who we were, we were an enterprise survey tool and that really worked, everything else started to work too. We started to have a user conference and people would come to our user conference. We started being taught at colleges and universities and we would -- it's just everything started to to fall into place and that's when it would've taken three, four, five years to get to that stage. I would say that we didn't have true, true product market fit in a scalable, sustainable way until we got to that point. That was basically how -- and here's the other nice thing. When we -- at some point SurveyMonkey also said hey, we need to get into enterprise. Enterprise is pretty cool. How do we do that? Again, we were that niche offering who had figured that out . They came to us and they said, "Hey, let's team up." That made a lot of sense for us because we were doing one thing, they were doing another thing, and it completely made sense that if the same company did both things, then obviously you could take all of the market. It was justa natural thing to do. It was kind of strange, I will say, in the beginning because we're startup pirates against the Navy, all that fun stuff that you do when you're a startup. You call one company your enemy and then the next day your best friend and you team up. That was an interesting, interesting process. Yeah, I just thought it was -- it just all made sense. All of it really came together at the end. Pablo 36:07 Yeah. I'll flag two things because I do think it's very important. Going back to it, I think when it comes to these competitive markets and especially where there are at least one -- there is at least one main competitor, this idea of having this orthogonal strategy -- What I think is core to it -- you talked about this 80/20, but it's -- the main competitor is not going to shift course on a dime. They've got something that's working. That's why they're the main -- that's why they're the big guys. If you understand that strategy, which in their case was the easy-to-use mainstream survey tool, but in other cases there's other things that people are playing for. If you do the opposite of that and you're the more complicated, deeper enterprise tool, sure, they could do it because it's software and any software can be built. The answer to why can't X do it, they could do it, but they won't do it. They won't do it because it's not strategic for them and they've got other things that they got to prioritize. Aydin 37:00 By the way, it's really hard to do that too. I'm sure you've heard many stories of this, but the challenge is when you're an everybody tool and you don't have enterprise in your blood , it's a different way of being. You're doing sales-driven motion. I'll give you an example. A lot of what we would do is we would bid on RFPs. Can you believe that there are RFPs for survey software? That's how we sold. A Lot of times, again, as a bootstrapped company, we did things like this, but it would be like we might answer an RFP in a certain way and if we won, we just make sure that that feature was ready for the customer by the deployment date. You don't really do that if you're a VC-backed company necessarily because you're like, oh well, we're just going to follow our own roadmap. We followed a little bit of like a sales-driven development cycle as well because when you start to get that niche and that enterprise-y, people do have more specific requirements and sometimes you just have to operate a different way. So that's a different type of development. It's a different type of sales motion. If your company culture is a certain way, it's not easy to change your company's culture and just the way that you do business. It's like you literally have to birth a new company. That's just -- there's so much inertia that it's not even easy to do even if you wanted to do it. Sometimes what a lot of companies might do, if they're mass market and they want to serve enterprise, they might create different offices and like house people in separate places so that each one has their own culture and they behave a little differently. I mean, it is a difficult thing to address. You're right; you can't just switch on a dime. Raising Destroys Optionality Pablo 38:46 The other thing I think that's really important to flag -- and this is something that I've heard through and through with many different guests, but it really comes out here -- is just the power of optionality. I think it's important because it gets lost, especially first-time founders and especially in '21 where it was relatively easy to raise, but oftentimes you want to go raise that pre-seed round 2 million bucks and get funded. What you have to be really careful about is often enough, what you give up is not just equity; it's optionality. It's optionality to go out and just do things without having to worry about the big picture all the time. Just because customers are demanding something and you go and you fill that need and you put yourself in a position to learn insights that, frankly, you would never learn. A jaded person might say well, you could have raised $5 million and just build the enterprise tool and gone at it, but you would've never discovered the little nuggets that got you to a place to say, oh wait a second. Like you said, what's looping? What are these things that they're asking for? I think that's really important, especially for first-time founders out there, to think about those first few steps, having to bootstrap through them. There's a lot of power to that and you're not the only founder out there that found that going through those motions actually ended up in success. Aydin 39:56 I know this is the main point, but I will tease in maybe one day in a few years, we'll do one of these on Fellow, but it was an interesting -- having sold a company and trying to figure out what the next company would be, you're a lot smarter. You don't do what we did, which is start a company without doing intensive research and doing all the competitors and so on and so forth. The problem is when you do things like that, you discourage yourself from being able to do anything because sure enough, if you look deep enough, you'll find someone doing something in a certain area. You end up discouraging yourself. What I realized was sometimes you just have to commit to a problem because you're obsessed about the problem and you're going to -- you just trust that you're going to find a way to solve that problem and you'll figure it out. Once you jump off the plane, there's enough pressure for you to find those things and find the product market fit. It's a skill that you're -- once you learn how to do it, it's a skill that you're going to use again. I mean , we talked about using it three times in my last company. We've used it three times at Fellow so far as well. This is just my way of building companies now. I know that whatever we start is not going to be where we end up and I will change it and it'll probably change -- sometimes it'll be minor pivots, sometimes it'll be major pivots, but it will change and eventually we're going to find something really, really great. When we first start, maybe it doesn't look like it's a huge market or is this big thing, but I trust that playing detective and constantly switching and pivoting and focusing on the next right channel or how we expand it or what market to go into, that eventually we're going to find something really, really great and it's going to grow really, really fast. What I've realized is the way that my co-founders and I have built every business we have so far, and it's just a core skillset that I think once you learn, you're going to use forever. Pablo 41:50 The other way I've heard exactly that described was from Mike at Ada who talked about commitment versus attachment. I think what we're talking about is committing to solving a certain problem without necessarily being attached to the way that you're solving it today and being willing to -- okay, yeah, that's going to change, might change many, many times, but as long as the problem is interesting enough to you and your core team and you commit to solving it or something around it, then you're giving yourself the flexibility you need. Aydin 42:15 Yeah, I mean, I think it's exactly that. It's the fall in love with the problem, the space, and then you'll find a way, but the key is not to give up. A lot of the time, you're going to get all these things. This market's not that big. It's not that exciting, but it's the next milestone. How do you get to the next milestone? The further along you get, the more you'll be able to see, the more knowledge you'll have and then the better you'll be able to decide what the next milestone should be. Pablo 42:44 Perfect. Look, Aydin, we'll stop it there. Maybe just Recap Pablo 42:47 as a quick recap, you start Fluidware around 2008, very crowded market and you found your way selling into governments, of all places. That was your first customer, solved some niche problems for them, which -- and this is really what bootstrapping -- one thing led to the other. The other thing was selling to government-funded organizations, got you to your next milestone in terms of ARR, getting to that seven-figure ARR. Then after building what started to become a very complete product, falling into the enterprise world and having this kind of orthogonal strategy to the leader in the space, which is SurveyMonkey. Ultimately by filling that niche so well, being a great builder/buy type decision for SurveyMonkey when they decided to get into the space and bringing a good -- an amazing exit ultimately there and now jumping into your second venture at Fellow. So really appreciate you sharing the story. I think listeners w ill learn a lot from this one. Aydin 43:41 Yeah, thanks for having me. It was super fun. Pablo 43:43 Thank you so much for listening all the way through. It's been a pleasure having you here. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.