Aug. 14, 2023

Hamed Abbasi, Founder of Plooto | How to Pivot to Product Market Fit

"Wouldn't it be cool if..." Usually, those words are uttered by first-time founders. And unfortunately, they usually lead to terrible ideas. It was no different for Plooto. Their first idea sounded cool, but it didn't provide real customer value. Fortunately, Hamed noticed it and pivoted. Not once, but twice. This is the story of how Hamed pivoted from a Bitcoin-based payment service to an Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable platform for small businesses. If you think you ...

"Wouldn't it be cool if..."

Usually, those words are uttered by first-time founders. And unfortunately, they usually lead to terrible ideas.

It was no different for Plooto. Their first idea sounded cool, but it didn't provide real customer value. Fortunately, Hamed noticed it and pivoted. Not once, but twice.

This is the story of how Hamed pivoted from a Bitcoin-based payment service to an Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable platform for small businesses. If you think you might need to pivot, this is the episode for you.

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

02:37 - How Plooto Started

07:27 - The Power Of Status Quo

11:16 - The First Pivot

14:08 - Working Backwards From Customer Value

20:05 - The Product People Want vs The Business

26:49 - Going From Free To Subscription

29:48 - The Initial Thesis

32:06 - Sometimes You Need To Build A Faster Horse

34:20 - The Second Pivot

37:25 - Recap

WEBVTT

00:00:00.179 --> 00:02:32.000
Hamed, the founder of Plooto, went through a pretty – two, actually pretty big pivots. He starts off selling a solution that uses crypto to help SMB owners make payments. He admitted this during the show. This is classic first-time founder stuff, which is you think of something, you think it sounds cool, and you just go after it, right? Yeah, sure, you use lean startup stuff, and you iterate on product, but you're solving a problem that, frankly, isn't really a real problem. It took him a bit to realize this, but he did, he realized it, and he shifted a couple of times, and now he fully admits it, right? Before startup mode, there's research mode, and he did – after a few years, did do the real research to realize that the problem isn't so much for SMB owners making payments. It's everything else that goes around making payments. It's the entire workflows, it's the organization, and so he shifted to an AR/AP platform, accounts receivable, accounts payable platform. I think what you're going to learn on this episode is just the importance of doing research, talking to customers in a way that isn't so focused on, hey, what do you think of my idea, and is much more focused on who are you as a customer? What is your day like? What are your problems in order to make sure that you're climbing up the best hill that you could climb up? What's happening otherwise is you've got these little, tiny mountains and you're going up them because you think it's cool, but it's hard. It's full of obstacles, and even if you got there, it's not even a big opportunity. If you do real research, you can find the big problems, the ones that are really worth solving. If you listen to this episode, you'll learn how. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show. Today we have Hamed, the CEO of Plooto, and today we'll be talking about how to pivot. You have a really interesting story. You haven't pivoted once. You’ve pivoted at least three – two or three major times. In fact, you started off as a Bitcoin company back in 2015, and now you're in the accounts payable, accounts receivable space, so quite the transition. I think we're going to learn a lot about how to see signals and react to them and the fact that startups are rarely a straight line, so let's dive into it. Maybe you can tell us just a little bit of context. How did everything start? What was going on in 2015?

00:02:37.069 --> 00:07:05.740
Yeah, no, absolutely. So I started early part of my career at Bank of Montreal, and I was in personal commercial banking, and that was the first time that I was exposed to how other businesses managed their finances and managed their banking relationship, their cash flow and so on. I spent a couple of years there, but I really didn't enjoy – I didn't see myself being at the bank for too long, so I left to start a gaming company with my co-founder, Serguei. He's our technical co-founder, and I basically took care of all the business stuff. When you run your own company and you're a small business, you pretty much do everything, and that's exactly what I did. I had to take care of vendor management, supply management, payables, receivables, working with our bookkeeper to reconcile our books. I would spend Saturdays just trying to see who needed to pay us and who we needed to pay, and we had suppliers all around the world and publishers all around the world too, so just being a small business owner meant I had to do all of that and deal with all the banks at the same time. We were fortunate enough, we were one of the few small businesses to be able to – especially in gaming, to be able to grow, and we were eventually acquired by a larger publisher. When time came to think about our next idea, we really started to think about what are – where do we spend the most amount of time? What were the biggest friction points that we had trying to build our company? Managing payables was one of the most painful things to do, especially when it involves international payments, when it involves wires and so on. We wanted to build a really next generation payment platform, and this is around 2015, mid-2015. This was when Bitcoin was starting to be on the news and people were ordering Bitcoin – ordering pizza with Bitcoins, and you could start to use it in different places, so there was a lot of – there was a lot of chatter around how this could really change payments as we know it. We wanted to be in the forefront of that, so the first iteration of Plooto was to do payments, business payments on blockchain. Bitcoin was the only coin at that time on – the only cryptocurrency at that time, so we built it on Bitcoin, and then other things came, and we started a multi crypto wallet. It was the next iteration of it, but it just never went anywhere because businesses that we were targeting were not interested in it, but one thing that they told us is that they really loved the features we had built that allowed you to make payments easier. They just had no idea what the hell this thing called Bitcoin was and why it was even – We wanted to build a really next generation payment platform, and this is around 2015, mid-2015. This was when Bitcoin was starting to be on the news and people were ordering Bitcoin – ordering pizza with Bitcoins, and you could start to use it in different places, so there was a lot of – there was a lot of chatter around how this could really change payments as we know it. We wanted to be in the forefront of that, so the first iteration of Plooto was to do payments, business payments on blockchain. Bitcoin was the only coin at that time on – the only cryptocurrency at that time, so we built it on Bitcoin, and then other things came, and we started a multi crypto wallet. It was the next iteration of it, but it just never went anywhere because businesses that we were targeting were not interested in it, but one thing that they told us is that they really loved the features we had built that allowed you to make payments easier. They just had no idea what the hell this thing called Bitcoin was and why it was even – The pitch was keep your bank account, use the same money that you have, your same operating account, but in the back-end we would exchange that local currency to Bitcoin, and then we would send it to another exchange, and then they would basically convert it to the local currency and then pay your supplier. But one thing that SMBs didn't want to deal with is hedging the different currencies, and Bitcoin, you would just – used to go up and down so much during that time that just didn't want to take that risk, and there wasn't anything that was pegged to the US dollars that you could – that could fix this for you. We ran into so many issues of our customers – just having to explain the solution to our customers, and they just didn't understand it, or they even cared about it, right? To them it was like, hey, here's my money. Deliver it to my supplier. I don't care how you do it. I don't care about the technology. I just want it – in the words of Steve Jobs, “I just want it to work.” That's exactly what our customers wanted.

00:07:14.720 --> 00:07:25.740
Did you even get to – did you build out a platform and then have customers transact, or was this more even stuck in just the first conversations that never really translated to something real?

00:07:27.120 --> 00:08:41.820
No, we actually – we had about 10, 15 small businesses on the platform, so we actually had a lot of it built. We had the UI, the UX. We had built the wallets. We were testing on blockchain, and we were processing payments, but the customers that were initially – I had to personally call every customer, by the way, to get them. It wasn't just people were coming to us. I literally had to build a relationship with every business owner that wanted to use us, but we were just getting feedback that this is way too difficult, and they didn't understand it. They don't understand the value of it, and I think that was one of the key lessons that I learned is that if the product is not really 10 – they use the word 10x to describe it, but if the product is not 10x better and making your life 10x simpler or better or cheaper, then customers would just walk away and would give up on that idea. We constantly ran into this wall of just trying to educate the customer, so we realized that maybe in 10 years, the value would be very clear to especially small business owners, but at this time it was just too early, and it would've taken us so many years to be able to get there.

00:08:43.820 --> 00:09:15.980
I think that's – just on that point, and especially I think for first time founders. I remember myself back in the day with Gymtrack. You don't realize the power of status quo. The thing you build might actually be better, but the difference between customers jumping on board and doing the work to learn about it and not is how much better because status quo has worked so far. That's why it’s status quo, and people, generally speaking, don't let go of it all that easily. I'm with you on that. Those cliches are – they're cliches for a reason.

00:09:19.620 --> 00:09:52.259
We're still using checks for B2B payments, right? Checks were invented around 1500s, so it's been many, many centuries that we've used this product, but we continue to use it because it's just so simple. You literally write someone's name on it, you put it into an envelope, and then you send it. You don't need to – how can you make – that's what you are competing with, right? If you're building a FinTech product, you really need to think about how can I make the experience I literally write a name, I press a button, and it's gone. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to replace checks..

00:09:57.039 --> 00:10:08.100
How long were you on this – let's call it phase one, this bitcoin play? How long did that last? Just walk us through the thinking of you're getting these signals. How do you start thinking about, okay, this is not going to be the thing?

00:10:10.169 --> 00:13:33.460
It lasts around six months, I think. We were also fortunate enough because we had just sold our company previously, so Serguei and I were not in an immediate rush to find a solution for this. We were in a fortunate position that probably a lot of founders are not because a lot of founders – I look at my first company. I was working at Bank of Montreal, and then at night I would come in, and with Serguei’s help, we were thinking about ideas for games to build on mobile. That's the journey that most entrepreneurs go through, but for six months we talked to customers. We tried to work on our pitch deck to write our idea down. How is this better? Where do we fit into this world? During that time, we were also talking to investors as well to see if there's any interest in terms of what we were building, and there was just some fundamental questions around why would anybody want to use this? How is this better? How’s this going to make it cheaper, better, faster? We just couldn't answer that to the extent that it would get us either customer or investor or that initial attraction, so within six months, we basically went to our customers and we're like, what do you like about what we've built? That was the first pivot because they told us that they really love the features we had built around just making payments easier in terms of if you want to send an international payment, you have to think about how an international payment is done. You need two pages of information, which are basically your wire instructions, and then wire instructions have an intermediary section, they have a recipient section, so there's tons of things that you need to know before you can send a wire transfer, and we didn't need that. Customers just absolutely love that, just being able to just put in someone's email address, say which country they're in, and then be able to get the payment out there, little things like that. Customers would come back to us and said this is where we want. I think that's where we realized that even if we were to take out the Bitcoin and the entire blockchain component out of the equation, the actual application still had a lot of value for our customers, but it just wasn't packaged in a way that customers – would be appealing to our customers. I think that's a really important part for entrepreneurs to understand is that maybe – you can't fall in love with a solution and just commit to that solution wholeheartedly because ultimately you need to find enough customers, enough of a critical mass of customers out there that want to pay for this product, and if they absolutely don't love this product, no one's going to pay for it. You have to constantly talk to the customers and figure out what out of this whole thing do you like and you're willing to pay for it? What is it out of this whole thing that you don't like? Another thing that we had built, for example, is integration with accounting software, and customers absolutely love that because they didn't have to go and manually enter their transactions into – and they didn't have to manually reconcile anything with the accounting software. Those were some of the key features that customers absolutely loved that we basically took out, and we basically released the new version of Plooto in 2016, early to mid-2016, which was the first version of Plooto which is just send payments using the bank accounts you have, and we'll deliver it for you regardless of where the suppliers are.

00:13:42.360 --> 00:14:01.019
That was pivot one was from Bitcoin enabled to traditional fiat, but still focused on payments and sending payments. Curious on that, you mentioned talking to your customers and getting insights from them. Did you limit yourself to those 10, 15 customers that were using it, or did you do any broader discovery around that transition?

00:14:07.919 --> 00:15:45.220
I personally didn't do that. We relied a lot more on investor feedback and the initial set of customers that we had of the small business owners that we worked with. However, if I were to go back and think about launching the next business idea, I would definitely do that. Then I would just probably spend the first year not building anything at all and actually just talking to all the potential buyers to really understand the pain points that they have. In fact, that's why working backwards from customer value is Plooto's number one leadership principle right now. Everything that we tried to do at Plooto is to first define what the outcome is and what the value is, and if that outcome has zero value to the customer, we don't build it at all. We spend a lot of time, for example, right now just trying to talk to customers and discover what do they really want solved, and then we go and build something, whereas we did it a little bit the other way around, and maybe that's why it took up to a year to figure it out is that we just want to build stuff. There is an element of yes, go out, build stuff and iterate, but I think if you have not discovered what that initial pain point is, you're building in a direction that is far away from solving the gap that the customer has, and I think my preference nowadays is to understand that gap and then start to build and iterate towards that solution.

00:15:49.950 --> 00:16:46.809
I hundred percent agree, and the way I – and I've broached this subject a few different times actually on this – on the show and in other places. The way I look at it is before startup mode, there's research mode, and you can go through it explicitly or you can skim by it, but one way or another, you're going to have to face it. The reality is most founders love to build, and that's why they're founders, even if they're not technical, they want to create a business, they want to create a product. They're not academics first and foremost, and so they're not – and then if you look at the literature, look at Eric Ries or you look at all that stuff, it's all about how do you build and iterate, build and iterate, and go through that, but before that, there's this research mode stage which the more you make that an explicit piece and you go deep on it, it's just going to save you so much time down the road. It's going to put you in such a better position to be more likely to ultimately create that value, which at the end of the day, value delivery is what this is all about, right? Everything flows out from there.

00:16:50.879 --> 00:18:16.579
Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. I recently attended an event with the CEO of Picasso, which is a split home purchase – a second home split purchasing platform, and he actually – one thing it clicked in my head is that he spent an entire year going around United States talking to real estate agents, talking to potential home buyers to really understand the pain point associated with buying a home, a vacation home, and he didn't build anything for a year. Looking back at my own journey, I would 100% agree with that. We as builders, we don't spend enough time think about the customers’ pain point. We're like, I'm the entrepreneur, I know better, and I'm just going to build it because we have this romanticized version – view of how entrepreneurship works. Especially if you're a first-time founder, you think Steve Jobs goes into a dark room, comes out with iPad, right? You don't realize the actual work that it takes to really identify not only customer pain, but also the gap within the market, how you compare to the alternatives that exist. You’ve got to spend a lot of time actually writing down all of your thoughts and going through it over and over, and I would say that's where you have to do a lot of your iterative thinking on paper before you actually build something, but yeah, I did it the other way.

00:18:23.420 --> 00:18:56.420
You know what, though? Part of it is, I don’t know if you want to call it a psychological or a social phenomenon, which is that person you just mentioned, that founder who spent a year talking to real estate agents, for a whole year, people asked him, hey, what are you up to these days? He had to say I don't know yet. I'm talking to people. Nobody wants to be in that position, right? People want to be able to say, I'm building this startup, doing this, and you have to put up with that for a year. It seems like a small thing, but I actually think there's – that's a huge reason why there's so much momentum towards let's just pick a thing and do it.

00:19:02.380 --> 00:19:48.740
Because that part of it is not sexy, right? That's right. It's like talking to 500 customers and just thinking about a problem just by yourself and then bouncing ideas with advisors, that part is not sexy, right? What people want is ship code, right, and getting in front of the customer and iterate because that's been told to us and that's been sold to us as tech entrepreneurs so much that – just get the MVP out. What is the MVP about? Right? I think just not answering those core fundamental questions before you built the MVP – MVP mindset is fantastic once you have a thesis and that thesis has been – you feel very strongly about that thesis, but if you haven't done that homework, then you're just going to build something that nobody wants.

00:19:56.460 --> 00:20:03.339
That's your first pivot. What happens at this point? You go out with this non-Bitcoin solution. What sort of feedback do you start getting at that point?

00:20:05.339 --> 00:26:33.650
Actually, around that time, we started to do well because one of the things that we had built is – we had built this integration with Xero accounting platform. A lot of Xero accountants or SMBs that used Xero started to use us because it helped them automate a lot of their payments. However, the mistake that we made around that time is that we assumed that PayPal was our main competitor, and we really tried to emulate PayPal in their design. Our thinking was, okay, well, PayPal sends international payments. PayPal is a very popular solution, but people don't really like you to use PayPal because it doesn't give them any other tools beyond just sending payments internationally. What we could do if we're targeting small businesses, small businesses would like to see some automation features built. We're going to build those automation capabilities into our platform, and we're going compete with PayPal. If you're going to compete with PayPal, well, PayPal's free. How do you compete with free? I think, initially, we started to do that, and we started to get a lot of traction. We actually did that from 2016 to 2018. We didn't charge anything for our services, and that started to grow really fast because, of course, people are going to love a free product if you're not charging anything. You're just taking on all the costs, and you're dealing with fraud. You're dealing with everything, and you're charging nothing or next to nothing because we were charging a dollar per transaction. What we realized is that, around 2018, we were seeing a good amount of growth. We had around 1500 customers that were using the product, but we also had a lot of customers who would come in, sign up, and not stick around or do anything. The adoption was happening, but the retention was not there. Most of the usage was coming – it was coming from a handful of customers – not a handful of customers, probably like a few hundred customers, but the larger portion of the customer base was maybe using us once a quarter or once a year type of thing. When we went to raise our Series A, we actually completely failed. Every investor looked at our usage metrics. They basically came back to us and they're like, no, you have something here, but it's not enough for me to give you millions of dollars to go and scale it because you got a leaky bucket, basically. That was when we started to think about, okay, how do we solve this problem? We had something that, obviously, a lot of people like to use. When you have a thousand customers, thousand businesses on your platform, you've obviously built something that people care about. However, how do we now turn it into a business? There's a difference between building a product that people want to actually building a business that has the unit economics that can support you growing and spending on marketing and hiring people and be able to eventually return – have a decent return for your investors because that's the only way that you're going to be able to raise capital is you need to communicate how you're going to return that money times three or times five. What we then realized is that, okay, we need to actually go and build a business model that is not like PayPal. If you look at the history of PayPal, they were pretty crappy business for a very, very long time until eBay bought them. We don't have someone like eBay, so how do we make that happen? That's when we again went back to our customers. We did close to maybe 700 interviews. We did surveys. There was a six-month period where we talked to every customer who would sign up. We said, okay, what is it about our platform you like? What is it that you don't like? If we were to turn off Plooto, what would you do tomorrow? The number one feedback that we got from everybody was that we make their lives easier. As small businesses, they don't have time to worry about all of these auxiliary things that you have to do in order to just run your business. They love Plooto. It was at a price that they could also afford. They can't just go to a bank and get payment automation from a bank or a treasury solution. I used to sell treasury solution at Bank of Montreal. We charged thousands of dollars per month to get a business to use treasury solution. SMBs couldn't afford that, so they were coming to us. When we realized that, we actually realized that payment processing is not our business. Payment processing is stable state, but what we really want is to help them save time as small business owners and then offer the solution at a price that they could afford versus what they're getting it from the banks. When that happened, we completely changed our business model. We started to focus on the automation part of the business, the application part of the business, and less on the payment processing, and we also introduced a subscription package, which we had never done. We went from $0 and just paying a couple dollars per transaction to now we asking our customers to pay $25 a month plus usage fee based on the transactions that you're – that they were doing. The cost significantly increased for any business that were using – that was using it. We had no idea what this is going to do to our business, but we knew that, if we don't do something, we were going to run out of money, right? We had maybe another six or seven months of cash left, and we would've had to like shut down the business if we didn't do something drastic. We could not raise money from outside investors unless we were getting some terrible, terrible terms. We said, okay, why don't we just go to our customer and ask them to pay us? That's exactly what we did. We really took all those lessons from the 700 interviews, repackaged the business, repackaged our pricing, and we introduced…

00:26:43.380 --> 00:26:49.299
Was it a different – just to be clear, was it a different product or just a messaging change and a pricing change?

00:26:49.299 --> 00:28:46.380
It was a messaging and pricing change, so it’s basically just a business model. I'm saying the pricing model. The pricing model just really changed. The product remained the same, but it gave us an inclination of where the product needs to go. We didn't have money to hire engineers at that time, so we couldn't just build it. We had to get the resources just to be able to survive first. We had to put out the fire that was going to burn the entire house down. We repriced it, changed our – all of our landing pages, all of our messaging, and we went back to our customers. We're like, hey, this is what we're going to have to do. We're very sorry. You are paying nothing. Now you got to start paying something, and if you stay with us, this is where we're going to invest the money and this is where we're going to take the product. We did that initially with cohorts of customers, with a few cohorts, so every month from July – June, July, August, September, we ran the test with all the new customers that were coming in. We kept everybody on the old pricing, and we just tested it. We actually saw that the usage was through the roof. Anybody who would come in, they would pay a $30 fee, so they really wanted to be there. Otherwise, why would you pay a $25 fee? Once we saw the – that cohort data, we knew that this was the right decision. We went back to our customers, and we said, hey, we're going to give you a few months of free, but we're going to put you on a pricing plan. We were forecasting that maybe 30% of customers would stick around, but over 82% of customers converted in October of 2019 to subscription pricing, plus usage. When that happened, we literally eliminated our burn overnight, and that was the first point where we actually – for the first time ever, we had some resources to be able to go and build the product and hire support and be able to sustain ourselves.

00:28:55.960 --> 00:29:43.349
That's a pretty crazy story, honestly, just the fact that you could go from free to whatever, 30 bucks a month, and only experience 15, 20% of your customer base churning. Let me ask you something else, going just backwards a little bit. Over those two years, you were doing, effectively, payment processing. It was free, and then there's this outside catalyst, maybe a runway that prompted you to reevaluate and do the shift. What do you think made you not see it earlier, or was there any way to see it earlier? Were you looking at it one way but should have been looking at it the other way? I'm just trying to – again, thinking about it from a listener perspective and a first – well, first-time founder, early-stage founder, really doing something that clearly is getting enough pull? Did you have a sense of maybe it's not enough, but you just kept powering through? Maybe just walk us through that.

00:29:47.900 --> 00:31:28.670
Yeah. I think, ultimately, it really – looking back at those first three, four years of our company's history, we were a – we were really focused on just building a product, right? I'm a product founder. My co-founder is a technical co-founder, so we really spent a lot of time just thinking about the product and not really thinking about turning it into a business. I think what made sense from a business perspective sometimes doesn't make sense from a product perspective, but you have to do it. I would say that, ultimately, it just really goes back to that initial thesis and really doing your research as much as possible around the customer pain, around the gap in the market, around the alternatives that are available. A lot of customers would be like – the number one feedback we would get from our customers, be like why do I have to pay $2 for a transaction when e-Transfer is a dollar, right? They would not look at the value of the software you've built. They were just literally comparing you to something they know, and they would discount all the other features that you've built. You really need to like get into the psyche of that customer, and I think one of the main reasons that it took us so long is because we were just so focused on building a product versus building a business. If I can go back in my journey and redo this all over again, as I mentioned, I would just really try to think about how to build the business first and try to answer all those questions.

00:31:32.440 --> 00:32:00.329
It's funny. The other thing I'm pulling out and this just struck me now is, when we talk about customer interviews, we talk about this research piece, the number seems to be way higher than I thought. It's more like 500. I mean, I would've assumed do 20 or 30 of these, but it's 700 here. LumiQ, which is a company you probably know, they did like 500. Sunang was 500. That's closer to the number of interviews you probably need to do to really of get it right, much higher than I would've expected.

00:32:05.849 --> 00:33:43.579
Yeah. That's an argument we have internally all the time with my product team. It's been some time that I actually worked on the product the way I used to, so now we have these amazing product managers who oversee a lot of these. They come back and they say, oh, we interviewed five people. I'm like, guys, you guys got to go back and talk to a lot more customers. You cannot just make a pricing decision based on talking to five customers. It's funny that you say that, but we have that internal argument all the time. It's never enough. The more you talk to customer – because I feel like this is where we also get it wrong. We’ve been sold this Henry Ford saying of, if I wanted to give customers what they wanted, I would've given them a faster horse. The reality is that's so far from the truth. You don't take exactly what the customer says, but the customers also know all the answers, right? Maybe they can't communicate what the solution should be, which is what your job is, to really read between the lines and try to understand what the creative solution to this problem is going to be, but they all know what the problem is. They all know that the way that they're doing certain things sucks, and they don't want to do it. A lot of times, as entrepreneurs, we fall in love with the car and the design of the car and making sure the lights are like this and the wheels are like this, and then you realize that, oh, it actually – it doesn't even move . That's what the customer wanted is to go faster, and you've not delivered on that.

00:33:52.569 --> 00:34:05.339
It's funny you mentioned that. Literally, doing a podcast a few weeks ago, one of the founders of StackAdapt, and his whole thing was exact same line, right? It was sometimes what you need to build is a faster horse. Customers will pay for that, right?

00:34:07.621 --> 00:34:07.859
Hundred percent.

00:34:07.621 --> 00:34:18.860
Yeah, a hundred percent, cool. You switched to this. Results are much better than expected. I guess, after this pivot, you started to feel like you're getting true product market fit. Is that right? Ham

00:34:20.679 --> 00:37:09.360
For sure. I think that was the first time where we felt like, okay, there's something here. We just had close to a thousand customers move over from a free product to $25 plus subscription. Now it's all about how do we get this out there to many more customers? I think that was the first part of our journey. Up to that point, we were maybe 15, 16 people. The business, if I needed something, I would just turn around and tell somebody this is what it is. This is what we need to build or do. That was the first moment where we set a price for our customers. They came in. They started to use the product, but now they had expectations, right? Now they wanted to have support given to them at a specific schedule. They wanted payment delivery, so they wanted SLA on a lot of things, right? Now you start asking the customers for a pay product and they're fine with it, but now you need to deliver a different experience from what you're used to delivering. That was like another big – I wouldn't say so much like a pivot but being able to scale and adapt as a founder of the company. For three years and then prior to that for four years, my job was just to build, build, build, whereas now my job is – has completely shifted to, okay, you don't have the time to build. How do you now build an organization to deliver on that promise to your customers but have somebody else actually do it? For us, that also maybe took another year before we could really figure out how to actually scale the business. We had never planned for that because we were just heads down building. I would say that that was not so much a pivot. It's a complete shift in your mindset as a founder going from building stuff to, okay, you're not touching anything now. What is my job? What is my role in the company? That was another thing. Now, today, the Plooto that you see today is still delivering on that original promise we made to our customers in October of 2019, which is we're going to streamline all of your processes when it comes to your payments, and now we're just adding to that, right? We're making receivables automated. We're doing data capture automated, and now our vision is so much bigger than where we started. Now our vision is we want to automate the entire cash management for small businesses because cash is the number one reason SMBs fail and they go out of business, and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen. We’re just delivering on that promise but in a lot more, I guess, professional way than how we used to do it.

00:37:25.250 --> 00:38:14.099
Perfect. Look, we'll stop there, maybe quick recap. You took us through 2015. Now we're in 2023. It's been quite the journey. You started off with bitcoin, moved to payment processing, and then moved to really the tooling, the software platform that allows businesses to pay and get paid, which is a core function that obviously every single business needs to go through. Through it, I think we learned a lot about listening to customers but also being engineering success by going through the motions of customer discovery, of true research, and really pulling out customer's need and building, as we said, a faster horse sometimes, which is really the thing that gets money in the door and that creates a business, as you've been saying, and not just a product. Thanks a lot for sharing that with us. It's been a great show.

00:38:20.519 --> 00:38:31.099
Totally. If I can help any entrepreneur out there save a year or two of their life not making the same mistakes I made, that's going to be worth it.