Jan. 31, 2023
Hongwei Liu, Founder of MappedIn | How to Find Product Market Fit
Finding product market fit is rarely a straight line. Many founders zig and zag through different iterations of their product, different target markets and competitive positioning until they find true product market fit.
It was no different for Hongwei, the CEO and Founder of MappedIn. He went from building indoor maps for malls, to getting an investment on Dragon's Den, to finally building an 8-figure ARR startup.
In this episode, he shares the main milestones and pivots that took him from a student at Waterloo to the CEO of a company with almost 100 employees. The main lesson? You might start off with a niche, non-scalable idea. But by working with customers you find unique insights you would otherwise never have uncovered.
To win, you have to first be in the game.
01:31 - The Early Days of MappedIn
05:20 - Every Use Case was Different
08:53 - Forget Dragon's Den
11:03 - From Custom to Scalable
15:10 - Switching the Sales Pitch
22:37 - Discovering Unique Insights
25:42 - User-Friendly vs. Legacy Player
27:38 - Product Market Fit
29:33 - Recap
WEBVTT
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There's products you put out and nobody buys it.
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It's just like in your face, obvious, this is not working.
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You’ve got to do something else.
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There's a lot of products, and it sounds like this is where you were, that are in this gray zone where there actually is customers.
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There actually is some pool, but the upside is, yeah, at least you have something going.
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The danger is you can convince yourself that you have a lot more than what you really have.
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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistrial, a seed-stage firm based in Canada.
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I'm Pablo.
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I'm a founder turned VC.
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My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit.
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Today we have Hongwei, the CEO of Mapped In.
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Mapped In provides software platforms for indoor maps and wayfinding.
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They're based in Waterloo.
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They have 80 employees and they've bootstrapped their way to almost eight figures in ARR.
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Welcome to the show, Hongwei.
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It's great to have you here.
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Yeah, thanks for having me.
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The topic of today's episode, pretty big topic actually, is how to find product market fit.
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We'll be going through really the entire kind of Mapped In story, but we're really going to focus in on the details and the steps that you took to really nail down product market fit and get into a point where you are now where you have that demand, you have that pool, and you have a solution that you feel really fits what the market needs.
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As I understand there was kind of– you started with one solution and then you kind of had to shuck and jive until you understood what the pains were.
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That's what we're going to go through today.
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Maybe for starters, if you could take us back to the early days.
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I think you were at Velocity, an accelerator in Waterloo, and when you came up with the idea, what was that like and just what was the first idea for Mapped In?
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The original idea for Mapped In came out of a side project, right?
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I would describe myself and my co-founders originally as accidental entrepreneurs.
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We were bored at school.
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We joined a residence that said you have to work on some side projects.
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We wanted to do that anyway.
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The first idea was, we called it Google Maps for the indoors.
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Let's help people find stuff on campus.
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Let's help students find classes on campus, know where stuff is basically.
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That's how it all started.
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We kept working on that for about a year, an hour on a weekend here, hour on a weekend there, until a random collision led to us getting introduced to the general manager of the local shopping center, Conestoga Mall.
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Sandra Stone's still one of the all-time biggest heroes of mine because she said,“Hey, I take shots on stuff like this and digital experience is important to us.
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It's September right now.
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Can you guys deliver it by Christmas, by November?” I knew in my head we could.
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We weren't there yet, obviously.
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That's when I took a year off school, wired all the money in my bank account at the time as a second year student to some California company that provided some hardware and then we did pull it off.
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That's really how Mapped In started.
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Did they pay up front or anything like that or you just took a complete gamble that things would work out?
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No, it's a gamble.
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Basically, it was the biggest number I could make up on the spot in terms of an annual license and it's a really small number by today's standards.
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Because there was hardware at the time, they wanted– people who know about Mapped In might know us as the company that does those big shopping center directories where you can search for stuff and touch the big screen.
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Thank goodness we don't do the hardware anymore, haven’t for years.
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Back then it had to be all included.
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We charged them a monthly license, but we didn't charge them for the hardware.
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I financed it with my, again, my five figure life– low five figure lifesavings.
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It was basically a deal where we'd make that back over the first 12 months and then the second 12 months would be a little bit of margin, but it was real.
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Okay, and so that first solution looked like what?
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I mean, you had the software to actually enable those indoor hardware maps you clicked through.
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Was there an app as well that came along with it in terms of that first kind of idea?
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Yeah, so the original idea is a pretty, I call it a pretty dumb one at this point, making apps for wayfinding, right?
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The mall wanted an app essentially that runs on that big touchscreen so that you can search for stuff and get a map for like, I'm looking for shoes or I'm looking for Aeropostale, here's how you get there.
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That's super intuitive, right?
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It made sense to turn the old piece of paper thing into a digital thing.
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That morphed into, okay, I've got it on the directory now.
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Now can you put it on my website?
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It's an app for the website essentially.
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Then can you make an actual app, which we did as well.
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I think that's the fairly obvious idea and the hard– the thing that sucked about that idea was it was essentially consulting, right?
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Like mall A wanted it their brand, their color, their schema, mall B, the next one, wanted it totally different, but we didn't realize that going in.
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Yeah, so I'm curious how that plays out.
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Because I can imagine, I mean, you're pretty young at that time, second year student, kind of in your early twenties, you have arguably an enterprise contract.
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I don't know how much it was, maybe it was$50,000,$100,000, but it was probably meaningful.
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It seems to be working.
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I mean, you're selling software.
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Sure, it's custom made, but it's– so what kind of mode do you go in at that point?
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Obviously, you build the first version of that and I assume you deliver it to that client.
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Then do you start getting into kind of like sales mode?
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You're like, okay, let's hit up all the malls in Canada or US or whatever.
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Where do you go?
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First, I wish it was$50,000 to$100,000.
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Clearly, I did not dream as big as Pablo on the spot.
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I’m a VC, man.
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What could I say?
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I mean, again, accidentally all of us got into this saying, well, I guess we have a business now, or at least one customer and took it really seriously.
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I was the least bad at talking to people among the founding team.
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It was my job to be the CEO now and talk to people full-time.
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Of course, I just, yes, let's go talk to all the other malls that we can find, not an easy proposition when you're a nobody, right?
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None of us had family collections into this industry.
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None of us had any personal connections.
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We were engineers or computer science students at UW.
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They don't really pick up the phone and just take your call, right?
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People hammer them all the time for shiny widgets and do you want to use my flyer service over your flyer service.
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Cold calling is not fun.
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Tried to do a bit of that, actually, through random collisions, our second customer wasn't even a mall.
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It was the school of the University of Waterloo.
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Our third customer was, if I'm not mistaken, Casino Rama in Orillia, Ontario, helping– well, basically helping mostly senior citizens, because that's their target demographic, find slot machines, which is their favorite way to gamble.
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Hard to do, there's like a hundred thousand machines sometimes in the floor and they rotate often.
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That was an interesting one, but again, like every single use case was in the end different, right?
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The mall wanted it like this.
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The school wanted an app.
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The casino wanted custom integrations with their slot floor layouts.
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It was really just an educational exercise.
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Here are three different types of building owners and businesses that want indoor mapping and wayfinding, but what are the variables in that?
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Why do they want it?
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How do they go about it?
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From all that, we learned a bunch of really important stuff in hindsight that allowed us to then build what became Mapped In today.
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Moving to that, but maybe just going back, because I do think it is important, like what was your mentality to that point?
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Was it, okay, people are signing, people are paying, let's build the thing, this is awesome, or was it like, were you aware at that point that, wait a second, I have three customers and three different verticals?
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Where am I going?
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It's hard to describe how naive and not dumb we were about this, right?
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YC, I think by that time was two years old or three years old, maybe like not that old, basically.
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Paul Graham hadn't written half his essays.
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No one was talking about a startup.
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Everyone was talking about going to Apple, which is where the other path in the road was for me.
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I guess the only thing I was thinking at the time is better not fuck this up, right?
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We've got three real customers.
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We've got at least one employee at that point that we were paying, like a co-op student, and this guy's awesome.
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He's like really scrappy dude, did amazing work for us, didn't come from a lot of means.
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I remember when I first met him, he was like crashing in the Velocity dorm and then we hired him as a co-op.
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That guy needs to get paid.
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I at least still have some lifesavings.
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It was really important to me that we didn't disappoint any of those people.
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It's like survival mode, right?
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Hopefully, every day you chip away at it.
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I think maybe back then we would get like a new lead every month just from random efforts that I wouldn't even say were that targeted or effortful.
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You compare that to like today when I look at Mapped In and we get like five leads a day and I just look at it and I feel happy because I remember how much work each lead used to take.
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Because this is the interesting thing about product market fit, right?
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You've got the– and I've heard this many times, I mean, it really is a spectrum.
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On one side of the spectrum, you never really fully have it.
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I mean, you kind of have it, but then you've got to keep changing because the market keeps changing or whatnot, but on the other side of the spectrum, there's products you put out and nobody buys it.
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It's just like in your face, obvious, like this is not working.
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You’ve got to do something else, but there's a lot of products, and it sounds like this is where you were, that are in this gray zone where there actually is customers.
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There actually is some pool, and you can– the danger there, the upside is, yeah, at least you have something going.
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The danger is you can convince yourself that you have a lot more than what you really have.
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That's what I'm trying to pull at here, and the thinking around because at some point you realize it, right?
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What was that transition like?
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I guess at what point– where did you get to this first product and at what point and how did you start thinking like we've got to build something bigger or we've got to build something else or it's not really going to scale sort of thing?
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I guess we got really bad validation from going on Dragons’ Den, which is like, I'm almost embarrassed to say that.
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You remember we did that.
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It was a huge deal, by the way.
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It was a big deal because like, again, startup wasn't cool, Dragons’ Den, so at least people knew what that was about.
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We went on.
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We looked really good.
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They cut it so you looked really good or really bad.
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We just made the cut for really good.
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Then I remember all my friends calling me the next day being like, dude, like when are you going to buy us dinner, right?
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I'm thinking, man, this is small beans still.
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Like this is not– this is still a really small operation, but we got a lot of social validation, which I wouldn't even recommend people go chase, but we got that by accident.
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What we didn't get from that was customers, because if you're selling lawn chairs, Dragons’ Den is awesome.
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People on their couch buy lawn chairs off the TV.
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They're not buying indoor mapping software for their mall, right?
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That's not enterprise buying behavior.
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That was bad validation.
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I think the good validation came later.
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For me, I always had an interest in the product behind what we were shipping the mall.
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The mall, the school, the university, the hospital, the casino, they all wanted the app, the app that helps people find stuff, let's say.
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What I found interesting to build, and I still wrote some code back then, was the map editor behind the scenes.
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We realized that every single time we sign up a new customer, the first thing they do is send us like this picture or PDF file of their map that's been printed out on their side.
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They've like scribbled out what's wrong, scribbled in what's right, scribbled in what's coming next week, taken a photo of that and sent it to us and said, can you make this look good and put it into your app?
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That's how they've been maintaining indoor maps, it turns out, in their respective businesses forever.
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They just had a digital agency that turned it into a website app.
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We were essentially that digital agency plugin.
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We hated doing that work.
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I thought surely there's a better way to do this on our side.
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Just for ourselves, we wrote a really rudimentary map editor to make it easy so that the next time they sent us incremental changes, I don't have to re-Photoshop the whole thing.
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I can just make those incremental changes on our side, efficiency tool for me.
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I always felt like that tool, A, I had an attachment to it, I had built, it makes sense though that this seems like something that would be more useful at scale.
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The a-ha moment for me was at a trade show in Vegas where all the malls get together every year.
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There was the CIO of a really big mall company that walked up to our booth.
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By then, we had some pretty big customers buying our apps at scale and we were maintaining their maps behind the scenes for them.
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That customer said,“Hey, my malls aren't that nice.
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I don't want this wayfinding stuff.
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We're strip malls.
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We power centers.
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There's not even an indoors in most of them, but this map making tool that you just happened to show me,” because I could tell he wasn't interested in it so I just showed him whatever I could show him.
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He goes,“Yeah, no, that's a really big problem.
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I've got a thousand centers and maintaining these maps suck.
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It's super painful.”
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For internal, just to be clear.
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This is for internal use case, like operationally, they wanted the map for themselves.
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For their leasing plans, right?
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Because they need a source of truth, if you manage a building, you've got eight different use cases for digital maps.
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One of them is for the visitor.
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One it turns out is for leasing.
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Every time you're renting out space, you got to show what the space is right now.
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Leasing is a big one and that's what he cared about.
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Then later on we learned that there was one for security, right?
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The fire escape thing that needs to be posted by law.
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The security guards need a copy.
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The insurance company needs a copy.
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The city needs a copy.
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The garbage collection company needs a copy.
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Where do I actually go to grab the right cans and stuff?
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They're all following the same workflow.
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We learned incrementally over time, but by then we had a hunch that, hey, what if all these people are doing what the mall marketing people did for us, which is they print out the CAD file, they scribble it out, they scribble on it, and they take a photo and send it to a contractor agency and say, please make that look good for your purposes.
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What if all eight of those groups were doing that?
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It turns out they are largely.
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I think that confirmed what was more an intuition or maybe just an interest in building tools over apps anyway.
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We had built this tool for ourselves.
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Once I heard that, in the next couple months, I just told the team, we're going to really invest in this tool.
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This is not just for us anymore.
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Let's see if our customers, our existing mall customers, and we had in the tens of customers at that point, let's see if our customers can use this, too.
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It turns out they really liked using it.
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They preferred to edit themselves and self-serve, as we call it today, versus call us.
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It was faster to just go in and type your own words than– imagine you didn't have Microsoft Word or Word Processing or Excel, and the only way you could change the spreadsheet that you're using is to call somebody over the phone or email them and say, please update this cell for me.
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That's crazy, right?
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Computer provision people should be able to self-edit.
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That was the insight is that, while every building might want a different app for some mapping use case, they're all going to want the same productivity tool for maintaining their own maps.
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We had stumbled upon it and really learned about it and gotten to know it intuitively because we were in the app making business and they were willing to share then their underlying problems with us.
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That's perfect.
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A lot of questions on that.
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Maybe the first one is when you– so you go to this tradeshow.
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That happens.
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What do you do with your, let's say, let's call it dozen customers?
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Do you call them all up and tell them about this idea?
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Do you build the thing and try and sell it?
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What's your next move at that point to validate that, oh, it's not just this one CIO, this is a common problem?
00:15:30.539 --> 00:15:38.190
Yeah, so I think, I'm tempted to kind of paint it as like a really clear, like, a-ha, go do this and then boom, boom, boom.
00:15:38.191 --> 00:15:40.389
It's more like that was the big a-ha.
00:15:40.390 --> 00:15:45.629
Maybe by then we already had one or two of our mall customers have access to it because they want it.
00:15:45.630 --> 00:15:47.909
They had asked for it and like, oh, that's weird, but like, yeah, that's cool.
00:15:47.910 --> 00:15:48.389
Please use it.
00:15:48.390 --> 00:15:49.389
It wasn't that secure.
00:15:49.390 --> 00:15:51.909
We didn't have privacy concerns like we do today in InfoSec.
00:15:51.910 --> 00:15:57.350
Certainly, there was no two-factor authentication, but they were happy to log in and do it themselves.
00:15:57.350 --> 00:15:58.909
Then we thought it was a one-off.
00:15:58.910 --> 00:16:00.990
This guy says, no, that's all I want.
00:16:00.990 --> 00:16:02.590
Okay, so that's not a one-off.
00:16:02.591 --> 00:16:04.629
Now let's go contact the remaining number of our customers.
00:16:04.630 --> 00:16:11.190
It was likely just me reaching out to them and saying,“Hey, could I show you a demo of what's been happening behind the scenes?
00:16:14.110 --> 00:16:19.990
Do you want to log into this?” Then but very quickly, I think I switched my sales pitch.
00:16:19.990 --> 00:16:26.269
For example, a really big customer that we won in Canada's CF, it's like CF Eaton Center, CF Sherway Gardens.
00:16:26.270 --> 00:16:29.230
It's like the branded luxury mall that most people would know.
00:16:29.230 --> 00:16:35.909
We weren't the first indoor mapping company to show up trying to sell apps to malls.
00:16:36.279 --> 00:16:41.590
In fact, there was many other competitors that were already there that we had to displace.
00:16:41.591 --> 00:16:50.629
The only way we displaced them out of the really big ones that they obviously cared a lot about was the CMS, was the content management system, the editor tool.
00:16:51.090 --> 00:17:01.509
By the time we showed up with CF, I said,“Hey, here’s– we do the apps really well, too, but here's this map editor that allows you to self-serve and here's why that's good for you.
00:17:06.608 --> 00:17:08.069
It fits into your various workflows.
00:17:08.349 --> 00:17:15.630
We're starting to think about other workflows like leasing that this might plug into well.” I don't even know what exactly I said that resonated, but enough of it did.
00:17:15.631 --> 00:17:17.269
They took a shot on us.
00:17:17.270 --> 00:17:17.549
We rolled.
00:17:17.680 --> 00:17:22.349
Today we have definitely CF, but most of the malls, big malls in the world are using us.
00:17:22.750 --> 00:17:26.160
I would say it's the bet on tools that really unlocked it.
00:17:26.161 --> 00:17:32.640
The slam dunk win was the next big customer we got, which was Simon Property Group, the world's largest mall owning company.
00:17:32.641 --> 00:17:34.720
It's$60,$70 billion market cap.
00:17:34.721 --> 00:17:36.920
I remember calling their VP of marketing at the time.
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