Jan. 1, 2022
How to Come up with an Idea | Mallorie Brodie, Founder of Bridgit
Building a successful startup starts well before the first prototype is created or the first investor goes all in.
It starts with customer discovery, and Mallorie Brodie has some unique insight into what that looks like. Now the cofounder and CEO of Bridgit, she started out as a college student eagerly chasing down construction cranes and listening to complaints. Today, she tells The Product Market Fit Show the secret to finding great startup ideas.
If you think you already know your market’s pain points, you’re probably doing it wrong.
02:03 - What to do before the AHA Moment
03:57 - Why Research Mode is KEY
06:03 - Step 1 - Pick the industry
07:43 - Step 2 - Learn about the industry
11:14 - How to get in front of industry experts
17:57 - At first, do not build
20:07 - Step 3 - Find a pain point
21:43 - Step 4 - Build MVP
23:24 - Step 5 - Look for validation
28:21 - Recap
WEBVTT
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The conversations were going from"Yeah, I'll tell you about my day" to"We need to have this.
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When is it g oing t o be ready?" The conversations definitely progressed pretty quickly once that wire framing was done, and I think once they r eally f elt like we really were serious about building this.
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And then at a certain point, we were like,"Holy shit! We really need to build this now because we will have customers immediately."
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Welcome to the product-market fit show brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada.
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I'm Pablo, I'm a founder turned VC.
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My goal is to help early-stage stage founders like you find product-market fit.
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Today we have Mallorie, the co-founder and CEO of Bridgit.
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Bridgit is a construction tech company that today offers the number one workforce management platform for the construction vertical.
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Bridgit is based in Waterloo.
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They have a hundred employees and have raised almost$50 million.
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Mallorie, it's a pleasure to have you here.
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Thanks so much for having me on the show.
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The topic of today's episode is how to come up with an idea.
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This is, it's the million-dollar question, right?
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Because if you're...
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and I remember these days, pre-gym track.
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You're an i nspiring founder.
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You just know that you want to build something, that you want to start a startup, and you don't have an idea of what.
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And when you start, you read all these things, lean startup or whatever, it's always post-idea.
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Once you have an idea, here's how you launch an MVP are tested, how you ite rated.
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A nd a lot of the st uff is kind of well, you should just have an epiphany, some idea sho uld come to you, and then you roll with it.
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And your story of how the idea for Bridgit developed was a lot more methodical.
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I think that this is going to be very helpful to founders that are in the really early days of how to do it right, how do w e g o through process.
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And look, it's not always going to work, you're not always going to come up with this wonderful idea, just because you go through these steps or whatever, or t hi s process, but the example, I think it's goi ng to be really helpful to give a sort of framework of the sor t of things you might do to get inspired and accomplish some thing that's worth solving.
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Let's start at the beginning.
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Were you in university?
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Had you graduated?
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What was happening at that time?
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Going back, even just one step before that, I remember being in university and going to business school and specifically focusing on the entrepreneurship classes.
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I really wanted to start a business.
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And as soon as I graduated and have that be my career.
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But I remember thinking to myself, I just haven't had that aha moment yet.
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And when is this big idea going to hit me, then I'll be able to start a business, but only when I all of a sudden wake up one morning and have this amazing idea.
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And then I remember actually in one of the entrepreneurship classes, one of our professors had us do this new venture project.
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What he said to us was essentially find a sandbox to play in, an industry that you're excited about or that you know about, and just start talking to people in that industry and start trying to identify a problem or a pain point that you might be able to solve.
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That really stood out to me ultimately.
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And I was like, maybe I don't need to have this aha moment.
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Maybe it is just about going out and talking to people that could be our customers one day.
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Fast-forward a little bit, I was in my final year of university and decided to apply it t o the Next 36 program, which wa s a n accelerator program.
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And my business partner, Lauren, also applied to that program.
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We didn't know each other, got randomly matched up on a team together and the very first night of the program connected on the fact that both of our families had been in t he construction business and that Lauren also was a civil engineer and had worked on site.That very first night we were like, oh, construction.
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This is something we're both excited about.
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We know some people in the industry.
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This is going to be the sandbox that we play in, but we don't know specifically what business or what product we will have, but let's just start talking to people in the construction business.
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That's what kicked off our initial research.
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And, at first, it was a handful of interviews with friends and family that we knew in the space.
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And over time that actually turned into 500 ons ite re search interviews that we conducted over the next nine months.
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This is what, I think, is so important to your story, which is you spent a lot of time in research mode, true research mode.
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And I worked with probably hundreds of pre or i dea stage companies.
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And the motion is the same.
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It's, here's my idea.
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Okay, I'm going to go do validation, which means I'm going to tell 10 people that here's why they need to buy it, and they're going to nod their heads, and I'm going to be cool, it's val idated, r ight?
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That's more or less effectively it.
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And the ones that do real customer discovery oftentimes find out it's not a problem, and they have to scrap their whole idea anyway.
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And that is probably 95% of the idea stage companies that don't make it to traction fail because, in the first, place they just weren't solving an important enough problem.
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And that's the importance of being in research mode, which is if you do it right, you're very unlikely to start building until you've identified a problem that's worth building for because you're spending so much time in that sandbox.
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Yeah.
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No one wants to be a dream killer, right?
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So if you're a young entrepreneur, you're going, and you're like,"I have this amazing idea.
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What do you think?" No one wants to be the person that says,"Your idea sucks, and I would never pay money for this." They're like"Yeah, that's pretty good." Whereas if you go in, and you actually don't have an idea, there's no dream to be killed.
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You're just going in asking about their challenges.
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So, you get a lot more really valuable feedback and conversation when you're not actually going in asking someone, is this good or is this bad because no one wants to be the person that says it's bad.
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That's right.
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And I think this is so important, especially for younger f irst t ime founders, who frankly are probably not an expert in any space.
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It's one thing if you've worked in the industry for 20 years and all of a sudden, something happens, and you realize wow, this p roduct needs to exist.
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Well, maybe you already have done customer discovery over the last 20 years.
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You're in your twenties, you don't know much about anything, to be honest.
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And so if you don't spend time in t hat research mode, there's a lot of assumptions that you're baking into that idea, th at y ou need to really go and flush out.
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Yeah, for the twenty-year veteran, it might feel an aha moment, but really, it is those 20 years of experience, and you're just kind of connecting all those data points and all those stories together to come up with that idea.
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But really you w ere exactly, as you just said, you were doing that customer discovery for the last 20 years of your career.
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So let's start at the first step.
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We'll jump into the questions and everything.
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But step one is, if I understand, it's pick an industry.
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You picked construction because, can I say that you w ere passionate for it or i t j ust, was it c lose?
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I'm just curious, you could pick an industry in so many ways.
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You c an just go and be top 10 hottest industries today.
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Okay, e-commerce and then y ou're in e-commerce.
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Is there a method to even that first step?
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Yeah.
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Starting a business is definitely a marathon, and so, I think passion is important.
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It was a space we were both interested in.
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I was actually thinking of going to apply for a job at a general contractor.
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Lauren had already been working in construction.
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We were also familiar with the space.
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So, that felt we would be able to access more of these initial research conversations, at least for the first handful of them.
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We were lucky in that, right off the bat, it's a huge industry.
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So, we weren't concerned about market size, but depending on what the industry is that you're choosing, market size is something I would think about.
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And then just the trend of mobile technology was pretty obvious to us.
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Right at the beginning that, everyone now ha s a smartphone in their pocket and that likely was an opportunity to bring more technology to the space.
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So, a few of those qualifiers almost, but I do think passion is important because if the business is successful, it's something that you're going to be working on for many years to come.
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And if we had hated working in the construction industry, then it wouldn't have been a good pic k, n o matter how good the opportunity was.
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Passion is almost an edge because i t's just going to make you work, n ot just w ork that much harder, but think that much smarter and just invest that much more time and energy into it.
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And without it, it's going to be a roller coaster, so it's not going to be all fun and games.
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And when hard times hit, you're just going to give up probably, if you don't care enough.
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Step one, you pick an industry, cool.
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Step two, you started mentioning these discussions with friends and family.
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I would assume y ou try your immediate circle.
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In your case, you had that luxury, in other cases you might not.
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Tell m e a story, what were those very, very first, literally the first one or two or three conversations.
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If it was with friends and family fine, but what were you asking?
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What were you taught?
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You knew very, very little, I would think at that point.
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So, what was that like?
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We were really, at that point, trying to validate whether technology in general was seen as potentially adding value to the industry we're operating in.
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So, it doesn't matter what the app is or what the product is, was there a willingness to consider technology as something that could bring innovation or efficiency to the space?
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And that became very clear right away.
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And it's kind of obvious in hindsight, but, we were like,"Is this industry going to be really resistant to that?
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Is there a desire to use more technology?" So, that was really critical, and I think the other insight we discovered was not about a specific product, but was that people love to complain.
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If you ask them questions about what their challenges are and what is taking a lot of their time at work, they will spend so much time with you.
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And so, that was really the tactic that we ended up using was that people to complain.
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And so if you can ask those questions that give people the opportunity to talk about their hardships in their work and in their careers, they will spend a lot of time with you because it's almost therapeutic to an extent.
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And through that, we were able to gather so many insights and pick up on so many trends of the things that were frustrating in the industry.
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And I think there's often this temptation to always go in and be the expert, and especially as a young entrepreneur, you want to make sure that you come across as smart and that you have potential to have a great idea, but in my opinion, the best way to do that is really to just sit back and listen and let the potential prospect own the conversation.
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And then in the background, you're gathering all the information, all the data points to find those themes and find those trends.
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But you're really just asking people to sit and complain about their job for an hour with you.
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At i ts most basic form, that's really what it is.
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Did you do any market research in order to be a little smarter in these conversations, or it was.
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I'm curious, almost your first conversation, which I assume for you is with a family member, y ou just went in and be like,"Hey, t ell m e about construction," or how much did you know going in, how much work did you do that's more kind of academic that you could do it o n a computer?
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I would say the first, probably 20 conversations we had were quite open-ended: What is your role in th e s pace?
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What are the other types of people that you work with?
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What type of work does your company do?
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All of that.
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And after we had about 20 conversations, we really started to understand the different stakeholders, how they wo rk t ogether.
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We probably didn't come across as insightful, or we ma ybe n e eded t o ask more of those basic conversations in the first few, but you're listening and learning quickly.
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And then you can get to more of the...You don't need to ask, how does the engineer work with a general contractor an d c onversation 21 because you've already heard that it's the same in every circumstance, so you can jump right into what the engineer's challenges are, for instance.
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I think some of those preliminary interviews, we've had more of those basic questions and that kind of evolved.
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We actually didn't do a ton of online research or more academic research o utside of just trying to map the actual market opportunity.
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All of t he customer discovery is really getting out there and talking to potential customers.
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You have your first few conversations, not much market research, and a lot of those are kind of calm, warm leads, right?
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People that you know, or you have mutual introductions to or whatever, at some point you make the leap, and you go into completely net new people in the construction world.
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Who was the first one?
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A nd, and how did you...
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I'm curious about all the details around that.
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Because people will say, I want to start an e-commerce company.
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I don't know anybody in e-c ommerce.
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How do I get in front of somebody that's running an e-commerce site and get them to give me time?
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Who do I go after?
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All those things.
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In your case, construction, how did you go and...that kind of the first one or two or three, what's that story of who it was, how you got to them and then how you got them to give you time and then so on?
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There was really three tactics that we used.The first one was anyone we talked to, we asked,"Is there anyone else that you think would be willing to speak to us for 15 minutes?" So, you're not taking up an hour of their time or an hour and a half of their time, 15 minutes, you can even get a lot of information, and it's a very low commitment.
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So, that helped expand the potential number of people that we could do the research with.
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The second was because we were just graduating from Western university, we had access to a lot of the alumni databases.
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So, we'd use those to actually reach out to folks that had been to Western university.
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There's some sort of common connection there.
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We're doing research on this potential business idea, because we were just graduating from Western university, we had access to a lot of the alumni databases.
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So we'd use those to actually reach out to folks that had been to Western university.
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There's some sort of common connection there.
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We're doing research on this potential business idea, o r we don't even have and idea yet.
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How much did you use that line?
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I'm a student doing research.
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All the time yes.
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Take it.
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If you are a student, and you're watching this video, everybody wants to help students.
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So, completely.
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That is such an opportunity that you don't necessarily have, later down the road.
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So, definitely leverage that.
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Then the third thing, which is definitely specific to construction, but we literally just walked onto job sites.
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We would drive around in the morning before class, we would see cranes in the sky.
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We'd be there was a construction site.
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We'd go to Tim Horton's, we'd get coffee, we'd get Timbits, we'd walk onto the site, and we'd say,"Hey, can we chat with you for 15 minutes?
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We brought you some coffee, we're trying to start a business.
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We just want to learn more about the industry and the role that you have."
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You had a name for this whole excercise.
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Crane hunting we called it, yeah.
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And we'd show up to class with our steel-toe boots and hard hats, and everyone was what are you doing?
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And we were like,"We're going crane hunting."
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I need to hear that.
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You find a crane, you drive there, what happens?
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First of all, we were in my mom's old Sebring convertible.
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That just stuck out so much on a job site where it's big trucks, and you have this10 year old Sebring convertible driving up onto the job site.
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Sometimes we'd park out a block away because we were embarrassed.
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Then we would walk up to the job site.
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In larger cities there's much more security on job sites, but in London, Ontario, where we were, there wasn't too much security.
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We have our PPE on, our steel-toe boots, and our hard hats, and we'd walk on site, and we would just go right into the site office, the trailer on site, and we would just knock on the door and someone would answer, and they'd be like,"What are you guys doing here?" And we'd be like,"Well, we're two students at Western, we are really hoping to start a business that can bring technology to the construction industry.
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Could we talk to you for 15 minutes, either now or if there's another time that we can come back that is better, we'd love to just pick your brain."?
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And then, they'd be like,"Okay.
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Yeah, I have time right now." And then we'd be like,"Here's your coffee, here's your donuts."
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This is a site manager?
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Who's the person in that trailer?
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There was typically the project manager or the site super.
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And initially, we're interviewing all different types of stakeholders.
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We were open to talking to anyone because, again, we didn't actually know what problem we were going to solve yet.
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Then depending on how the conversation went with them, we would say,"Hey, can we come back another time and ask you more questions when we're further along?" And they would always say yes, they'd give us their contact info.
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Some of them also then invited us to the shadow some of their meetings on site because they were interested in what we were doing.
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Then we'd get to go back and just listen to the meetings they were having for two hours and take notes.
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There was a handful of people that let us go back to their site literally all the time even as we got into the actual idea.
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I once heard this kind of rule, when you, when you talk to new people, you have this kind of 10-80-10 rule.
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Where 80% is of status quo.
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They'll be like,"Yeah, sure.
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I'll give you 15 minutes, whatever, and that's it." Ten percent are dicks, and they'll be like,"No, get out of here." But then you have the 10% who are just stars.
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They are like,"Yes, 100%." They give you 30 minutes, they introduce you to everybody.
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Was that more or less your experience?
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I had never heard of that specific role, but basically.
00:15:53.061 --> 00:15:57.980
And I would say even fewer actually told us to get lost, which was nice.
00:15:57.980 --> 00:15:59.450
I think that only happened one time.
00:15:59.360 --> 00:16:06.889
Other than that, everyone was willing to give us time, but there was definitely a few of those standouts where we'd go back to their site every single week.
00:16:06.890 --> 00:16:09.799
Anytime we had another question, they said,"Just, call us, email us.
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We're happy to answer." We definitely had a few folks that just spent so much time with us, which in hindsight, I'm like,"Wow, why did they do that?
00:16:15.770 --> 00:16:19.460
That was so nice." But it definitely helped us actually launch the business.
00:16:19.461 --> 00:16:25.399
And I think it spoke to the fact that we were really starting to dig into a real pain point that they had, that they had helped us discover.
00:16:25.789 --> 00:16:29.360
How many weeks or months that you spend in this kind of research phase?
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How many sites did you end up going to?
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The exact number of sites?
00:16:34.551 --> 00:16:40.399
I don't know, but we spoke to, literally, hundreds of people in the industry, phone calls, job, site visits, et cetera.
00:16:40.400 --> 00:16:47.600
That was partially because we did not have a technical co-founder on the team.
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And as part of the Next 36 program, you had to meet these milestones, and we were like,"We can't actually build the product yet.
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So let's just do more research.
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Then we'll hit the milestones by doing more research.
00:16:56.541 --> 00:17:02.299
So, it kind of fell into it in a way, but it ended up being the best possible thing we could do.
00:17:02.301 --> 00:17:16.279
And I think because we were going to have to pay someone to build the product, it wasn't a founder of the company that was sort of, sweat equity in the early days, we had to get it right because we could not afford to build the wrong product.
00:17:16.371 --> 00:17:20.539
That also was a further incentive to just do all of that research.
00:17:20.540 --> 00:17:36.950
In total, it was probably six months of not even building anything, just doing research as we were finishing up our degrees, and then we hired, a couple of co-ops from Waterloo, and they built the first version of the product in the summer.
00:17:36.951 --> 00:17:44.509
Once we had that, we were able to get letters of interest signed saying that, if you actually fully build this product, we would be willing to pay.
00:17:44.510 --> 00:17:56.190
That helped us get$250,000 of investment and then throughout the fall, for another three or four months, we did pilot sites, 10 pilot sites, actually testing the software and iterating on the software.
00:17:57.690 --> 00:18:07.339
Did the fact that you didn't have a technical co-founder help relieve pressure because sometimes what happens in this exact research mode stage, founders want to build.
00:18:08.040 --> 00:18:10.259
The desire is always to, okay, cool, let's get going.
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Let's figure out what the idea is and let's build some shit and let's sell.
00:18:13.829 --> 00:18:19.829
And if you have a technical co-founder, would that have made you rush, you think, a little bit?
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Because then this p erson sitting around like,"Hey, let me build something I need to code."
00:18:23.730 --> 00:18:25.589
Yeah, absolutely.
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And I think at the time, we were like,"This is such a massive challenge.
00:18:27.961 --> 00:18:34.200
Oh my goodness, we don't have this person." It's obviously a critical role, I'm not downplaying that at all.
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It caused us so many challenges, not having that person at various points in time.
00:18:38.221 --> 00:18:58.740
But in the beginning, I think the fact that we weren't under any sort of pressure to really start building the product made sure that we really understood the market, we really understood the pain point we were solving, we'd spent so much time in wire framing and iterating on what the product would actually look like, that by the time the product was actually built, we nailed it.
00:18:58.740 --> 00:18:59.519
We really nailed it.
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There was other things we didn't nail, but the product we nailed.
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I do think that research was really valuable.
00:19:04.950 --> 00:19:05.220
Right.
00:19:06.391 --> 00:19:10.349
I think what that leads to is, of course, having a technical founder is critical.
00:19:10.351 --> 00:19:20.400
And if you happen to start a company with a technical founder from day one, it just means probably both people need to be in the trenches doing this research mode versus thinking, well, I'm a tech person, so I'm going to build.
00:19:20.460 --> 00:19:25.259
Now today everybody is just a researcher and tomorrow I might be the salesperson, and you're the builder.
00:19:25.829 --> 00:19:35.940
No, I would totally encourage them to get involved because down the road, as the team grows, you're trying to explain to your team what problem it is that you're solving.
00:19:35.941 --> 00:19:42.990
If you have that firsthand research, and you can explain to the other software developers or testing or designers or product managers like,"This is what we heard in the field.
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This is why this type of thing matters, or this is why we need to make sure that the user experience is designed in this way because they're on a job site, they're running around all day.
00:19:52.951 --> 00:19:57.150
They're not sitting down at their computer." Those types of insights are so helpful.
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And I think for the tech leader to have those insights is really valuable.
00:20:00.540 --> 00:20:01.619
I totally agree.
00:20:02.010 --> 00:20:06.480
No matter what your role is in the company, you should be involved in that early customer discovery work.
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At what point do you move towards really finding pain points and what were some of the early signs you start to see that start to make you think okay, it's one of these three pain points, or these are the big things that really are worth solving.
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What are the things you start to hear?
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We started hearing about two or three different workflows that were getting complaints.
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Crane hunting we called it, yeah.
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And we'd show up to class with our steel-toe boots and hard hats, and everyone was what are you doing?
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And we were like,"We're going crane hunting."
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