PAT:
Welcome to this episode of Like a Glove, the startup podcast about product-market fit. I’m your host, Pat East, and we’re recording here in the podcast studio from The Mill in Bloomington, Indiana. Today’s guest is Sha Imran. Sha?
SHA:
Hi, how are you?
PAT:
Thank you for coming in. We appreciate it. So you’re not from Bloomington originally, or you’re not from Bloomington, period. You’re just kind of spending a little bit of time here, back and forth between here and Oklahoma City. So give us a little bit of background on you.
SHA:
So my name is Sha. I’m co-founder of Workbench and we are trying to forge a new path in the venture space, and I’m actually coming up from Oklahoma City. I moved there a few years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area, and then before then, I was in Boston. Mainly technical background. So I graduated with a degree in computer science. After that, went to work as a software developer. A year after that, I actually went back to my college, to Boston College, to enter a pitch competition with one of my friends, and we won, which was crazy, but one of the judges actually gave us $150,000 to start a business, which was even crazier. That doesn’t happen. Total stroke of luck. And so we moved across the country to the Bay Area, because back then you had to be in the Bay Area if you had a—
PAT:
That’s where you went to do your startup.
SHA:
Exactly.
PAT:
Yeah.
SHA:
Exactly. And so we went there, started the company, got a little bit of traction, went through Y Combinator there. Found product-market fit a little bit. We’re starting to scale the business. Like a lot of first-time founders, it took us a long time to do that, and so we were getting exhausted. At some point my co-founder had a baby, and so we switched gears, worked on other things. I ended up in Oklahoma. Actually met the CEO of a company in Oklahoma through Y Combinator. Ended up working at an energy company there for the last four years. While I was there, the company started at 15 employees, when I left it was 200 employees. So it was an amazing experience, another experience in building out a really cool tech product. And then after that I was like, “I need something else to do.” And then somehow ended up in Indiana.
PAT:
Awesome.
SHA:
That’s where I’m at.
PAT:
Awesome, awesome. And then just kind of magic, magic, magic Indiana.
SHA:
Exactly.
PAT:
Right there. Wow. You gave us a lot of stuff there to chew on. I want to hit on a bunch of that stuff, but let’s start with what’s your definition of product-market fit?
SHA:
My definition of product-market fit kind of goes in line with the definition of what a high-growth startup is, and I think it’s two things. One, it’s building something that a lot of people need. And two, it’s being able to reach a lot of those people. And I heard a really great example once. It was that everyone needs a haircut, but if you open a hair salon, you can only service customers in one city, maybe the neighboring city. But with a tech product, you both create a need, and then you’re able to scale it because of the internet. And so I think it’s something people need and then being able to reach those people.
PAT:
So for you, it is, “Hey, we need to solve a pain for people, for a lot of people.” I mean, that was one part I heard in there, not just “Hey, my friends and family.” Right? But the second part you mentioned is something that we actually haven’t talked a ton about on the podcast, which is “Hey, you have to reach all these people, too.” You can’t just say, “Hey, here’s who I’m going to service.” You actually have to service them, and by servicing them, that means you have to sell and market to them first.
SHA:
Exactly. Yeah. And we had a great, really, really close-to-home experience with this with my first company. We built out a marketing tool for small businesses, and it was really great. Once we got it in front of a small business, they wanted to use it. They stayed our loyal customers. But it was a really, really hard sell to small businesses, especially in the Bay Area, because in the Bay Area, small businesses are solicited by 30 startups a day.
And so we tried something else. We’d try and experiment in going through merchant associations, which are groups of small businesses. And I remember the first month, for the first 30 days we were just knocking on businesses’ doors, and we got maybe one or two customers that way. And once we went through these associations, they sent out one email on behalf of us, and I had 140 signups in 20 minutes.
PAT:
Oh, wow.
SHA:
And that just blew my mind.
PAT:
That’s a big difference. Yeah.
SHA:
Big difference. Yeah. And so the distribution really, really matters. If you’re going to build something, but you can’t get it to a lot of people, it’s not a high-growth tech product.
PAT:
And so when you were going door to door to these small businesses, you’d sell one or two in a month or something like that, right? How did you know that you needed a pivot how you marketed to them versus you need to pivot the product?
SHA:
Yeah. Good question. I think it was basically those one or two that we would sell, it’s after trying to get in front of them, trying to get in front of maybe hundreds of them, and you finally make it to a few. And so we thought, who are entities that are already in front of these businesses and interacting with them every day? And so just with a little Googling, I actually found the first merchant association was like Female Focus Founders. And I was like, “Oh, they’ll talk to me for sure. At least I can show up to that.” And so I just literally went to their location, walked in, started talking to them, and they were like, “Yeah, sure. We’ll help you.” And it just ballooned from there, where once you build a really good product for one person, they’ll tell other people about it. And so what we ended up doing was building a product for merchant associations themselves, but in order for them to get full use out of it, they had to get their businesses on board. So they were like the backdoor into that market.
PAT:
And so it sounds like once you were able to get in front of those one or two, it wasn’t difficult selling them. And so that was a sign to you that, “Okay, our messaging probably works. Our product is probably going to solve a pain. We really truly can’t just break through all the noise of 30 different startups soliciting these small businesses a day.”
SHA:
Exactly.
PAT:
And so that’s what led you to, “Hey, we need a different way to market to these folks.” And that’s where you came up with the merchant associations.
SHA:
Exactly, yeah.
PAT:
Awesome, awesome. That’s really cool. You went through Y Combinator. Was that something specifically that Y Combinator helped you figure out, or was that post-Y Combinator?
SHA:
That was actually I think pre-Y Combinator.
PAT:
Oh, pre? Okay.
SHA:
Yeah. So everything YC talks to you about while you’re there is all about product-market fit. First day you show up, they literally give you a tshirt that says “Make something people want.” And they want you to wear it on your body. Just think about product-market fit at all times. And then they bring in different founders and mentors to talk to you. Everybody’s basically talking about the biggest challenges between going from an idea to traction, which is just all product-market fit. And you guys do a lot of that here. That’s actually one of the things that attracted me to Indiana, is there’s this great support system for founders, where you have Pat East talking about product-market fit or you have Cy Megnin who’s spending even all of his free time helping these founders. And so you guys are like the Paul Graham and the Paul Buchheit of YC but here. Yeah. Founders here have an amazing advantage they have no idea about, because when you’re out in Silicon Valley, you don’t have access to that unless you get into YC.
PAT:
Oh, okay, okay.
SHA:
Yeah.
PAT:
So there’s a great support system and network out there, but you have to go in through the front door to be able to get to it.
SHA:
That’s exactly it. And it’s because there are so many startups. Everyone’s there. So tons of startups, and so it’s like you really can’t find support because it’s so competitive.
PAT:
Oh, wow. Wow. I didn’t realize that. That’s an interesting side effect of having such a great network out there. It’s almost too big to ingest new startups into.
SHA:
Yeah.
PAT:
Wow.
SHA:
It’s just hyper-competitive. Yeah.
PAT:
And so you figured this out pre-Y Combinator, and so what did YC help you with specifically in terms of product-market fit? Or did you feel like, “Hey, we got it, we just need help with other areas of the business”?
SHA:
I think it was really helpful in that they teach you about what to measure. So how do you know when you’re finding product-market fit? And in the most simplest terms, it’s when people really want what you’re selling, you don’t have to over-explain it to them. And then through YC we learned about metrics, like recurring revenue is really important if you’re selling a SAS product and looking for product-market fit.
PAT:
Sure, of course.
SHA:
And then you have to keep track of your churn, and there are other metrics, like would people recommend this and referrals. And so we learned a lot of those details in that process. But I think the main benefit was the mentorship piece, because whatever issue you’re going through right now, it’s amazing to have someone who’s been there. And you have full access to that person, and they can tell you something you would have never thought of. And as a first-time founder, that really helps you avoid a lot of mistakes.
PAT:
And so this mentoring network helps you. I mean, you can model yourself after these folks, right? Not only just ask them the questions, “Hey, I’m having this problem right now,” but they probably had a bunch of other similar problems that you will face in the future. And so you can continue to go back to them. You can get help to avoid some of those problems. They can help you work through those problems faster, I would imagine.
SHA:
Yeah, exactly.
PAT:
Awesome. So it sounds like the big differences in product-market fit in Silicon Valley versus the Midwest maybe aren’t as different as what I thought, it sounds like. We talk about it here and Silicon Valley talks about it a lot. My impression is that we don’t talk about it enough in Indiana, that we don’t talk about it enough specifically at The Mill, which is why I wanted to start the podcast. And so your impression as an outsider is we do talk about it a lot.
SHA:
Well, yeah. The first time I heard about it really, though, explicitly, is this podcast, and I just assumed you have been talking about it for a while. So it seems like it’s the same.
PAT:
Oh, gotcha.
SHA:
Yeah, no. Just 100% of a company’s priorities in going from idea to traction is all about product-market fit.
PAT:
Product-market fit. Right, yeah. Everything else is really ancillary. Because if you don’t have product-market fit, you either aren’t going to have a company, or if you do it’s going to be a major, major slog.
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
Yeah. Let’s talk about your current company, Workbench. You described it earlier this week to me as a venture builder. So you partner with founders who are domain experts and you help them with early-stage product development. So how much of your work is guiding them to product-market fit?
SHA:
Very good question. So with Workbench we’re trying to figure out a model for VC that’ll work for us. Traditional VC is like, exchange equity for cash. Venture builder is all around the flip side. where they actually create the company, come up with the idea, and then hire a CEO often cases. That’s not what we’re doing. In our case, we’re partnering with a domain expert, like you said, and then we’re providing them some engineering knowledge and engineering best practices and then even hands-on engineering work as needed. And the reason that’s really important is what I’ve realized in just the last 10 years of being in tech, both running my own startup and working at a big company, is the number-one thing that really affects all operations of your business and your success is the velocity of your engineering team and especially for startups.
Most startups, if you’re taking six months to develop something, you’re going to run out of money and die. And so it’s super important that you’re able to build and make changes really, really quickly. So build and iterate. And that’s really the process of product-market fit. It’s building something, taking it to your customers, testing it. Likely the first time, they’re going to hate it. It’s going to be useless to them. You go back, rebuild or make changes, test again. And so it’s this recycling of the build and test. And so what we’re really good at is building and testing really quickly.
PAT:
Oh, cool.
SHA:
Yeah. And so what we think with these founders is we can come in, we can get them started with the building and testing, but then also we’ll help them hire talent that’s a part of their team too.
PAT:
Gotcha.
SHA:
And then bring in that culture of iterating quickly into that team.
PAT:
So you’re helping them with product-market fit, not necessarily doing it for them, because they’re the domain experts, right?
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
They’ve got to figure this out on their own, what their customers are really saying versus what they actually want. Your role is once they do figure out, “Okay, here’s what the customer wants, we have to figure out how to build it quickly and how to iterate on that quickly.” And it’s that velocity, that speed that you turn those requests around or you turn . . . How many sprints can you do? Because you’re right. If you do take six months to build something, I mean, so many horrible things could happen, right? You could run out of money, your market could change. There could be other competitors that come in this space that do have that velocity. I mean, time isn’t on your side when you’re a startup.
SHA:
Yeah. Yes, exactly. And engineering is really interesting because it’s not just about writing code. There’s a big design component to it. And so my business partner, Tyler, he’s the most brilliant product designer I know and I’m more on the engineering side. And so when we first work with founders, it’s like founder dating. Like with Stagetime, with Jennie [Episode 5] we actually . . . Jennie and I talked for months and built out a vision for the product in the form of actual visuals. And then once you have those visuals laid out, it’s really easy to go into development, speeds it up. And then you also get to know the person and you decide if you want to work together.
PAT:
So part of what you do is you work with them on what that product vision should be, the blueprint, right?
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
So that once you do have that, you can figure out how to build it really quickly versus you’re kind of building it along the way and you figure out, “Oh, I actually don’t want to put a bathroom here, I want to put it over here.” But then you’ve got to tear everything down. You just figure all that stuff out up front.
SHA:
Exactly. And too much preparation can be a bad thing, too. But getting to a basic nonfunctional prototype before we get started is really important because you can literally bring that to your customers and take care of the first layer of testing.
PAT:
And so how do you find that? How do you strike the right balance between not enough planning and too much planning?
SHA:
That’s a good question. I think for us it’s always kind of intuitive, and we do put a time cap on it of a month to five weeks. And that’s usually helpful because you can plan ad nauseam forever, and then you never get to build anything, and so you’re basically at zero.
PAT:
Gotcha. So maybe a month to five weeks of planning. I mean, that could probably be a decent rule of thumb, right? Maybe you can do it faster or maybe it takes a little bit longer, but if you’re at five months instead of five weeks, you probably overshot it.
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
Okay. And what’s involved in that planning stage? How many customers are you talking to during that time?
SHA:
That’s a good question. In the case of . . . I’ll use Jennie as an example because she’s amazing. She’s done this user testing for years. So she had her own website design company. She built out 90 websites, she installed Google analytics and just has been watching it for years looking at what exactly people look at. So for her, it’s great because we don’t have to come up with a plan for user testing. She fully understands her users. And on top of that, when she has an idea that she needs to vet, she just texts them and then immediately gets a response. So in that case, she’s so embedded into their lives that the cycle of running an idea by a customer, showing them something is really short. And I think that is the ideal. And that’s why we love working with domain experts. These people are plugged in. Not only do they understand the domain, but they’re plugged into that network of people that they have access to instantly.
PAT:
Gotcha. And so having that domain expertise not only allows them to figure out, “Okay, here’s an insight into the market, a pain that other people aren’t solving,” but it allows them to do that product-market fit and get that feedback a little faster. Because you’re right—Jennie, she had this web design company that specialized in not just musicians, not just classical musicians, but operatic singers in particular. And so she’s got a really good deep relationship with 90 of these folks that she can quite literally text and have an answer back in five minutes and that’ll help her figure out what direction she should go.
SHA:
Exactly. And especially for her, she found the first half of product-market fit with those 90 customers, because she had hundreds more trying to knock down her door to get a Jennie Moser website just because people who have those websites get hired, and so she solved the core problem for these people. But with manually building websites, you’re going to reach 90 people in a couple of years. And so that’s where the technology piece comes in. How can we take this and scale it so that it applies to a much bigger market?
PAT:
So for Stagetime, we interviewed Jennie for our podcast before, so some of our listeners know what Stagetime is. For those who haven’t listened to that particular podcast, what is Stagetime?
SHA:
Stagetime is a LinkedIn for performing artists. So most of us will apply for a job maybe once every two or three years. Performing artists audition 50 times a year. And so it’s really important for them to be able to showcase both their media, the visuals of their performances, and their professional experience in one place, in a format where people in the industry are used to consuming it, and there isn’t. There just isn’t one place for them to do that. You can’t post your resume on YouTube, you can’t sing an act on LinkedIn. And so Stagetime lets these performing artists do all that in one place.
PAT:
And you could use YouTube or LinkedIn for parts of it, but really the type of career that these performing artists have doesn’t fit those products exactly. You’re right. You can’t post a resume on YouTube. You can do that on LinkedIn, but you’re going to have quite literally 20 to 30 different ‘jobs’ in the course of a year. And so that looks a little weird on LinkedIn because nobody does that, right?
SHA:
Right. And then on the flip side, the people who are hiring these people at the auditions and consuming that content, they need to see it a certain way. And so, yeah. It really matters to them, maybe even more than LinkedIn matters to the normal professional.
PAT:
And so Jennie figured out that these folks were getting hired because of the websites they built and there was no real other tool out there that helped these professionals get a job. Talk about the process of how you decided to build a LinkedIn for performing artists versus a website builder that’s specifically for performing artists, because those things exist right now, like Wix and Weebly and Squarespace. So why create a LinkedIn for performing artists versus a Wix for performing artists?
SHA:
So the difference between having the website builder and having a LinkedIn is those social features. And so one important aspect for Jennie was that she wanted to add the ability for artists to collaborate with each other and with industry professionals and to showcase that collaboration in the Stagetime profiles. And so that’s why that piece became really important. She could have just released a website builder to all of her customers. They would have immediately bought that. And then it’s the same thing that they’ve had before. From the outside, it looks like it’s the same thing. And in a way that isn’t really creating enough value. Somebody phrased it really well once where they called minimum viable product, MVP, they called it minimum remarkable product.
PAT:
Interesting.
SHA:
And I think you kind of need that. If people were to just take a Jennie Moser website rather than this actual platform that’s going to give them more than what a website does, they’ll log in, they’ll post stuff, they’ll leave, they’ll never come back. And so the goal is to keep them engaged and help build out this community and add more value than just a website.
PAT:
Gotcha. And so part of the value in creating this network of websites that she was doing, she did 90 over the last couple of years, was this community that started to build around it. So she just basically said, or you and her said, “Okay, instead of building this ad-hoc community that’s lightly linked by websites, let’s just create an actual social network that is truly linked up.”
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
Gotcha.
SHA:
That’s a great way to put it.
PAT:
Okay. Awesome. That makes sense. So tell me, how did you end up meeting Jennie, and how do you choose founders you work with?
SHA:
I met Jennie here at The Mill, actually, and I ended up here through Cy, who I met through my former co-founder and so kind of just met through people. Was invited to come out here. I was bored. I was like, “Fine.” And then when I showed up—
PAT:
You were bored, and that’s why? Oh, great. What a plug. Thanks.
SHA:
No, no, no. I love traveling, so I wanted to come out and see what was out here. And then I met Cy Megnin, and I met Roger Lee and a bunch of other people just in the community. And there’s just an energy here, because everyone’s putting so much effort to help these founders. And so you want to be here. I don’t get that in Oklahoma City, and it’s sad and I want to help create that there. But Indiana is definitely a little bit farther along, and there’s something special happening here. I don’t know exactly what it looks like.
PAT:
You don’t know what it is. But, yeah. You feel it.
SHA:
Yeah. And so I just ended up here, met Jennie. Obviously she’s brilliant, charismatic. How we choose founders, or how we, I would say, choose founder, since it’s only one person so far.
PAT:
Right, right. I mean, your startup, Workbench, is super early, right?
SHA:
Super early.
PAT:
So you’re still figuring out product-market fit for Workbench, right?
SHA:
Exactly, yeah. And for now I just see myself as co-founder of Stagetime more than I see . . . Think about Workbench, it’s long-term vision for us. Oh, I forgot what the question was.
PAT:
How do—
SHA:
Oh, evaluate.
PAT:
How do you choose a founder, singular?
SHA:
Right. So one is domain expertise. So someone who knows something about a domain that we don’t. Otherwise, it’s not really founder, it’s us building a company, and that’s not what we’re doing here.
PAT:
Oh, that’s a really great perspective. Yeah.
SHA:
Right. And so someone who is a domain expert, someone who has a really, really strong work ethic. And I saw that with Jennie. I showed up, she spent the whole weekend, night and day, working with me here at The Mill. And so she actually . . . I gave up first. So I’m like, “Okay, Jennie’s great.” And then the third thing is being open to criticism on both ends. So we try to be really open to criticism, and Jennie is one of those people where even if you have a disagreement, you can talk through it and arrive at something that everyone’s on the same page about. And if you can’t do that over and over repeatedly, you can’t be co-founders with somebody.
PAT:
Gotcha. And so with Jennie, those three things were really evident as you started working with her.
SHA:
Yeah.
PAT:
And so maybe you don’t have the answer to this yet because you’re still at the very beginning, but how do you replicate that kind of work environment in a scalable way so that you don’t literally have to work with every single founder? Or, I don’t know, maybe you do want to work with every single founder. Maybe you have to do it manually before you can really build these companies. I don’t know. What do you think about that?
SHA:
Yeah. Good question. I think for now we’re going to build it manually for a while and then I don’t know what this is going to develop into in the future, but for now, yeah, I think we’re working with each person.
PAT:
Gotcha. So literally just, “Hey, we’ve got to work with this person. And if they show these things, like hard work and ability to accept criticism.” Right? And you can probably figure out the domain expertise up front.
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
I suppose actually working with them, you’ll figure out how deep of expertise they have versus just what’s on the resume. But the other two you can only figure out if you’re actually working with them.
SHA:
Yeah. And that’s also why we do that month and a half of design first or that month of design, just because you’re working together one on one, and it’s easy to see what the issues are in communication, and it’s easy to see whether you can resolve them. And so that really helps. And there are a lot of reasons to work on Stage Time. It’s a big market. People first hear about this company, and they’re like, “Oh, whatever, performing artists.” And so it’s really interesting, because winning there is going to be a really fun thing. And so the project is really cool. But ultimately the reason I want to work on it is Jennie, because we met and we just connected.
PAT:
Just clicked. Yeah. And performing artists is actually a really huge market, right? So Jennie has previously worked with classical musicians and operatic musicians, but performing artists can be ballet dancers, they can be actors, they can be singers, they could be anybody who’s literally on stage, which is why it’s called Stagetime, right?
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
So it’s really a pretty huge market.
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
How big is the market? How did you guys figure out the TAM, the total addressable market?
SHA:
So we first looked at just performing artists, and I’m not sure if this number is exactly right. It was something like 475 million. And we got that number. But—
PAT:
Holy mackerel. 475 million performing artists?
SHA:
Or sorry, million dollars.
PAT:
Oh, million dollars. I was like, “Oh jeez.”
SHA:
No.
PAT:
Got it.
SHA:
So we got that number by looking at BLS data on how many, like you said, just stage performers there were, and we calculated an average $500 a year spend on things like website and maintenance of that website. And we got that number. And then that sits inside a bigger entertainment industry market, and that’s $750 million. And that sits inside the staffing market, which is way bigger. And that’s like $148 billion.
PAT:
Gotcha.
SHA:
And that’s where the LinkedIn piece comes in. LinkedIn wants to onboard the two billion other professionals in the world that aren’t on LinkedIn. And a lot of those people are non-corporate professionals, which includes performing artists. And so it sits inside this much bigger market.
PAT:
And you got all this from BLS, Bureau of Labor and Statistics, right?
SHA:
Yes.
PAT:
And so all that information was publicly available, and so you just kind of created this bottom-up TAM where you said, “Okay, here’s this objective third-party statistic, here’s how much we think they’re spending,” based upon what Jenny was generating of revenue from her clients, right? And then you just multiplied the two together.
SHA:
Exactly.
PAT:
Awesome. That makes a lot of sense. We’re starting to wrap here. I have a couple more questions. And so when the co-founder you’ve chosen has domain expertise, how do you resolve those conflicts when maybe you think she is not choosing the right decision for the product roadmap? You don’t have domain expertise. And so, I mean, it can’t just be that she trumps you all the time, and it can’t just be, well, “With zero domain experience in performing arts, I disagree.” And so how do you resolve those conflicts?
SHA:
So everyone can be wrong about every theory of what’s going to work with customers. And so essentially the way I think about it is, you have to test everything, but you have to prioritize what you test. And because you’re working on limited resources, limited amount of time, limited money, those priorities have to be set as best as possible. And so with that in mind, I think you come to an agreement about priorities. And Jennie’s the CEO, Jennie’s making the ultimate decision. And so it’s on her to make that decision, but she’s also the type of person who’s going to be open-minded about that decision. And so with her, I feel pretty confident that we’ll come to an agreement about what those priorities are. And it’s okay if we’re wrong about the priorities, we’ll go back and iterate again. And in fact, it’s pretty likely that we would be wrong, too.
PAT:
So I heard a few things in there. One, there’s just an openness in that whatever we decide for the product roadmap is not a final decision. We’re probably going to go back and correct things based upon what the actual market’s saying in terms of revenue generated versus just customer interviews. So part of it is, “Hey, these are non-permanent decisions.” Part of what I heard in there was also that you just have to agree on general priorities first rather than specific parts of the product roadmap. So if you both agree that “Hey, it makes sense for us to tackle the entire performing arts market,” that makes a lot of sense. Versus okay, Jennie wants to go into just specifically the ballet market. Well that’s not what we agreed on at first. And so figuring out features specifically for that audience may not make sense. We’ve got to tackle the entire market, right?
SHA:
So this is a really good example. There’s a company called Weebly, a website builder from back in 2006, and everyone in Silicon Valley always says start with a niche market. You want to start niche because if you’re going to make something that a few people really love, it’s easier then to replicate in other places. But Weebly, they didn’t start niche, they just let everyone—
PAT:
Oh really? They just said we’re going after our whole market right now.
SHA:
Yeah. And I’ve watched an interview once where they explained why they did that, like why not start niche? That’s the advice. And they said that they could have started niche, but the niche markets weren’t deep enough. They had to go the shallow route, which meant they had to go after the bigger group and they learned that only after a little bit of testing.
PAT:
And so they did try to go after niche markets, but for whatever reason, they weren’t getting traction for them. So instead of going deep, they went wide.
SHA:
Exactly. Each niche market was asking for too many niche features, and they’re like, “This isn’t going to work.”
PAT:
Okay, okay. So the feedback they got was, “Hey, in order to service all of these niche markets, we’re almost going to have to build an individual website builder for that niche market, and that’s not going to scale.”
SHA:
Yes, yes.
PAT:
And so that’s what forced them or informed them down the road of “let’s go wide on this.”
SHA:
Exactly.
PAT:
And not deep.
SHA:
Exactly. And that’s one of the problems we’re going to face with Stagetime ,too, is do all performing artists want the same thing, or does it differ too much?
PAT:
Interesting. Yeah. And so what’s your initial thinking on that? Will classical singers want something different from operatic singers, they want something different from all of the other performing artists that you could service?
SHA:
Yeah. So there are two pieces of data we have about that. One is from Jennie. She actually designed profiles for administrators and industry professionals, so people who aren’t just performing artists. And those profiles are similar but different. And so we got to see that. And the other is me just asking friends who are actors and asking people in the industry. And it seems like there’s a lot of overlap. It’s all about just media-rich content being presented together with experience. So it seems like that’s a core theme, but so we don’t really know. But right now it seems like it’s certainly possible to incorporate all performing artists.
PAT:
Gotcha. So you mentioned Paul Buchheit earlier, and so I don’t know him, you obviously know him, but I’ve read an article about when he started working on Gmail as a product. And so this is a long way of coming back to your point, but when they started Gmail as a product, they quite literally said, “Hey, we’re not even going to have an address book in there.” And so whenever you email somebody, you just literally have to know what their email is and type it every time. But what they did figure out was, “Hey, people are really starved for a ton of storage.” And so I think they started off with a gigabyte of storage and that blew everybody’s mind.
Now, it’s no big deal, right? A gigabyte of storage actually isn’t that much. But back then it was a huge game changer. And so the thing that I took away from that insight was, Hey, whatever problem you’re solving, it has to be so big and overwhelming that these small things that you don’t have . . . And really an address book isn’t a small thing. You’ve got to remember somebody’s email address every single time and type out the whole thing. That’s a big annoyance. But having so much storage overcame that. And so what I hear wrapping all the way back to Stage Time is that this rich media, this content that they have, regardless of audience, that’s going to be the thing that really draws people in and that’s the thing you need to focus on.
SHA:
Yeah. Well put.
PAT:
Awesome. Cool. My last question is, based upon your experience working with startups and maybe specifically with your experience in Silicon Valley, what’s the single biggest thing folks can do to get better at product-market fit?
SHA:
Build. Just build as fast as possible and test with customers. That would be my opinion of that. You can talk about ideas forever, but until a customer touches the product that you made, you don’t know anything, and you’re not any closer to product-market fit.
PAT:
You’ve mentioned that a handful of times, whatever you think now, once it actually gets in front a customer, even if you’ve talked to that customer before, your plan is going to change. Either you misinterpreted what they said or they didn’t fully think through what they were saying. So having a real product for them to work through and to look at and to touch and feel is a big deal.
SHA:
Yeah. Everyone thinks they’re going to be the first-ever tech company in history to get it right on the first try, but it never happens.
PAT:
Right, right. Yeah. Of course I’m going to hit the nail on the head the first time.
SHA:
Of course.
PAT:
Why would I think I’m going to be wrong?
SHA:
Right.
PAT:
Well, that does it for this episode of Like a Glove, the startup podcast about product-market fit. Sha, thanks for coming in today. We appreciate all your insights and your background in tech and working with a domain expertise founder. We appreciate it.
SHA:
Yeah. Thank you so much.
PAT:
And if folks want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?
SHA:
Best way is to find me on LinkedIn, or you can go to a workbenchlabs.com and you can contact us through there.
PAT:
Workbenchlabs.com or your LinkedIn profile. And for folks out there, how do you spell your name?
SHA:
Yeah, this is going to be hard. So it’s S-H-A-H-B-A-N-O. So if you go to LinkedIn and search for Shahbano, I might be the only one ever.
PAT:
Gotcha. Okay.
SHA:
So it’s probably easy to find.
PAT:
So you’re unique. All right. Thank you very much, Sha. We appreciate you coming in today.
SHA:
Yeah, thank you so much.
Like a Glove is a production of The Mill, a coworking and business incubator space in Bloomington, Indiana. Our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies, and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. You can learn more about The Mill at dimensionmill.org. Thanks for listening, and be sure to check back every other Monday for new episodes.