How to Build a Product that Scales into a Company

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What we're going to talk today about is how to build a product that scales into a company. It's uh, you know, it's it's super, it's super common that when you start a company, you start with the product. So for those of you starting companies, did you have a bolt of lightning where I've got a product idea and that was the genesis for starting the conversation, or did you spend time deep in an industry where you understood a problem and decided to explore different products? Who, who's started their thinking with a product as opposed to, as opposed to a market? By the way, most people do. That's not, that's, I'm not trying to, uh, I'm not trying to imply that that's not the right way to do it. It's the right way to do it. Um, but it doesn't always scale into a company.

And so what we want to talk to you about today is about how you take that product idea and how from the beginning you can build in things like thinking about go to market, thinking about pricing, all the stuff that turns it into a big company as opposed, as opposed to just thinking straight about the product. So the agenda today is to talk about something that we call the, the company gap. Um, and then talk about how we actually design products from the get-go to span, to span that gap. And that involves both designing for product go to market fit. And by go to market, I mean, you can actually design products to make them easier to sell, and that's super important. Um, and then you can architect a business model on top of that which helps you scale your selling. So pricing and all of that stuff. So we're going to talk about, talk about all of that stuff today.

So the problem, you've heard the term, uh, minimum viable product. You've certainly heard the, the term product market fit. Um, you know, but it often doesn't get enough momentum to build a lasting company, um, product market fit. So in the VC business, one of the things we're seed investors at Underscore, and one of the markers we look for when a company is getting ready to, a question number one, do they have product market fit? So I do not mean to imply that product market fit is bad. It's just not enough to build a big company. So when you're going out to raise a Series A, we want to see a little bit of revenue. We want to see a class of customer, at least a minimum viable segment, we'll spend much time talking about that, for which that product works. And so you've repeatedly sold that product a couple times, but there's a lot more that has to happen to get to the next round of funding beyond just that product market fit. So product market fit is just one step, just one step along the way.

So the, the challenge is something we call the, the product company gap. And I figured I'd, you know, since I, I actually started a company, I figured I'd tell you about a company that actually failed to get across that gap. Um, and that might be useful. I started a company called Padiant. Um, it was a mobile payments company. QR code payments before it was happening in China and Korea. Like, we actually had to write, we had to code our own QR code reader. We hired a satellite imagery engineer to, to build our own QR reader from scratch. The idea was, hey, we could use QR codes instead of credit cards to, to pay for stuff. Um, we knew, like, we had, we'd started companies before, and we knew that it was going to be hard to build a company, a direct to consumer company. How are you going to get millions of people to stop using their cards and and start using QR codes? So, we took a different strategy to try to address what I call this gap, to take it from a product idea to something that we could actually deploy at scale in the marketplace. And so, we decided to go after huge retailers. We had success signing Best Buy and Walmart and big retailers like that that would use our technology but build it into their own app. So, we were like, "Okay, we're going to use a partner and they're going to be the ones that deploy it for us so we don't have to do the whole direct to consumer thing." The problem was, we didn't, we had no idea how hard it was to get an IT department at Walmart or at Best Buy or Target to actually deploy this stuff and do the work. See that little payment terminal right there? That is a 10-year replacement cycle. Doing anything on that payment terminal is like brain surgery for a retailer. And so although we ended up selling our company to PayPal because we had good kind of core technology, we, it never got, it never turned into a huge company. We got acquired when we were doing like $10 million in revenue, and even at PayPal with all those resources, we couldn't get across the gap into it being a scalable company, easy to deploy, millions and millions of users using it.

On the other hand, so not all, not all kind of bad news. Here's an example of a company that did get across it. So YouTube, prior to Google, was founded in 2005 or so. In one year, they're one of the fastest growing sites on the internet. 20 million, 20 million uh users a month. Absolutely insane. And in less than two years, they were acquired by Google for $1.65 billion, which in 2006 was just an, an absolutely astronomical amount of money. They were growing so fast. Before they were acquired, the platform was falling down. It was getting way too expensive to run. There was no economic model whatsoever. And there was no prayer of getting across this gap without someone like Google to come in. And what changed? They figured out how to monetize it with advertising. And YouTube alone within the Google ecosystem is going to be like a $30 billion business this year. So there's, it is possible to get across that. It doesn't have to be Google, but you need to think about, it's not just having the best. YouTube was amazing. It was one, the best product in the world. It was one of the fastest growing internet sites. But just having the great product isn't enough to get across this gap.

So the whole point of today is to talk about the, the product company gap. So it's, it's all about the product, right? You know, it's, it's funny. I'm showing the iPhone here. Steve Jobs is, I don't know, maybe you guys disagree, but he's probably the greatest product manager that ever lived, period. Right? He's all about the design, all about the aesthetics of the device. So, what do you, and this is a little, we're going to try to get a little interactive here. And by the way, feel free to interrupt me, raise hands. What was the big innovation for the iPhone? Anyone? I mean, uh, the touchscreen. Touchscreen. Touchscreen. So, the second thing you said, so touchscreen, clearly the hardware form factor was innovative. They went for a full screen. The device was gorgeous. Coming out of the gate, it was the thing to have. It was like a luxury item. It felt beautiful. It was packaged beautifully. But I'm with you. The real innovation was the App Store. The ability to have tons and, you know, tons and tons of apps so that your device could be completely customized to you. And not just the App Store. One year after the App Store launched, you know what they did? They, they introduced in-app purchases. So the ability to, and we're going to talk a lot about this notion of pricing your products or making it very easy to deploy products. This notion of, hey, I, I download an app, it's totally free, but then you can upgrade and you make an in-app purchase and they get 30% of all of that. So, it's not always just the product. It's not just Steve Jobs thinking of this, you know, beautiful, aesthetically beautiful device. It's also the go to market and the pricing and all of that stuff that turned it into what, of course, is just absolutely blockbuster business. Um,

So here's something, here's something. Maybe it's surprising for you, maybe it's not. So you guys are early in your journey. How many of, of those of you who have started a company, how many of you are like, actually starting to write code and kind of doing all this stuff? Anyone writing software yet? Okay. So in the early days of a software company, certainly you spend all your money on development. It's, you know, maybe one founder is a technical founder, one's a business founder, but the first five hires are going to be more technical people to kind of build out the product and start to do it. But as you scale the company, you end up spending way more money on sales and marketing than you do on, on the product. And I'll, I'll share some, share some data with you that kind of, that kind of backs that up. What will actually happen is that your expenses will flip. So in the early days, you've got your team, you hire five or six engineers, certainly as seed investors. When we invest in, when we invest in seed companies, very often it's, you know, one maybe non-technical person and the rest of the folks are are engineers, for example. No marketing people, no director of sales, no customer success people. But what happens is, as you start to bring your product to market and you get past this kind of MVP and what we call founder sales, where the founder is the one, founder's the one salesperson and they go out and close all the deals. As you start to get past that, what happens is it flips. You start to have to spend much more money on, on marketing, um, than you do on development.

Now, what, what actually happens is that there's, there's in the SaaS business, and I'm, maybe not all of you aren't creating SaaS businesses, um, there's rules that have started to emerge about how you benchmark companies that are doing this thing. There, there's a rule called 40/20/20, where for mature, mature companies in a mature line of business, 40% of the revenue is on sales and marketing, 20% um, is on product and research. So it's actually, it's actually 60, it's actually, uh, 60 to 20, 60% to 20% in, in from G&A compared to R&D for a mature, scalable product. And this is literally, these are literally benchmarks that people use to, to more and more these days too, especially since valuations are compressing and everyone's actually cares about metrics. Again, these are benchmarks people use, and certainly investors use to value companies, decide how much money to invest in it. This is data, and I put a link down here. It's actually worth kind of digging into. Um, Crunchbase did a survey across all kind of software segments, but SaaS was one of the biggest ones, but social networks and others where they looked at how the expenditure change, uh, how the expenditures on R&D changed as a company approached a public offering. And if you look, Salesforce and LogMeIn, two kind of classic public company SaaS, Salesforce in fact invented the SaaS business model. And if you see how their, their product spend as a percentage of revenue changed as they approached IPO, just what I was saying, right? It's starting to go down. Um, both of those companies are profitable. You look at a more recent IPO, MongoDB, they're not profitable even. So, heading into the IPO, they're kind of trending towards trying to get to that 20%. Um, but perhaps part of the reason they're not profitable is they're still spending a ton on, on R&D. And then when you look at someone like Twitter, um, huge in the early days, huge kind of R&D expenses, generally trending down. One of the ones I found super interesting though, of course, was Meta. So as Meta was getting ready to go public, they were a super efficient product organization, right? The expenditure of revenue, 10, 10, 7%, 10% as a percentage of revenue. When you compare it to what's going on now with like the metaverse, like these guys, I, you probably, you know, you've probably read some of the stories, the stocks tanking and all this, they're likely to spend 30% of their revenue now on just the metaverse product. And so that's an example of a company that was at maturity had kind of R&D spent expenses in a more appropriate place, but as they invest in a new product line, you will see those expenses go up. So, it's not that it's a hard and fast rule, but on a per product line, and certainly when you're just starting up, you have to be prepared for the fact that it's going to flip as you start going forward.

Any, is there anything surprising there yet? What's, you have a question?

Question on your last slide. I think you have something called G&A. Yes. G&A. Yeah. General, general and administrative expenses. Yeah. It's just kind of back office stuff. Sorry. Does SaaS? So, oh, I'm sorry. I, I should have, I should be careful with my acronyms. You're very right. So, it's Software as a Service. And so, it's, it's the notion where your software lives in the cloud, typically a subscription-based revenue model. Um, it's generally the most popular software pricing model now. Very few people actually sell software that you install on, on-premise. And subscription revenues are are great for predictability and all that other stuff.

All right, let's keep going. Okay. So the, the purpose of this session is how do you think about this stuff upfront and how do you build that into the products, the products that you're creating. So let's, so what we're going to do for the rest of the session today is, this is kind of the agenda of the things that we're going to talk through to kind of guide us through this, this, this forethought of building products for delivery, really. We're going to start talking about, um, just the design, in the design stage of the product. How you actually design a product for go-to-market fit, not just product market fit, but go-to-market fit. We're going to talk a little bit about value prop, um, a little bit about what we call minimum viable segment, and then how you build a, build a repeatable product.

So when we talk about designing a product for, um, product market fit, the first thing you do when you're building, you know, a product is you build an MVP. It's called Minimum Viable Product. Um, this will be a little bit of review, just a couple slides. I promise we won't, we won't harp on it too much. Um, but it's super important you triple check your value proposition before you do anything, before you spend any money, before you hire engineers, because if you're not solving a valuable problem, nobody's going to pay for it. Um, and you won't build, you won't build, you won't end up building a, a, a valuable company. And viable, viable just means you can kind of build it and deploy it and the software works. It doesn't mean people will pay for it. So it's important that you really double and triple check that value proposition before you spend even a dime so you have that, you have confidence in it.

This may look familiar to you. This was part of the stuff that was discussed in that previous session two weeks ago. You know, the, this is the framing that we used to talk about kind of, um, to value proposition. But is, is this a product that addresses a need? Is there an unworkable, unavoidable, urgent problem or an underserved market? We call it the four U's. And then there's the 3 D's. Is the solution, the product that you've built, is it discontinuous? Is it defensible? Is it disruptive? And I, again, um, I know this is a little bit of a, a little bit of review, and we, those of you remember, we did, we talk about something called the black and white framework. Is, is the product, you know, on that you kind of, you got, we have a nice 2x2 here where we talk about blatant, latent, aspirational, and critical. Good example of latent and aspirational: Gucci. It's, it's obviously aspirational. Generally speaking, you see products that look like that more on the direct to consumer side. Consumers like it. You can build gigantic multi-billion companies with something that's latent and aspirational. So that doesn't mean bottom left quadrant is bad at all in this case. Um, but it's not, it's not, um, it's not blatant and critical. On the other hand, um, those of you who are, are old enough, or as old as me, remember when the cell phone came out. Cell phone was a status symbol for a long time. At first, it was in the car. You had cords and stuff. There was no good reason to do that other than to flex on your friends. And especially when, you know, the phones were like this big and you had to hold them, hold them with two hands. It didn't take long. Um, and the iPhone and the maturity of Android devices really, really changed it before it became absolutely blatant and critical. It's crit, you know, I have kids, like kids get phones when they're 10, 11, 12 because you, you don't even know how to pick them up at the bus. It's blatant and critical for consumers. It's blatant and critical for business. So, it is possible for products to move from latent and aspirational up as they mature. And then I thought I'd just give a, you know, a little example of another one. So, Oculus or VR glasses. Any of you play VR games? Guilty. Um, it's latent and aspirational now. It's literally a toy. Um, or, or, or is it? It's not. This is an example of something that right now you might argue is still sitting in that lower left quadrant as an aspirational product. It's clearly going to move up, up and to the right. And not just because of what Meta is doing with the metaverse, but because of industry. Um, you know, the ability to check the, this, I think one of that screenshot at the top was the ability to kind of check the skin of an aircraft with VR goggles that can kind of detect stuff that you can't with your eyes, to operate factory machinery, and, you know, not a pleasant subject, but every day on TV, um, with what's going on in Ukraine, you see what's going on with drones, and everybody is wearing VR goggles to pilot those drones. It's now, it's now an absolutely common part of war fighting.

Question: In India, we have a defense incubation center called uh Forge. Okay. And uh, the weaponizing drone part is something that that is so deeply rooted with AR/VR and, and, uh, and camera-based drones. It's, it's so critical that at any particular point of time, there's a pilot flying that drone, and he or she is supposed to neutralize some targets, and even a latency lag of a microsecond can can result in someone else being shot. So this is how critical it is becoming. Literally, literally life and death.

Yes. Literally life and death. Literally life and death. And it's, you know, and look, not everyone's building kind of, you know, a hardware product that, that evolves and maybe you are, that evolves in that way. The broader point is to think about how your product fits in this matrix, in the latent and aspirational, blatant and critical matrix, as part of your envisioning your value proposition. So you understand whether you're building something that's valuable, and that may be even more valuable as you, as you kind of grow into it.

So when we talk about bringing an MVP, um, to market, Minimum Viable Product, you've built, and I, I'll, I'll continue to do software examples, just since that's my world, and I apologize if you're, you're building something else or a piece of hardware, but you built something small. Um, typically you're building a fraction of your total vision, and you, and you've got an idea of the people that you want to sell it to, but the most important thing is to be able to sell it to somebody repeatedly and to be successful when you do that. And that almost always means you need to find what we call a minimum viable segment. And what do I mean by that? What that means is, of your grand market where you have a dream of, you know, building a deck of cards that could, you know, sell all of your stuff to all of these people, you find one segment of that that has consistent needs, either based on the four U's and, and the 3 D's and stuff that we talked about, but that has consistent needs that you think you can take your small product, solve a problem that's important enough for them, and do it over and over again. Because one of the most important things when you're, when you're starting a company is to be able to prove to yourself, and prove to eventually your investors, that you're solving a problem that's important enough. Even if that first segment is relatively tiny, is not enough to, you know, do $100 million of revenue at scale. Prove that your first idea either works or doesn't for a minimum viable segment before you try to blow it out and create something much, much bigger. It's absolutely critical to think that way. And so you find the MVP, you fit it into these needs, and by the way, you ignore those other segments for now. You've got your minimum viable segment, and all you want to do is make them successful.

Question: What's the size of the minimum viable segment?

It depends on what you're building. Ideally, you want to be able to generate some revenue in there, but what, but as investors, we don't, when someone talks about a minimum viable segment, we're not, we don't ask about the TAM for a minimum viable segment. So, the way we think about it, um, is that the segment is small enough that if you're right for the problem you're solving, you can dominate. You could actually dominate that market. So, you've kind of, you've carved out a space that's like, okay, maybe there's not a hundred competitors. I'm going right after this thing. I'm solving a very particular problem, and I can absolutely do dominate it. And by dominating it, it's viable. You've proven you can succeed in this market with your first idea. And by the way, doesn't matter if it's your first idea, because you might try, you might try it, it might be your second, it might be your third iteration, but it's small bets. You're not making, you're not betting the whole house kind of right out of the gate. But you want to make sure that there, that it's a combination of pain points, budget, product, use case, channel. How would you sell into them? How would you sell into that customer profile? And the, the center of the Venn diagram is your, your MVS cluster of demand. That was actually, uh, actually coined by a, um, Des Traynor, the founder of Intercom. It's a deck out on the West Coast. Um, and so, and that's important, right? Because what you've done is you've simplified the problem. There's only one channel. You're only talking to one department for their budget. It's a simple product use case. Um, but you want it to be, you want it to be big enough that you can prove those points, but it's not about, at this point, it's not about revenue. It's about showing that you, that your basic idea, and then you repeat it, and that you can repeatably sell it. So you've got it, you found a couple customers that want to take this product, and then you find five more that look just like them, and you're able to do that. Then you have something, and then you know you can put the pedal to the metal and be like, okay, I've got this, like, I'm dominating. And by the way, sometimes you can actually go out and raise money just by, if the segment, to your point, if that minimum viable segment is small enough, and you're getting just traction, and, and we'll talk about business models in a second, if you've got a PLG, product-led growth, where it's free to try, and all of a sudden people just orders start coming in, sometimes you can raise money on that first shot because you've proved you've got something going, especially if you have the vision, the expansion vision to go along with it.

So here, here's an example. Um, this is an example from our, our portfolio. Um, a portfolio from a, a company that first did it the wrong way, and then switched and figured it out. So it's a company called Aploy. Um, and when they started, what they do is they're, um, they're a healthcare hiring and onboarding platform. Nurses, doctors, um, you know, physician assistants, etc. All of that stuff. But they had a grand vision for what the platform was going to do. They had 20 different features. They were going to go after nurses, doctors, skilled nursing, home healthcare, senior centers, vets, like everything. Spent a lot of time trying to build the product across it and did not do well. They struggled. Struggled to raise money. Struggled to kind of get off the ground. They peeled the whole thing back and said, "You know what? Hiring nurses, nothing else." And they had tailwinds from the pandemic, but they did this. They made that switch before the pandemic. The company started going like this. And now, if you go to their website, guess what's back? Home healthcare, senior living, veterinary care, because they proved to themselves, proved to their investors that they were onto something. Honed the value proposition, then expanded. Tried to do too much at first, went for the minimum viable segment, boom, and now they're, they're one of the best performing companies in our portfolio.

Question: The question I have, how do you determine the price for your MVP?

So, we're going to, we're going to talk a little bit about pricing. So, let me, I promise you we'll get, we're going to do a whole little chunk on, on pricing because it's, it's, it's really important. Um, so, pause that, and then you hit me up if I don't get it right. Is there a question in the back?

How do you balance simplifying the problem and going through the small segment, um, with, I guess, like pigeonholing yourself into one, like solving one problem versus the multiple that you may have in your longer-term vision?

Yeah. So, so I'll put on the investor hat. So when we, really like to see people that, in the seed investors, so we're usually like the first real check into a company, and so we re, we're betting on two things. We're betting on you, and we're betting that the vision is big enough to build a big company. And so the vision is absolutely critical. An understanding of what you want to become, how big it is, how you could, that's what, you know, that's when you get the questions on TAM and all this, how big, like VCs will come right out and ask you, how big can this get? Sometimes they'll turn you down and be very blunt and just say, "I'm not sure this can be a big enough company." So the vision is critical, but when you start spending money and you know, hiring engineers or other people to build something or a factory, etc., start with the small, but always be able to articulate the big story. Is that, is that helpful?

That a question about the TAM. Uh, what if you're doing well? Sure, like there's lots of ways to do a company. So, um, the VC route kind of assumes you're going after a large market, right? But you could still have a very successful business, you know, making millions of dollars a year, be a smaller company. Um, but probably can't go the VC route for that, I'm assuming, right?

So, so 100%. And if you and I were having a beer together and you were talking about starting a company, we'd have a very serious conversation about whether you want to build a VC-backed company or whether you want to build a different type of business. And the reason is exactly what you said. As founders, and this is goes against the business I'm in, but as founders, you can build an awesome business without taking VC money. You can do SBA loans, you can do grants, you can do all sorts of other stuff and continue to own most of the company and build a company that would not be interesting to VCs, but would be an amazing outcome for you, for your family, for what and lifestyle. So, it's an important decision. Like, you shouldn't just assume that VC is the only, I think that's what you're getting at, right? That's not the only, like, because, because I heard like a VC might say no, but then like somebody might take that as a value judgment of their company. Even if a VC is not interested, it could still be a very good company, right?

Yep. Totally agree. And, you know, and certainly I try to be direct on nos and, you know, and it's, and it's worthwhile if you're having a conversation with a VC and they say no, try to cut through, try to cut through the response, right? Try to, try to cut through the, the kind of hand-wavy response. Say, "No, no, I actually would really love feedback. I love when founders do that." And I will, I will flat out say, "Hey, that sounds awesome. That sounds like the kind of company I would want to work for. Here's how we think about investing in businesses. Our business, we're venture capital is largely a hits business. You want to invest in companies that can become very, very large. $100 million in revenue is kind of how we think about it. We like, we want to be able to see a company that without squinting at it could become a $100 million company, therefore worth a billion dollars or more. And if you have something that's a smaller market and it's, you know, and the biggest company that's ever existed in that space is only $50 million, that's okay, especially if you've got a better product, but we'll tell you directly that it's probably not a, the word we use is a venture-scale business. But it, that doesn't mean it can't be an awesome business." Totally true.

How do you carve out which is the minimum viable segment? So in this case of Aploy, they have veterinary, senior living, healthcare, nurses, all these like different segments that have different needs and different features for the product they're building. How do you choose one of them to start focusing? Or if you're building a fintech, you have low income, middle income, unbanked, unemployed, formal employed, gig economy, and you can build a product and solve a problem like for a whole lot of customers, but depending on the segment, your product will look differently. How do you, what is your criteria to choose one segment to start trying that MVS?

So the best answer is will be very unsatisfying, but it, it's talked to 200 potential customers in your universe. So if you look at, if you look at, go back to kind of the big, the big universe that we're talking about, you talk to as many people in that universe before you do anything, before you spend a dime, before you drop out of HBS, you talk to those, you get in an airplane, you talk to those 200, you talk to those 200 customers, and you start, you start doing pattern recognition. That's the best way. It doesn't cost anything other than time, which obviously has value, but doing that and understanding where your idea resonates. The just, and you guys, I'm sure you've taken tons of classes on it, but when you talk to a customer, you're not just saying, "Hey, what do you think of my idea?" You're saying, "How much would you pay for it?" Or you're saying, "What are the four most critical things in your organization that if I could solve them for you tomorrow, you'd be willing to pay for?" It's that sort of Q&A. You do this, you know, you go on a, you go on a tour and you talk to all these customers, and from there, you start to make some guesses of what it would be, and then you can do stuff. By the way, you don't need to build a complete product either to do this. We would do at PayPal. I was at PayPal for five years. We can do paper prototypes. Like, we would literally bring people into our focus, you know, we, of course, fancy focus group sessions, but it doesn't have to be fancy. You can sit in a Starbucks with paper mockups with one of your customers and kind of describe what you were trying to build to get feedback. It can be very inexpensive. It's, it's like, it's gorilla customer research. But that's the way to do it is to actually talk to them. And that is, if you have a workable prototype or a clickable prototype, something that doesn't have any code behind it, then you can go back and refine and see if your original assumptions were right, and wash, rinse, and repeat until you feel confident enough, okay, I'm going to actually spend some money on again, in software, real software development.

Approach them with an idea and see to which segment it resonates more, or approach to them just to understand the different problems they have to then build an idea around them. Either it depends on who you are and the type of company you're starting and how you want to start. It's, you know, I asked everyone to raise who started with a product idea, right? That a lot of people think startup is all about, you wake up from a dream, I've got this product idea, I'm gonna build this thing, right? Lots of people start companies by just going and interviewing a segment. Like you might have an interest, I'm interested in veterinary care or whatever, just to harp on a similar theme, and rather than kind of trying to invent a product, I'm going to have coffee with 200 vets and ask them what their pain points are. Um, that's even ideal. Clearly, that's even better than kind of dreaming up a product and going and testing it to them, because it's even cheaper. Does that make, does that make sense?

How do you go about getting your 200 vets? That, that's old, that's old-fashioned pounding the pavement. That's, I mean, there's, there's no, there's no shortcut to that. You can buy lists. You can get on LinkedIn. You can ask every single, you can walk into where you dog, where you take your dog gets taken care of and ask them for introductions. That's, that's largely old school. I mean, other than kind of buying a list, the nice thing is that so much of that stuff's online. It's not super hard to quickly generate a list of folks to talk to. You show up at a conference is a, is a good one. You buy just a, you buy a guest pass to a conference of vets and you start walking around and meeting people at the bar or whatever. That's, I actually like doing that. I just think that sort of thing. You start to go to a conference. I had a buddy who was trying to, you know, was going in trying to get into the contracting business, and he started going to architect conferences. That was it. He just bought a pass, and he's not an architect, and he went, and he just started meeting people and realized for this, there was a segment that was underserved in construction.

Okay, minimum viable segment, crazy Venn diagram, but what you're really doing is simplifying the problem before you start pouring a lot of money into a hole. It's not just about product market fit. Narrow your target, segment it by need. Really, really focus your product, but this helps not just the product building part of the equation. It helps you start to hone your messaging and how you talk about it, not just to potential customers, but to investors. It lets you start to think about packaging and pricing, because when you ask, when you ask someone, you're on your tour for 200, you know, 200 people, you're trying to figure out your minimum viable segment, hopefully your little 10 question list includes things like, "How much would you pay?" "Do you have a similar product today?" "How is that packaged?" "How does that priced?" "What do you like about that?" "What do you hate about that?" When you have these conversations and you're narrowing your target, you start to get answers to all these questions. Doesn't mean you get it 100% right, but you start to land on a place where you've got something you feel like you can kind of wedge into this, this minimum viable segment. You start to learn things like channels and distribution partners. I'm going to talk about all kind of all this stuff in a second. Um, and reference selling, network effects, viral, business alignment. We're going to go into all this stuff.

And so, this is just an agenda slide. We kind of hit the front part. We're going to go into the back half. Getting to market. Um, we're kind of toying around with this, this word product facilitation. Um, what we're really talking about is getting, facilitating getting your products into people's hands so that they, so that they, so that they purchase it. And you know what? If you could literally slip into the lead in your minimum viable segment. And so we've created a mnemonic device here. We call it SLIP. Um, and we're going to kind of walk through four key elements of this that we think can really, really help, um, how you, it's a good framework for thinking about how you build a product that will be very, very easy to distribute. Um, the four, the, the mnemonic device goes like this. It's SLIP: S is Simple to install and use, L is Low to no initial cost, I is Instant and ongoing value, and P is Plays well in the ecosystem. This is very similar to, and you can read all sorts of books on the notion of product-led growth, and so you'll see some similarities there. It doesn't mean to, it's not meant to replace it. It's more of a mnemonic device that that helps you think about the different components of product-led growth.

So, simple to install. Um, you know, one way to think about is out-of-the-box experience. And I don't necessarily mean, I'm using that as a metaphor. It doesn't necessarily mean there's a box, but if there is a box, it does mean, hey, it's easy to open the packaging. It's easy to take it out. It's easy to assemble. But if it's software, out-of-the-box experience is, hey, how, how is this super, super easy to install? Do I have to even think about it? Is the onboarding process really, really, really easy? And you want it to be simple to use as well. It's not just simple to get going, but simple to use. Complexity is almost always bad in, kind of, an onboarding process of any sort for software. Um, and the first, and you need to think about, you know, first principles, advantage, disadvantage. A true competitive advantage is a combination of innovation and simplicity. So you want to, you want to innovate, but it can't be innovative to the point where it's so complex that no one will ever use this thing, because then you, then you just get tripped up, even, even if you've been successful in selling it right out of the gate. Um, less is almost always more. I know we keep, I know we keep talking about kind of simplicity, simplicity, minimum viable segments, and all this stuff. You look at, you know, these two remotes. One is clearly a superior product, easier to use, and all of that stuff. And, you know, it's like, it's the reason why things like software as a service, like, you know, Google Docs and all that stuff. Like, you know, I don't know if any of you have used Word recently. It's like, it's insane, like the number of menus and the number of features and all that stuff. And people have kind of pulled back from that in general in the software world and are really looking for products that solve basic problems super, super, super easily. And this is just an obvious, obvious example. Um, and simplify it, you know, simplify it to your core value. Again, this is just focus, guys, especially for this first kind of wave of investment that you're going to be making. Keep it simple. Minimum viable segment. Solve one or two, maybe three critical problems for this group that you've identified that has a handful of needs, and nail it.

Oh, question. Yeah, fresh point. So the picture you just showed, what, the remotes? Yeah. So you said one is clearly the most superior and simple, simple, um, or to use, but I don't know. I would say maybe you could say one is more superior and the other would be more simpler. You're right. I made a value judgment. You're, no, you're totally right. Like, there, in this, this particular case where buttons versus control services and stuff happens to be a fairly, subjective, a subjective, uh, design principle. Um, Apple historically, absolute leaders in design. They create a device that's tiny. The battery on that little thing lasts a year. Um, is it superior design? Would you prefer to use it rather than buttons? You're right. It's personal taste. I can't give you like hard facts and data, but I will tell you this, that, um, the notion of instant gratification in consumers has become very, very powerful. Um, it kind of started with the internet and being able to, you get online instantly. You can purchase something with, you can purchase something with one click. You order something, it's in your house in one day. Like, this whole, this whole push towards everything is one motion, economy of motion, and then you get, you get the dopamine hit of your p, you know, your Amazon package showing up within 24 hours of ordering it. That is a trend, and that's, that's clearly happened. Um, there's also economies of, uh, economies of scale in building simpler, simpler devices that do one thing incredibly well. Um, especially with consumer devices, though, it is, consumer, consumer devices in particular are very taste-driven. Um, do I think that we're going to, you know, go back to a world of, you know, giant phones with lots of buttons? I don't. Um, I think that this, this, this technological move into kind of simpler looking devices, aesthetic devices, is probably permanent.

So is this framework part of testing the MVP? Because what I'm struggling with is, especially for hardware products, how to use these frameworks because initially you are going to start with something complex and then over time it will. Well, well, not necessarily. I mean, so are you a hardware person? Is that, is that what you're asking? Tell me, tell me about what you're working on. And I'd like to, I haven't wor working on anything, but previously we were trying to do this, uh, wireless chargers embedded furniture, furniture embedded in furniture. Yeah. Oh, awesome. Right. But then the technology takes time to evolve, but we, we wanted something to test an MVP. So, so I think, I think what you're referring to, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that when you design something on a hardware basis, especially an electronic device, you've got breadboards, you've got wires coming out all over the place, it's maybe bigger than you want it to be at scale, and all that stuff. There's the complexity of a prototype. Um, what I'm more talking about is the complexity of the problem that you're solving. So you could have this crazy prototype that looks like, look, you know, this Rube Goldbergian crazy thing that kind of came out of the lab and looks like it. But what you're really testing is, if I put a piece of cloth over it and I just rest my phone on it, that it instantly starts charging. And so it's, it's the simplicity of the use case more than, especially in the early days when you're prototyping hardware. Does that make sense? Is that a fair answer? Is it, cuz it's not like, cuz I, cuz I'm, what I'm, if you had told me, hey, the first device we have is going to allow charging in an armchair and charging on a refrigerator, and it's going to have, it's going to have a connection for, you know, Apple Watches and and AirPods and all this other stuff. I would actually say, why don't you just start with the, let's make sure the armchair works and that consumers like it, like someone, a furniture maker, because you'd probably want to do that through partners. A furniture maker would actually embed your charging pad, your your charging pad into that. Get that question answered before you start adding features to it. That's, that's the simplicity that I'm trying to drive you towards. Does that make sense? Is it okay? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

One of the questions, how do you think about MVP for such hardware projects because you don't want to invest so much, uh, effort upfront before knowing whether there's a market already, right?

Harder, hard, harder and hardware because it, uh, so again, I think I'd go back to the same thing again for, um, for, let's just use your example, for a hardware charging device, I would encourage you to find, find a furniture maker that's, you know, you know, that's that's doing kind of a, you know, kind of a group, a group financed, uh, piece of furniture. You find someone on Etsy that's making something, or you, you work with wood. You don't.

Have something that gets covered with necessarily has to be embedded in the manufacturing process. Perhaps it's something you could stick on, you know, a chair, an adhesive with a battery that lasts four years or whatever it is. But again, a simple use case as opposed to trying to solve every problem that you're envisioning.

You can tell the VCs that are going to back you, "I'm going to solve this. It's going to be in everything. It's going to be in every airline chair. It's going to be in every chair, every public space," and all that. That's the story you tell when you're painting how big your idea could be. But when you're first getting started, if you could have that giant vision, but if you can't get a single furniture manufacturer to agree to embed that thing in there, it's not going to work. And so you want to prove that first.

Is that, is that I'm not a hardware guy, so hopefully I didn't like step in it, but it's a... So let's, why don't we do? We thought we'd do, we thought we'd do a little, um, session, kind of breakout with each of your groups here. Um, one of the, here, here's, here's the first idea, and, and we thought that you could maybe have a group discussion of what is one way you can make your product super simple to install? And since we have hardware people, I, I think you can think about that expansively depending on what your company is. You know, is it, is it simple to install? Is it simple to deploy? Is it simple to use? But within your group, have that conversation. And then, you know, we can chat for five minutes. Is that, we're doing kind of five minutes-ish, and then we can kind of get readouts from folks on what they, what they talked about. It's also a great way, you saw everyone kind of raise their hands. I'm sure everyone doesn't know each other. It's also a great way just to hear how other entrepreneurs think, which for all, for me, was always the most amazing thing. So, all right, let's do it. Five minutes or so.

Okay, cool. I need one or two teams that came up with something interesting and unexpected in the conversation. Did you learn something? Who wants to, who wants to share? We're not going to do everyone. We're going to, we'll pick as we, we've got a few of these. So, we'll pick on other people. Everyone will get a chance to talk. But any volunteers to jump in out of the gate? I explained my company and what I want to get done and I don't think we talked about like how we can make it simple. We just talked about how, how it's going to work. So, I'm sorry that we did not.

No, that's okay. What's your company? Just because that, that might be interesting for everybody. So, my company is called The Pitch App. I'm trying to design an app, um, that it's like a Tinder for entrepreneurs and investors. So, you sign up as an entrepreneur and you sign up as an investor. Much like Tinder, uh, you upload a 45-second video of yourself pitching your idea and the investor is able to swipe left or right and connect you, um, based on geolocation and or category. I do think this could get bigger. Um, I eventually would like to go to like music or actors. So like if you're a musician and you don't need a manager, um, the app can connect them that way. But I think the MVP or what I learned here with, or my segment would be, um, the investor-entrepreneur, um, route that I would take. Super, super cool. Super cool. Thanks for sharing. Anyone else want to? We got one in the back.

Why don't we? So, hi everyone. My name is Leil Ker. So my venture is called Foodie. Thank you, Leo. Right now, we're in, in the process of interviewing restaurants. So it's in the food technology, uh, segment. Don't be stuck with the name because the name, name is going to change. So it's an, um, it's an app that integrates processes at a restaurant. So with the help of QR codes on the table, QR code as well, um, you can, uh, it allows the app allows the customer to browse the menu, select their items, edit their dishes, place the order, and also make the payment and leave whenever they want. So what we were thinking to, uh, make the installment process simple is that what we're thinking is that why don't we remove the installment at all? So rather than starting with a full-on app, proper app with a lot of features, keep it as simple as possible. Simple is good. So we would start with a web-based app. In this way, the customer does not need to download the app. They will probably not even know that it's an app or our company is called Foodie. They'll just scan the QR code on the table which will take them to the platform and they will just order, uh, and pay and leave.

That's exa- exactly, exactly what we were talking about. Other things that came up actually in the group discussion, uh, we need to make the QR code, uh, process as frictionless as possible. So probably, uh, put below the QR code, put the Wi-Fi code so everyone has the access. Make sure that actually the restaurant has Wi-Fi so we can, uh, actually the app works. Is it, looks like there's a question right behind you or is it a question? I think you should also talk about how you are going, you should also mention your awesome idea of how you are going to integrate it directly with the restaurant's already existing systems so the cooks immediately know what they have. Yeah, exactly. There was a question whether we would have a second dashboard in the kitchen and the idea is for us to integrate in the c- in the restaurant's API or POS system so they would automatically get, um, the, the orders on screen and they don't need to follow two types of screens or reporting.

Perfect. It's exactly the type of thinking we want to be doing kind of at this stage. Thanks. Thanks for being brave enough to share. All right, let's keep going. All right, the second. So, we're just to circle back to the kind of simple to install was number one S. Now we're getting to L, low initial cost. Um, and what does that mean? Um, it could mean frictionless trials. It could mean free samples of textiles, enough maybe to test manufacture some stuff. Um, it means lower cost of customer acquisition. Um, you can identify prospects with a premium. You know, everyone know what premium is? It's free and then you upgrade premium offering. Um, but be careful because free often people will often equate the value of a product with what you charge for it. And so sometimes there are certain products that if they're free forever, they start to think of it as valueless. And so generally speaking, a free trial period that emerges into, you know, into something that people have to pay for is, is, uh, is preferable to kind of just going full free all the time. Um, because then also when it's free, if there's a like a free version, you have to, you're constantly upselling to to get people to kind of to kind of, uh, to kind of upsell. And an example of this is LinkedIn. We all use LinkedIn. It started as a place to just upload, upload your resumes. I mean, to basically have an online version of your resume, quickly became a social network. But what these guys have done a brilliant job of is there's, they've built a giant, they got all the network effects by having a free product and they have just piled on the, the, uh, the premium products. You've got Sales Navigator, you've got InMail, you can buy extra InMail messages, you can have the premium version of of LinkedIn. And so it creates this virtuous circle, but they got the network effects, get everybody hooked on it with the free product to start.

So, low initial cost, I, instant and ongoing value. So you want to reduce the pain, and this is what I think you were exactly what you were talking about, um, when you were talking about, you know, your ideas in, especially in a restaurant setting. Reduce the pain for customers to try, um, and adopt it. Pain is the single biggest barrier to getting people to adopt your product. And so you need to demonstrate enough gain quickly enough that you'll overcome, you'll overcome the balance. And so if you, if you think about the gain, we talk about it in terms of the gain-pain ratio. You know, this, there's this thing that we call inertia risk, which is in the middle, which is switching costs. Ah, I've already got something that does something similar. It's kind of a pain in the butt to switch. Doing nothing is probably just, is, is easier than kind of trying a new product, or maybe there are other alternatives that are good enough. I don't want to risk, I don't want to risk a big license fee on a startup. There's kind of this, this inertia that can keep people from trying stuff. So your job, um, is to create the value proposition that overcomes that pain-gain ratio. Whether it's generating new revenue, savings, you're saving time, you're saving the cost of hiring people, competitive advantage, reputation, etc., to overcome the pain that it takes people to discover something, try it, buy it, implement it, deploy it, and own it. And if you can do this instantly, it's incredibly, incredibly powerful. Um, you know, we talk about instant gratification. I'll give you an example of a company that I think does this very well. Um, but in the enterprise setting, if you're selling something to a big company, um, if you can, we call it, we call it time to value. If the time to value is sub three months, that tends to be great, um, in the enterprise world when you're selling to big companies because it makes it easy for people to do, um, you know, cost models on what it's going to cost to do this and when payback begins. If it's takes longer, like super long time to implement and, you know, install it at the factory and all that other stuff, it's much harder to get to get over the hump. And so you want to get this time to value as short as possible. Um, and the ongoing value again, make sure that you're delivering value on an ongoing basis. It's not just kind of a one-and-done. Increases revenue, reduces time, drives competitive advantage, and in the consumer world, consumers just simply can't live without it.

One, one example, and this is an enterprise, enterprise software company. It's an investment that I made. It's called Pagos AI. Um, and one of the things that I like about them is they, they've actually, and before I was getting set up to do this, I didn't realize they had kind of hit all of the SLIPs. It was kind of baked, baked into their, baked into their DNA. And there's a reason for that. The guy who founded it was one of the early employees at Braintree, which is a giant payments company owned by, owned by PayPal. And they basically decided to build a company of all the dozens of things that customers complained about when he was at PayPal, but PayPal could never get around to fixing. They built a company that did all that stuff. And the interesting thing is that these guys, so basically what they do is if you're a big e-commerce company like Adobe or Ticketmaster or something, you've got 10 different companies that process your payments all over the world. There's no way to analyze all that payment data yourself. They aggregated all that payment data and do analytics and all this other neat stuff. But the neat thing, the sales guys can onboard them in a phone call. They say, "Hey, give me the key to your payment provider, you know, the encryption key so they can get the data and they will demonstrate their first demonstration will be ingesting all the data into their product over the phone and they get to see all their data in these dashboards." And so it's literally instantaneous. And so that means it's easy onboarding and as, as you'll see when we talk start talking about pricing models, low initial cost, they do something very close to a premium model. Um, instant value creation because people deploy it right away and start saving money, detecting fraud, and all that stuff. And, um, and, and it supports all, all of the payment platforms. It plays nice, plays nice in the ecosystem.

So, if you're, so here's a startup secret: self-proving value. If your product is about improving a process, provide proof as part of the product. Um, these guys, Pagos, they baseline all the results of these payment processing companies. Then when they install the product, you actually start to see how you're performing against benchmarks. Provide key metrics and visibility into the progress. So people are like, "Oh, this is working. I can actually see." So it's, it's almost self-documenting it in the product. It itself proves that what you're doing, um, what you're doing is actually delivering value. Um, and that means analytics and surfacing reports that prove the value, kind of right, right out of the gate.

So, here's another quick exercise and we may skip one or two of these just since we're, we have so many, we had so many questions and we're running a little short on time, but I think this is a good way, good one because when we, you know, I started talking to people about the last question, you know, one was how can you make it easier to install? Good question. Well, it's an app and apps are easy to install. And so, we had a follow-up in that. Another person shared that I'm building a textile product. There's no installation. And so we had, we had a sidebar. I think this particular one, um, actually should work well against kind of all the different types of companies that we're talking about. If for the company that you're building, what are different ways that you could streamline that time to value for your first, for your MVP and for your first market segment? So why don't we take a quick five minutes on that and then we'll hop back in and, uh, and, and get going.

All right, we got, we got our first team talking here. All right. I'm working on a book for, uh, parents that have children with learning difficulties and are having a hard time to learn how to read. So the idea is that with this book that we have actually developed and tested, but with professionals that work with children with learning difficulties, um, to turn it into a book for parents. So the things we were thinking, uh, of how to make this instant value was maybe coupling the book with an app so parents can test their children to see the progress and where they start. So maybe they can understand, okay, maybe my child is not at the same pace of reading as other children their age and then see how they progress, and that would also give us evidence that the book is actually working.

That is super interesting. Bingo. I think you nailed it. What do you guys think? Well done. All right, we're going to keep going. Thank you for that. That's awesome.

Okay, the last part of SLIP: P plays well in the ecosystem. And I'm going to talk to you a little bit about, uh, what that means. I, I'll just, I'll use another example. This company, TetraScience, they're, they're local actually. They came out of, they came out of Harvard, Harvard Business School. They build a cloud for the life sciences that connects all of the research devices, um, collects data from all those research devices and builds a cloud. And if you start to look at the ecosystem that they play in, so we're talking about playing nice with others. Look at the complexity here. And the way they talk about it is, we're going to be this cloud that ties all these disparate platforms together. And so they're part of their explicit strategy is to play nice in the ecosystem. Not only that, a be a clearing house and a central point. So this involves, you know, partnerships with all of these different companies, technology integrations, but this is an example of a company that explicitly was about the ecosystem and being a player in the ecosystem.

We talked about SLIP. I'm going to skip that. Let's jump into pricing, um, because I wanted to make sure we spent some time on this. How you price your product is super important to that early friction. And, you know, I'll show you an example that you'll all be like, "Oh, yeah, like every, everyone does this." But the idea is if you can, if there's a way, I'm thinking textiles again. Is, is there a way, but I think there's a way that you can provide things like free, free samples and other stuff, or make your platform free, or create developer kits for hardware that doesn't cost anything so that people can start to use your product, test it out, and then you have a way to step them through increasing the value of your offering and increasing the price that you charge them. And what does that, what's an example of that in the, in the software world? And even things like airlines, airlines. Everybody does this. That's HubSpot. That's Slack. That's Vimeo. That's WordPress. You guys, I should have put JetBlue in there. You ever seen what the JetBlue pricing looks like? It looks like that, too. It's basically you get to walk through. There's a way you can get in cheap and then there's a way that you can upgrade. And in the world of startups, providing, especially if you need, if it's B2C and you need lots and lots of users, or it's a, it's, or it's, um, or you're selling into an enterprise, you want to get them using your product as soon as possible, but you have to have a way to kind of walk them up the value chain. And it's things like this. This is what we call product growth in the software business, which is you install the product, free, and as soon as people start using it, you start doing chuch-ching as they upgrade for more seats and kind of all of this other stuff. Very, very important. Um, and talking again, just going, circling back to the ecosystem and playing nice with others. It's not, you don't have to just think about being the center cloud of the ecosystem. That's, that's not always what it looks like. There's a, a local company called Klaviyo that does SMS marketing and they, they have a platform for SMS marketing. And they were kind of selling it to e-commerce customers so you can kind of market and send text messages to them and all that stuff. But in order to do that, they needed to have partnerships, both technical and business partnerships with all the wireless carriers so that they could send text messages over, over the wireless network. But the thing that made these guys, made them into a billion-dollar company was their partnership with Shopify. So they started off as a feature in the Shopify, you guys know what Shopify is, the e-commerce, you know, e-commerce platform. They started off as a feature and then along the way, Shopify blessed them as kind of the, the default standard, the preferred, I think they call it the preferred marketing and SMS platform. Boom. Unicorn, unicorn was born. And so partnerships, it's not just playing nice in an ecosystem with the different masters that you serve and kind of a super complex like that life sciences product. It's also picking partners that are part of your product from day one that can help you grow. They're either on the right side here. They're necessary for creating the business in the first place, or they can be provide leverage for you to make the product, product explode.

Did you have a question? You're raising a quick comment about that. I do a lot of e-commerce consulting with Shopify customers. Yeah. And I'm in a Facebook group and in the group, it's like a free CEO who paid at least $2,000 a month to be on Shopify's highest tier and everybody in that, an app provider in Shopify pays. So it's like a community where he pays to be in the higher tier. If you're in this tier, here's this group. So like all the users of Shopify who are like the owners of the companies, they're in that highest tier. They talk in that group and that you could hear them always talk about this tool, Klaviyo, to each other. Yeah. They're like, "What do I use? Use Klaviyo." And it was weird because it was new at the time. Yeah. Like they somehow managed to get into that, like word of mouth.

Well, so they, they got into word of mouth, but then also, so it was a combination. It was rising tides, right? They were doing quite well and at some point Shopify, it became a tight partnership, but partnerships can change the trajectory of your business, whatever the, whatever your business is. You know, you could have a partnership with the hardware manufacturer, a partnership with the furniture manufacturer, you know, partnership on the, on the textile manufacturing side. Super, super important way to, to think about playing, playing nice is the P on the SLIP. Playing nice in the ecosystem. So, really good question. And I'll just repeat it for everybody. Do we? So, and I think what you're talking about, so one of the ways a partnership can take place is you can actually sell through partners. You could say, "Here's my product and the partner is going to do distribution for you and they kind of, they end up being in front of you, in, in between you and your customer potentially, or is it better off to kind of just go it alone and kind of and and launching your own?" That's actually, it really depends on the business and what you're saying is true. Um, that said, if you, it depends on how much you think a partnership could accelerate what you're doing. And so you have to kind of balance, balance the, the loss of a 100% of customer control if you have a selling partner, um, with the acceleration of your business. One of the common ways to solve for that is a short contract if you really want to go it alone because that's, that's a. So that's exactly what my company, we, we're like, you know, we actually partnered with big, big companies that were actually reselling our stuff and eventually we were able, we got enough traction that we were able to switch over and kind of cut them out of it and go direct to our customers because we had built, built credibility.

Okay, we're coming to the home, home stretch here. Um, so let's, let's, let's do this. I'm, instead of doing kind of a, a proper breakout, I'm going to just give you the chance just to, we'll do this kind of one in real time, but for each of you, think of one partner or two partners that you think you should partner with for your particular idea. And I'll give you like 60 seconds and then I'll just start calling on you randomly. You got one already? All right. What do you got? So, with my app idea, I think I would be able to partner with LinkedIn and call it LinkedUp. I can just add a feature and it'll be a feature to to their product that's already developed. So LinkedUp for pitch, pitch decks or pitching, swipe right, swipe left, embedded LinkedIn.

I like it. Uh, so I think I can partner with, uh, Curriculum Associates. So quickly, what's the business again? So I help, um, classes diversify by bringing experts of color into the classroom. Yeah. Um, so now that everybody, there's a lot of conversation around diversity in the classroom. I can get the big textbook, um, companies to use my product to help Pearson, McMillan, like this, to bring that diversity in the classroom. So they integrate my own product directly into, um, their own products. Now, it's, it's a great idea. Super big company. Maybe you partner with them in a way that it's not in all their textbooks. You become, you, you do it on a smaller publication that you can get them to pay attention to you at first. Then you work your way through the organization. But you have to find, in these partnerships, you have to find a champion that believes in what you're doing and has enough pull to kind of do something with it.

Anyone else want to share a partnership idea? We don't. I think we can partner with POS systems. So Toast is the market leader, but the market, POS market is extremely fragmented. Even though Toast is market leader, they only have 15% market share. So with any POS systems who are ready to take down Toast with us, I think they'll be interested in partnering with us. Plus, they're local. You can just, you can walk over there and just bang on their door if, if you want to. You and I can have a conversation about trying to partner with POS, by the way. It's, uh, super fun. Anyone else?

All right, home stretch, guys. Um, okay. So, we talked, we talked about bridging the product-company gap. Hopefully, you've kind of, you understand how that's different from just product-market fit, right? You get product-market fit and then you need to get over the gap with a product that has a good value proposition, minimum viable segment, keep it small, repeat it, and then you can kind of go broader. And then we, the second half, we talked about business model and you can build, you can be doing this thinking of business model from day one. It's not something that comes later, right? You architect your product for SLIP: super easy to install, low cost, etc. That can all be part of day one planning. Um, it just requires thinking. It doesn't require a whole ton of actual, kind of work to do it. Package it, price it, free to try for actual pull. Make it very easy, um, and make it very easy for people to to adopt it and use it.

Anything else? I'll stick around, by the way, if you guys want to, you know, pick my brain. I'm gonna drink some water and just park for a bit if you guys want to chat. And we'll, I'll make sure that you also, you guys, I'll just send my email. It's Chris_.VC if any of you guys want to reach out. I'm happy to chat, happy to come on campus, happy to spend time or do a coffee hour or whatever. All right. Thanks. Appreciate it.

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