Transcription
At 29 years old, our business was doing $42 million, and my net worth was a Volkswagen Golf. Three months later, we sold our business for $180 million. But it's time to start again. This is not just your standard YouTube "build in public"; I promise you've never seen anything like this before.
In this video, you're going to see the importance of UI/UX as we take lessons from Silicon Valley's best, showing you the lengths we're going to go to assemble the best in tech and what it looks like to throw hundreds of hours of work in the bin. This is just you connecting to your AirPods wrong; it's a perfect example of UI and UX done correctly. So those little features you use every day without realizing it—that's the magic that happens when you use something and it just works.
Now, what is the actual difference between user interface and user experience? Going back to the AirPods example, user interface is a little popup that lets you know your AirPods are connected. User experience is that feeling you get when it connects seamlessly. Just going to pause there for a second. You're probably wondering why am I going to listen to these two random guys talking on my screen?
I want to take you back 12 years to when me and my brother started our first business. Bootstrapping a company to an $180 million exit, you learn a lot. We started with $1,000 to our name and a credit card. It was a really hectic process—building, scaling, and selling a business. To be honest, we didn't really do anything but talk about business for a decade. I got so burnt out from the experience that I needed to retire at 34 and see what that life was like. But being retired at such a young age got boring pretty quickly. We knew we wanted to go again, but this time we want to set the bar much higher.
Stop it, okay. Um, people keep throwing out this word: "unicorn." By definition, it's a privately held company worth over a billion dollars. With the likes of Canva, Safety Culture, and Linktree, we want to be on this list. We spent 10 years, 3,600 days, or about 87,000 hours on the business, and we only have four photos to show. This time around, we're going to document the entire process. It's a chance to learn by watching the process unfold, rather than just seeing some polished end product. You can watch us spend a shitload of money and make some mistakes, but hopefully, you can see some wins as well.
At RealHub, we developed the product ourselves, in-house. But now, seeing how far technology has come and the way that AI is developing, most people around the world are still not aware of what is happening on the AI front. This is the first time that we are basically about to enter a non-human culture. We wanted to take a bet on doing it offshore at a quicker pace to achieve unicorn status. We need the best talent.
Let me introduce you to Baraka. In 2023, I met Baruka on Richard Branson's island. We're sitting around dinner, and I'm hearing him talk about his business he's created, and I knew this guy knows his stuff. And recently, I realized his business is perfect for what we need. There's one issue: Serge's office is in Sri Lanka. We wanted to move at pace, so we booked our flights immediately. After about 15 hours of travel, at 2:00 a.m., we arrived in Sri Lanka. We needed to get to bed early so we could be up for day one.
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My full name is funny because I'm Sri Lankan. My full name is Gambir Arab Banana Harach Chandra, but you can just call me Banuka. I'm the founder and CEO of Serge Global. You know, Sri Lanka is a really interesting country. We have incredibly high literacy rates; the country is very kind of technically skilled. Everyone's an engineer; everyone does math, and it creates this really interesting kind of talent pool that we have. I think in-person collaboration is fundamental to starting a business. You need people in the room; you need that energy; you need everyone to understand what's going on. How do you get to a place where billionaires want to use this?
So day one here in Sri Lanka, um, we're really focusing on the user experience and user interface, but it's kind of broken up into three components. So number one is talking to the persona: Who are we building this tool for, and why? The context is going to be lost, so and before you kind of dive into solutions mode—which often a founder can do—it's like, let's make sure we actually think about what our customer cares about; what are their problems that they have? And then, finally, once we really unpick and uncover all of that, then we can start focusing on solutions. Probably not a lot of people that can design the room that we had yesterday.
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You had people with experience in mobile apps, in product development, in engineering, in cybersecurity, as well as a mix of founders that have built million-dollar businesses, all sitting together, ideating side by side and searchable for work but not actually clogging up a big list. Okay, so it's the same; it's the same feeling as "so connect." Okay, what else have this experience found? Okay, so have you ever wondered how a 4-year-old can pick up an iPad and just immediately know what to do with it? It's not an accident. Every single detail when it comes to user interface is carefully considered. It's not how it's laid out, but it's intuitively—you know what to do. But think about that: a 4-year-old, they have no idea what they're doing. They pick up an iPad, and all of a sudden they get it. The goal with building any product is reducing the friction. It's not just how you use it, but it's the feeling it creates when you use it. A really big part of our conversations with Surge is how the product operates without clutter—removing unnecessary buttons and annoying notifications. It's really important for this to feel like a part of your phone, not an addition. When building something great, you win the lottery when the person building your product is actively dealing with the problem you're trying to solve.
Let's go back to our first meeting with Baruka over Zoom. We've been working on a product for about 150 hours. Two days before we leave for Sri Lanka, we're on a flight home, and Jack says to me, "I think this product's going to fail." It doesn't really matter how much time, energy, or effort you've put into something when you're getting signals that tell you you're in the wrong direction. You need to adjust quickly. This is what we called the pivot. It's important to take the emotion out of business. We were attached to the original idea, but once we realized we could build something better, we had to let it go. We'd come up with a new product, and so we decided to go to Baraka, and I asked him a really simple question: You have a single bullet in a gun; which idea would you shoot without hesitation? He says, "I would shoot the first one."
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I'm not going to lie to you; I think we're on to something good.