The challenges of founding a business and the importance of product-market fit. It also touches on building a strong team and finding the right investors.
The challenges of founding a business and the importance of product-market fit. It also touches on building a strong team and finding the right investors.
We've we've gone in and out of product market fit which is I think something that people don't tell you right it's once you find it it's not permanent and in fact that may have nothing to do with yourself but rather what's happening out in the world like there's the market part so the the the first version of product market fit was we had launched in 2020 so it took us two years to get off the blocks but finally we launched in 2020 we were so excited it was March and then boom COVID hit and uh I I still have the screenshot of our of our launch on Hacker News where you know it was the front page and you had World Health Organization calls COVID a global pandemic. Assembled launches World Health Organization calls COVID a global pandemic. So it took us two years to launch. They're like, "Oh no, we're screwed." Um and then a month later it was off into the races because you know all these
businesses started growing um call centers where people you know had used to have been like it's called a call center because that's where you worked out of one central location. they were all of a sudden dispersed and and and so you were managing these large distributed teams. You had companies growing really quickly, adding headcount and they're just like how do we manage all this? And then so we were replacing spreadsheets at a point in time where businesses just had to Robin Hood, Slack, all strike all these companies were blowing up. So that's the first version of product market fit. The second version was in 2022 when a lot of these companies hit headwinds and they had to get more efficient and then all of a sudden um oh wait like now you need a tool as well uh for a different reason but we had to repurpose it. We fell out of product market fit because it wasn't just riding
headcount growth. It was how are you going to make this team 20 30% more efficient truly like hardnose ROI. Um and then the last version of product market fit was you know it's it's no access it's no secret that that customer support is an obvious application of AI. Everybody knows that. Um um and so when we built AI agents on top of our workforce management data they're resource aware AI agents. So it's different from any other chatbot but but it took us time to find that product market fit of it's an AI agent but here's why it's part of the assembled platform. Now you can fall in