In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr engage with Pablo Srugo, a Partner at Mistral VC and Host of The Product Market Fit Show Podcast.
Pablo delves into the essentials of finding and leveraging product/market fit from a venture capitalist’s perspective, sharing unique insights shaped by his dual role as a VC and podcast host.
What You’ll Learn:
Venture Insights: Pablo shares why he started his podcast and how it serves as a strategic tool for content marketing and enhancing deal flow.
Deep Dive into Product/Market Fit: Discover the nuances and strategies for achieving and maintaining product/market fit, as Pablo explains through vivid examples from his interactions with successful founders.
Engagement with Startups: Learn about the criteria and metrics Pablo considers when engaging with early-stage startups and how these factors influence his investment decisions.
Sustainable Growth: Discussion on how sustainable growth is driven by a deep understanding of product/market fit and the importance of continuously adapting to market needs.
Key Takeaways:
“Product/market fit is not a one-time achievement but a continuous pursuit.” — Pablo Srugo
“Understanding and adapting to your customer’s needs is crucial for long-term success.” — Sean Ellis
Timestamps:
[00:00] – Introduction: Sean and Ethan welcome Pablo Srugo.
[03:15] – Why Pablo started a podcast and its impact on his VC activities.
[10:30] – Strategies for identifying and investing in startups with potential for product/market fit.
[22:45] – Examples of successful product/market fit strategies from Pablo’s podcast interviews.
[35:00] – How product/market fit drives sustainable growth.
[47:50] – Q&A with Pablo: Insights into common pitfalls and success stories in venture capital.
Why Listen:
This episode is a goldmine for entrepreneurs, startup enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the intersections of venture capital and startup growth strategies. Pablo’s experiences and insights offer a rare glimpse into the mind of a VC who actively shapes the growth trajectories of innovative startups.
Links & Resources:
Follow Pablo on LinkedIn here
Subscribe to The Product Market Fit Show Podcast here
Subscribe to The Breakout Growth Podcast here
Join the Conversation:
If you enjoyed this episode, share your thoughts on social media and tag us! Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review—it helps more people find the show.
Transcript:
Sean (00:01)
Hey Pablo, welcome to the breakout growth podcast.
Pablo Srugo (00:04)
Sean, Ethan, it’s great to be
Sean (00:06)
Yeah, as you said, we’re also joined by my co -host, Ethan Gahr. Ethan, good to see you.
Ethan Garr (00:11)
Hey Sean, hey Pablo, yeah, good to see both of you. Excited for this conversation.
Sean (00:16)
Yeah, it should, it should be a lot of fun. we’re, we’re just getting back in the swing of things. We took a break as I, as I did my world tour. so, yeah, we’re, we’re, definitely not in our rhythm of doing a ton of these, but, this, this should be a lot of fun. Pablo, as we, as we talked about in the introduction, Pablo’s a VC, but he also has a podcast and.
I see it more these days where VCs are having podcasts, but it’s still relatively rare. So I’m just curious, probably what inspired you to decide you wanted to launch a podcast.
Pablo Srugo (00:53)
You know, it’s so funny how these things work and like, you’ll appreciate this because you talked to lot of founders and the founder story is always like, you know, they oftentimes kind of go in these circles. I actually started off, really go to the beginning and I started posting a little bit on LinkedIn and it got a lot more traction than I expected because when I post on like Twitter, I get like two views. And all of sudden on LinkedIn, I got, I think it was like a few thousand, it was so small, but I was like, okay, maybe it’s something here. And then I, you know, as I did that, the problem was I kept running out of
Sean (01:13)
Right?
Pablo Srugo (01:23)
I don’t know. I can’t possibly come up with something every week. Like I’m just not that smarter or that creative or whatever. And then I remember having this like this pitch presentation from one of the better founders in our portfolio, Hanif from he’s the CEO of cement and he’s just such an energetic guy. And I was like, man, if I could just capture this and clip it and put it on LinkedIn, like just the hot things that he’s saying with that, level of passion energy, that’s got to take off. So that was
That was the initial thing and it was like, okay cool, so I guess I gotta do this podcast thing just to get these clips and these clips are gonna go viral on LinkedIn. Turns out the clips went nowhere and you know, like three months in I just completely abandoned that short clip strategy. But the podcast, the podcast stayed.
Ethan Garr (02:06)
and
Sean (02:08)
That makes sense. it was just kind of trial and error and the podcast seemed to create value for the listeners and so you’ve kept doing
Pablo Srugo (02:18)
That’s right. mean, like for us, it’s obviously a classic content marketing strategy. Like at the end of the day, the way I think about it, our whole business is about referral deal flow. Like those tend to be the best deals. And so what we think about is when, you you’ve got thousands of founders out there in Canada and US, which is mainly where we play and all the time they’re asking other people like in their network, you know, if they’re thinking of raising, like who should I go speak with? And for that person who’s receiving that question,
to say, Mr. All, to say our firm, they’ve gotta think about us, like they’ve gotta know that we exist, and they gotta remember us at that time and associate us with high value, all those things, right? It’s the same reason that anybody does marketing. And so the idea being like, if we’re putting out this content, we’re writing on LinkedIn, we’re doing this constantly, the odds that they saw something from us in the last few days, and hopefully they think it’s high value, well then it’s just that much more likely to drive referral deal flow for us.
Sean (03:12)
makes a ton of
Ethan Garr (03:14)
That’s really interesting. For us, know one of the things that’s so rewarding about doing the podcast is Sean and I are always seeing these trends from conversation to conversation. wondering if you’ve noticed just in your work, if you’ve noticed any interesting patterns from your podcast that have really influenced your work as a VC.
Pablo Srugo (03:34)
Yeah, definitely. mean, that’s the part like of the product market fit show, which is a podcast that was the most surprising to me. And maybe it was a bit naive, but I kind of figured because I’m in this game already of, of, you know, venture and talking to startups and talking to startups all the time. And so the reason to do it was, you know, to create new relationships, it was content marketing. I didn’t think I would necessarily learn that much because I’m like, it’s just going to be the same thing that I get from all the other conversations I have, but I’ve learned tons through.
doing these podcasts because it’s just so different when you go into it with a learning mindset. And now we’re kind of deep discussion about just product market fit. So I mean, just off the top of my head, like a couple of really small nuggets, but for example, one thing that I’ve seen that’s very common, know, everybody talks about, you need to talk to customers. You need to get out of the building, you need to talk to customers. That’s how you validate your idea. And for me, talking to customers is like 10, 20 conversations. And frankly, for most founders,
It’s like 10, 20 conversations. yeah. Okay, cool. It’s aligning. Like it’s right. I’m telling you that the, one of the patterns I saw was a lot of these founders. And this is the select, like I’ve only interviewed founders who’ve gone on to become late stage companies. So these are all the successful startups. They’re doing hundreds, like hundreds of these interviews. And I can believe like 500 is a number I’ve heard it multiple times. So that was like a very big learning because it just seems
way too much, like you’d think after 30 conversations, you’d figure it out, but it seems like that’s the number of conversations it takes to get the nuance and the insights that are the difference between a product that kind of fits and one that truly gets to product market fit.
Sean (05:13)
that’s awesome. Yeah. I actually had a venture capitalist at Log Me In who used to like kind of hound me about talking to customers. And it was super early days there. I would, you know, being a bit of a smart ass, I was like, I don’t really care too much what customers say. I care what they do. And I’m A -B testing everything and I’m measuring the results. And so yeah, I’m really plugged in, but I’m just, I’m not really big into talking with customers.
Ethan Garr (05:35)
You
Sean (05:43)
He had led a $10 million round. so when he says, you know, dance, I’m going to dance. So he said, he said to me, okay, that’s nice, but that’s not good enough. I want you to talk to customers. I want you to talk to customers every single day. And so, and then every time I would see him and he was in the office a lot, he would say, so when was the last time you talked to a customer? What did you learn? And so after a while, I was just going through the motions for him, but I, you know, what I,
Ethan Garr (05:50)
Hahaha
Sean (06:12)
start to find was that even as I ran tests, I was so much more plugged into the reality of the situation and coming up with such better tests. it wasn’t necessarily the conversations that got us to product market fit, but it was, you know, being able to really like tap into that product market fit to maximize growth. So yeah, even, even I didn’t have the instinct of the number of conversations that you’re talking about, but, but found the benefit. Like once I started
holding myself accountable to having at least, you know, one plus conversations a day was super powerful.
Pablo Srugo (06:48)
it’s incredible the value you get from really trying to get as close as you can to living in your customer’s shoes. And that’s where like the data and stuff is all great. And obviously the bigger you are, the more you can rely on it. But in the early days, frankly, of such limited data sets that it’s hard to extract that much signal and you can get a lot more. And it’s not if this or that, right? Like you really want to do both, but you can get so much from being close to your customers. I was talking to one.
one founder who ended up building a software for like coffee shops. And he’s like to this day, and he’s gone to raise a few hundred million dollars. To this day, he goes to a coffee shop every single day, just to never lose that feedback loop of learning from his customers. Another one, and this is maybe even more by -blown, but there’s a company called Ada Support out of Toronto, they’re Unicor now. what they do is like, is chatbots, like, but they started in like 2010.
Right? Like, so they were in the beginning of Chabot now, obviously it’s an AI generate, you know, AI Chabot for customer support. And what those founders did, like to me, this is still to date, one of the craziest stories I heard, because what they did is they raised money. They were like doing this product. was a completely different product. And it was a kind of working, not really. They saw some, something around customer support. And then what they decided, these are like now venture back, they’re a venture back startup, like two go founders, venture back startup. And they decide to start working full time as customer service agents. Like they’re doing.
the job, basically get hired by a few different firms and they start answering the questions themselves. And then they build automations and try to automate themselves as much as possible out of that job. What came out of that was ADA and that’s gone on to do, know, last I spoke like over $50 million in ARR. So like there’s just so much value, whether you’re doing, asking questions, going to where they work, spending time doing what they
Ethan Garr (08:26)
yeah.
Pablo Srugo (08:38)
to really live and breathe your customers and understand all the nuances. Like that’s just often the difference between success and the million other chatbots that were there at the right time and didn’t work
Sean (08:50)
Yeah. And then for Mistral itself, like I know you guys are relatively early stage as a VC. Are you trying to find companies that already have product market fit or are you sometimes coming in before product market fit? How does product market fit kind of factor into your investment decisions?
Pablo Srugo (09:11)
you know, Sean, I wish I could wait till product market fit. That’d make my job a lot easier. you know, we play at seed and sometimes even a pre -seed. And so the way we think about it is like pre -seed is like team market fit. Series A usually is like product market fit. And the middle, is where we play, we think of it as like proven value proposition or value delivery, however you want to think about it. And that’s kind of the preamble for product market fit. So we usually come in when there’s some proof points around, you know,
The founder will say, my company is gonna help this KPI. For example, it’s gonna help conversion by 10%. Okay, do you have customers that have adopted your solution that are referenceable who have seen that KPI move by what you think it’s gonna move by? That’s when we come in and then the goal is to get from there to product market fit.
Ethan Garr (10:03)
Is there any interesting signals that you’re looking for just sort of along the lines of product market fit at that point? Are there things that you’re constantly at? Is there common question you’ll ask founders to try to unearth where they are with that?
Pablo Srugo (10:21)
A lot of it comes out, you know, obviously when we speak to these founders, a lot of it is about the team itself. But when it comes to product market fit, a lot of it actually comes out in the reference calls with customers. And honestly, I’ve learned it the hard way myself when I was a founder before, before I was a VC that there’s nothing, there’s few things more painful than solving like a low priority problem, like solving an actual problem. And the solution actually works and moves the KPI, but it’s just not.
the top of mind problem. And that’s a lot of times what I’m trying to get at in these conversations because, you know, realistically, if you go into these calls with customers, be like, yeah, I’m using the product. probably be like, yeah, I love the team because they probably do. No product works, does what it’s supposed to. That’s usually what you get, but trying to dig deeper into understanding how much this really matters to them. And this goes into the Sean Ellis test, you’re very familiar with, you know, how disappointing it would be if this wasn’t there anymore.
you know, that starts to speak to how easy is it going to be to get in front of that many more customers? Because the upside and downside is like founders are very convincing. And while it’s not easy to make a sale, it’s not easy to make 10 sales, it’s very much feasible for a great founder to do that through sheer like power of will, determination, and you know, charisma. But that’s not gonna get you to product market fit.
Ethan Garr (11:47)
Yeah, for sure. So how do you approach like determining market size and does that relate to these product market fit challenges for you?
Pablo Srugo (11:55)
Market size for us is honestly like a bit of a secondary thing, at least for me. Like we obviously think about market size, but at least I tend to do it because we’re coming in so early and many times, I mean, in some cases you’re going after an existing market and you’re just saying, I’m gonna take this much share or I’m gonna be this much better than that product. And so that becomes a much easier way to figure out market size because if you’re trying to be 10X better than a product that’s already doing a few hundred million dollars in revenue, well then your market size is pretty.
pretty clear and determined. But in many other cases, it’s really hard to know. You’re going after what’s a small market now, but it’s growing. You’re maybe even creating a new market. So I think I kind of inverted a little bit and I just say like, what would have to be true for this company to get to a hundred million dollars in revenue? And that’s almost a gut check. Like you kind of work backwards and okay, add their ACV, they would need this many customers. know, can the market get there? Is the market already there? And for me at seed stage,
That’ll check the box and as long as I’m comfortable with that, I’m like, okay, there is a potential path to it. The challenge is like most companies are failing for other reasons well beyond they hit the market size constraint. So we obviously check for it, but it’s not like the number one
Sean (13:11)
Yeah, it’s funny because the way that I check market size is if a VC has decided to back them, I’m assuming that they’ve got the the MBAs or the other people there assessing the market size. I’m maybe going to rethink my. No, but I actually I like how you know, essentially is there is there a scenario where where it is there a set of assumptions that would support it being one hundred million dollar plus business? And if there are, then.
then that’s probably enough because ultimately there’s so many points of failure between the market being huge and you actually capturing that market.
Pablo Srugo (13:52)
Well, I think it’s a fair point. Like frankly, most VCs love spreadsheets and they’ll spend a lot of time, a lot more time than me calculating exact market size. I’ve lived the pain as a founder, like we went after a massive market, the market size was spectacular, the story was great, and we failed drastically. So it’s just kind of like, okay, let’s focus on the most important things first.
Sean (14:09)
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. and, and yeah, validating that, that you’re valuable to at least one person is, is a good starting point. So kind of with that in mind though, do you, do you ever find where you start to get signal that, you know, maybe a founder has, has signal that their solution is a good fit for a couple of different markets. And one of them is maybe a little more niche than the other, but, the people in that niche are really.
Pablo Srugo (14:19)
That’s
Sean (14:42)
passionate about the solution. They seem to really need it. But maybe there’s not a lot of headroom there. I’ve come across that. So I’m assuming that you’ve probably seen that as well. And if you have, what’s generally your recommendation to kind of hop from little market to little market or to focus on the big market kind of right away?
Pablo Srugo (15:07)
It’s a great question. I mean, the thing is, it tends to happen in those later stages. You know, it’s unlikely that you’re going to hit the periphery of a market when you’re trying to get to 10 million ARR. And that’s like where we play is, you know, we’ll come in, they’re pre revenue, maybe they’re doing half a million of ARR. We help them get to like one, two million. We then, you know, they tend to raise around from somebody else, but we stay pretty close as they go to that five, 10 million range.
Once they’re kind of beyond 10 million, you know, we go to the next company. And so for the most part, the companies that I’ve seen hit that kind of plateau because it happens. Like that’s the thing that I think founders sometimes forget is they feel like if I could just get to a million ARR, then I’m good to go. And you could plateau, you could flat line at a million, a 5 million, a 10 million, a 20, like you’re never safe. Right? This stuff always keeps evolving. You always got to find new ways. And so yeah, I’ve seen companies that get to like 10, 15 million and all of a sudden, you know, they’re a little
Sean (15:53)
Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (16:04)
they’re a little bit stuck, but just being honest, it’s not really the main place where we play and where we tend to focus and add value for us. It’s really about finding a market, really frankly, any market that is gonna lead to that market pull.
Sean (16:20)
Yeah, that’s that’s the bigger risk at that seed stage investment is that nobody gives a crap about this solution.
Pablo Srugo (16:25)
That’s exactly it. That is exactly
Ethan Garr (16:25)
Hahaha
Yeah, so what advice do you have for companies that are trying to find product market fit?
Pablo Srugo (16:34)
So it’s a great question. actually have, like at this point on the product market fit show, I’ve done just over actually we crossed this milestone not too long ago, a hundred episodes and not all of them are founder interviews, but the majority is. So at this point I’ve interviewed almost a hundred late stage founders about product market fit. And what I did is I kind of summarized a lot of the, you know, the best kind of principles, the patterns into what I call the five steps to product
and like this would be like if you think about advice for founders looking for product market fit, this would probably make the top of the list. So if you want, can take you through, you know, those steps. won’t go into like the full full presentation mode, but I’ll just take you high level and then we can kind of riff on that. So the first one is I call it like before startup mode, there’s research mode. and I say it that way because you know, the lean startup is so popular. It’s like every it’s the first thing that any founder learns about. And honestly, it’s extremely beneficial, but what
Sean (17:10)
Yeah!
Ethan Garr (17:11)
Yeah, for sure.
Pablo Srugo (17:29)
one of the challenges that I’ve seen it create is that founders often move too quickly into the MVP phase, right? So they’re like, okay, cool. We got an idea, build the thing, put it out, see what happens. And before that, what I’ve noticed in terms of patterns is that, and we were talking about this earlier with the 500 interviews, like most of these really successful founders put in a lot of work upfront, well before MVP, just into pure research. An example is like the ADA one that I mentioned where they were
like truly customer support agents themselves. Another one is this company called Paper and they’re like a tutoring platform for, now they sell through schools, but like for students. And the crazy part of this story is, they’re like valued now over a billion dollars, but for three years, like from 2015 to 2018, Phil, who’s the founder of Paper, he had an MVP and he was testing the MVP and trying to find ways to make it work. And honestly, he had like
no major customers, like no, he had betas and things like that, but nothing important. At one point he like lucked out and got one district somewhere in California to just to kind of put their hands out, be like, fine, I’ll test it. And the things changed when he moved, like he just went from, was in Montreal, he moved his entire team to that city in California and they started spending every single day in schools. And he’s like, I would spend like, you know, the entire day, like eight, 10 hour days in schools, in the back of classes, watching how people use the product. And
is really the inflection point. After that, they landed district after district after district. They grew to over $50 million in ARR. like, that’s the research phase that I’ve seen a lot of these founders do that a lot of other founders tend to kind of gloss over because frankly, it’s not sexy, it’s not fun, but it’s a total must.
Sean (19:11)
Yeah. Especially they’re engineers and they want to just be in build mode and, and yeah, and engineers tend to be less, less desiring to go out and meet a bunch of people. They’re not, they’re, they’re, not that kind of sales personality most of the time. And, and, yeah, so it, it, it’s sometimes easier to prototype, but, yeah, ultimately you can’t, you can’t know if something’s going to work until you prototype it, but you can, you could eliminate.
It may be before even prototyping it if the problem you’re trying to solve doesn’t actually exist.
Pablo Srugo (19:45)
That’s right, that’s right. You can save a lot of time. But the other piece, Sean, and I have this myself, I’m more of a business guy, but for me, one of the problems is this research phase, psychologically, is really painful because what are you doing? You know what I mean? When you have a product and you put it out, people are like, what are you doing? I got this product, it does this, whatever. When these guys were at and they were pretending to be customer service agents, what were they doing? What were they, they go to party, you talk to your friends and family, and they’re like, what are you doing? I just
Sean (19:58)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (20:13)
kind of work as a customer support agent, but like not really, like, it’s weird, right?
Sean (20:14)
Yeah, that’s where the… I’m in a stealth mode startup. This makes me sound kind of cool. actually, just real quick, just to build on what he was talking about there, I have two companies that are probably two of my better investments over the years. One of them being Ring that went on to be billion dollar exit to Amazon.
Pablo Srugo (20:22)
That’s right, that’s right.
Sean (20:44)
And then another one is a company called Connectifier that sold to LinkedIn. But for both of those companies, the founders originally were not stuck to any one idea. were just like almost like an idea lab where they would just go through a bunch of things and like eliminate what might work, what might not work. so they really seem to spend a lot of time in that research mode. in fact, like Ring, the…
The way Ring was founded was that Jamie Simonoff was spending so much time as he’s doing the research and people kept coming to drop off packages and things at his door and interrupting his thoughts. And he was like in a pretty far from the door, think like in a back room or a garage or something. And he’s, he’s like, God, I just, I wish I could just like video to the door and, and, know, see what it is
Ethan Garr (21:20)
Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (21:25)
That’s great.
Sean (21:36)
tell him to go away, whatever. then so that ended up. But I remember I had actually invested even before that phase. invested in the, when it was, it was called Edison Labs, just when he was trying to come up with something, just as a bet on him as a founder. he, one of the ideas that they were going through was kind of a plant.
So something completely different, like a plant thing that connects to some windows. And then even the Connectifier guys, they were a couple of former engineers from Google working on analytics. they were so focused on how do we stretch out that research period? Because I knew they couldn’t get funding through that period, that they were.
They were kind of assessing the nutritional value of ramen versus peanut butter from a dollar investment perspective so that they could like stretch their funds until they figured out the thing that would work best for them. And in both cases, was really good outcomes for me. And so I’m seeing that pattern as
Ethan Garr (22:51)
totally want to hear about the next couple of points Pablo, but I just wanted to go back to one thing you said. You mentioned that the lean startup, it’s a great framework, but that people sort of get, they jump right to the MVP. And I feel like it’s a really good learning for myself, our audience, that a lot of great concepts, if you focus on just one, like the one key point of it and miss the bigger picture, you can really kind of hurt yourself. And I think my best example is actually,
with Sean, he, I had this conversation with him once when I was at Teltech and he was like, he was talking to me about this test learn process and, know, you know, that he was really honing for, you know, in the book and everything. And I went and I came back and I was like, we’re going to test, we’re going to start running experiments like crazy. And we didn’t do all that homework first around product market fit. And it was like the first couple iterations of our growth hacking were not great. Like we, struggled a lot. And I think it’s kind of the same thing. It’s like, if you read the lean startup stuff and you just.
you just focus on, we should just make an MVP. You’re really putting yourself in potentially a bad position. You got to look at the larger picture. So I just think it’s a really valuable point there. The research phase is really
Pablo Srugo (24:02)
I think that’s right. A lot of it comes back and it’s not like by any means, you know, it’s not even counter to what, what Eric Rees is talking about because it’s all about like learning. It’s that, that learning feedback loop. And it’s almost like it’s faster because frankly, like the slowest thing is to build a full product. You know, then you got wireframes a little less slower and frankly, talking to people is like the fastest thing. Like you have two conversations. You’re like, this makes no sense. You change the next conversation and you’ve already learned a lot. Right? So I think it’s part of it, but, I
What’s happened in the world is Lean Startup equals MVP. Like that association is so hardened that that’s become the
Sean (24:40)
Yeah, totally makes sense. So was there anything else in kind of your framework that you want to, it sounds like there’s a lot more details to it, you, is there anything you want to highlight?
Pablo Srugo (24:44)
Yeah, there’s there’s there’s there’s a few there There’s a few steps so like we’re go it like take me off this whenever you want But I’ll tell you the next step and then as long as as long as it keeps being interesting But we’ll keep keep going down this path So the next one is you guys all probably know this book called the only the paranoid survivor I’d very very like popular Andy Grove book and and he’s talking to an audience of like late stage CEOs because when you’re late stage CEO you’re successful and success breeds complacency and so only the paranoid survive I think the kind
Sean (24:56)
Sounds
Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (25:14)
when it comes to early stage founders, the common kind of refrain would be only the insanely focused survive. When you talk about the team, the one characteristic that I’ve seen through and through in founders that are successful finding product market fit is they’re insanely focused on whatever they find is most important at that stage. So I’ll give you one example.
Sorry, my dog is just going a little crazy.
Ethan Garr (25:42)
Hahaha
Sean (25:44)
Lassie communicating.
Pablo Srugo (25:46)
That’s God, this MediGenes has so many sounds that for her it’s just wild. Anyways, I’ll give you one example of just the sort of things that sometimes these founders need to do to kind of push through walls. But the difference between ultimately having some success and not, spoke with this founder, Nabil, the founder of Form .ai, and there are many different things he said to me that were pretty insane. he, first of all, he devoted his entire house to startups. He had like 20 people working out of his own house, because that’s how focused he was.
Ethan Garr (25:52)
Hahaha.
Pablo Srugo (26:16)
He got in a car crash at one point and like literally told me and I don’t recommend this at all but like this is just to get you into his mindset like he got in a car crash and he said to me that he didn’t even take the time to call the insurance to do anything with it because he literally thought to himself like best case scenario I’ll save $10 ,000 like my startups more important. So anyways this is his mindset but the crazy story to me is at one point he’s got this, he’s working on the first like
Sean (26:34)
Yeah. Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (26:41)
first enterprise pilot, he’d done an enterprise pilot and this was the time when he was gonna like renew the pilot and kind of expand the contract. Really important part of know enterprise sales is that expansion piece. And so he’s out of Toronto, he’s got a meeting with this company, they’re in Ohio and so whatever he kind of like sets up the flight, he wants to it in person and when they show up, this is February in Toronto, if you know February is like full of snow, like crazy snowstorms all the time, he shows up to the Toronto airport and the flight is delayed and then delayed and then ultimately just totally canceled.
whatever, he finds a way, he books a different flight, he’s gonna have a terrible time because he’s gonna go from Toronto to Vegas and then overnight to Ohio, just a ridiculous flight to get there, but whatever it takes. So he gets onto this flight and he’s sitting on the tarmac waiting for this flight to take off. And this is a few years ago, security is the same as it is today. And the flight just keeps getting delayed and delayed and delayed and he’s looking at his watch and he’s realizing
He’s not gonna make his connection. And if he doesn’t make his connection in Vegas, he’s not gonna make that meeting. And this is the key moment because I think of myself in his shoes and I have no doubt that I would just open up my laptop. I would email the company and I’d say, hey guys, like I tried everything. I’m so sorry, there’s no storm here. I’m stuck. There’s nothing I could do. you know, let’s reschedule. Let’s do it through Zoom, But not Nabil. Like Nabil pleads with the flight attendant.
gets led into the cockpit, which I don’t know, like I’ve just never seen that happen. gets galloped to the cockpit and tells the pilot that he’s not gonna make a business meeting and pleads to let him off the plane. And somehow the pilot lets him off the plane, which is just mind blowing because it’s not emergency. Like there’s no reason, but this is the sort of thing. It’s just a business meeting, dude. Like sit down, what are you doing? But he gets led off the plane and he finds a way and he makes that meeting. so like that to me just says
Sean (28:10)
Yeah.
Ethan Garr (28:11)
Ha ha ha!
Sean (28:23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just a business meeting.
Pablo Srugo (28:35)
just so maniacally focused. It’s not that it worked. the fact that it worked makes it a really interesting story. It might not have worked, but it gives you a sense of the sort of, the level at which he’s gonna push to make things happen. And those are the sort of things you need to do in the early stages because everything like just fully depends on you, on the founder.
Sean (28:54)
Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense. that brings up a question as it relates to that is like, are there certain types of maybe personality profiles that you think are more likely to be able to ultimately get to product market fit? I go back and forth personally between
Yeah, there’s personality profiles or it’s totally random and you throw enough monkeys at a problem someone’s going to figure it out. what’s the, what’s your, where do you sit on that spectrum?
Pablo Srugo (29:28)
it’s so, I think it’s really tough to figure out upfront, but I would say like probably the number one quality is this like just insane perseverance, like this not give up -ness, right? And you see this, like there’s some founders who are amazing storytellers and you have some founders who are just amazing operators. And it’s the operators who, especially the ones who will just not give up at anything. whenever I talk about this, I think about a friend of mine, Marty.
who I think of as like the founder cockroach because this guy can’t be killed. And like he went through failure after failure after failure. And like finally, can show the whole story, like finally found product market fit. And I think the lesson for me there was like, you just, it is really more an art than a science. there, no playbook will give you a guaranteed way to find product. Like these five steps, like there’s no guarantee to find product market fit, but the ones who are more likely to find them are the ones that find a way to just stay in the game and they run experiment and test.
and new idea and what and they persevere. And if you just do it enough times, like the odds are such, especially if you’re doing it the right way and maximizing your odds each time, like the odds are such that you get it at some point. So I think that’s, if there’s one quality, it’s that, like it’s just, it’s just perseverance that sometimes it’s like this naive, like belief that it’s just gonna work out, right? But it works.
Sean (30:46)
Do you see any pattern of like second time entrepreneurs having any better chance of getting to product market fit?
Pablo Srugo (30:52)
I see that, know, so actually like we’re big fans of proven founders and in general, what we find is they make a lot fewer, a lot less of the avoidable mistakes. But when it comes to finding product market fit, it’s a bit of a toss up because it just depends on the lessons they learned. I would argue that if they had a hard time in their first company to finding product market fit, then definitely they’ll approach it in the right way the second time around. So if it took them a long time, but a lot of first, a lot of founders,
I mean, you can call lucky call whatever like they put something out in the think works and if that was your experience the first time around that that’s gonna be tough and I have seen that and what happens is actually like the opposite where it’s like over polished because what they say is like in my first company, I had to do everything the bootstrap way You know, my decks were nice. My design was ugly. Like everything was last minute now everything becomes hyper polished and and they forget that like the reason
Sean (31:25)
Yeah, that’s not necessarily a good lesson. Yeah.
Yeah, there’s higher expectations about me now or something.
Pablo Srugo (31:51)
That’s right, like that’s part of it. hold them, but they forget that like actually the core is not all that other stuff. Like it’s just, it’s a product market fit. Like it’s the value delivery. That’s right.
Sean (31:57)
flexibility.
Ethan Garr (31:59)
kind of related to that, was curious if you find that successful founders often have someone very close to them on the team, sometimes it’s CEO, CTO or something like that, where that other person is a really compliment to that personality as opposed to being the same personality. think the perseverance thing goes across the board, but sometimes you need two different personalities to sort of balance that. Do you see that a
Pablo Srugo (32:23)
Sometimes, but I was listening to, I don’t remember which podcast the other day, and they said like, you know, even in co -founder worlds, there’s always like the dominant founder, you know, like, and usually that tends to be the CEO. And I think when it comes to product market fit, like at least my experience has been, there’s always, there tends to be one founder who is just so much closer to the customers, and that’s the founder that like really drives.
these efforts and you know a lot of times you have like the salesperson and the builder or whatever like there’s a bunch of different ways of setting this up but I you know I wouldn’t say that I’ve seen like this compliment duo that that helps when it comes specifically to finding product market fit it might help in of building a company in terms of a bunch of other things but specifically when it to product market fit I do think it often comes down to and it can be more than one person but but oftentimes it does come down to that one
Sean (33:17)
Yeah, I actually have even a counter example on that when I was a founder. One of the people I brought on the team was probably my hardest working friend who had come from investment banking. it was, just as like investment bank got really messy about 10, 12 years ago. And so he was, he was looking for a new path. And I thought, man, I would love, I’d love to team up and get his, his, his drive. But when we were going through
get to product market fit phase. I he was just so used to being that devil’s advocate, which you would think would be like a good thing. And maybe it was, and maybe I just didn’t handle it very well. But what I found was that as soon as I would have something percolating and like, okay, I think I’m onto something. This looks good. think, you know, it’s like he would just break so much of the momentum of trying to figure it out by playing that role of devil’s advocate that at that point I
I felt like it was not good to have someone who is used to being in big investment banks where you’re trying to control risk, where the biggest risk in a startup is irrelevance and you got nothing to lose. You can only win by actually doing something.
Pablo Srugo (34:36)
I totally agree with you. And that’s the thing, like a lot of the stuff that works in one to X doesn’t translate to zero to one. It’s such a different world than like this, this idea, like it’s actually being a devil’s advocate in zero to one is probably the easiest role you could take because like most things aren’t going to work by default. So it’s so easy to find the reasons why it’s all good to fail. That’s not the case in one to X. Like once you’re in an established place, like you can, you can actually put things against each other. And so, yeah, I think that that resonates with me.
Sean (34:49)
Yeah.
Right, right. You’re going to be right most of the time.
Yeah. So Ethan, you got
Ethan Garr (35:10)
No, I was just going to say, like, I really don’t want to leave our audience with a big cliffhanger here. So probably better continue on and tell us more steps for us.
Pablo Srugo (35:16)
Right, right, right. Well, let me do this. I’ll go through the next one really fast because the next one’s pretty straightforward. And you alluded to this earlier, Sean, like you have to be in the market to win the market. Like you said, like you can’t research your way to product market fit. So at some point you got to put something out there and this is more like the classic MVP stuff. But I’ve been surprised and I won’t go deep into the examples just to move this along, but I’ve been surprised by just the fact that oftentimes you just don’t, there’s so many things that you learn just
being there just by having something in market. lot of the unique insights come like the ring example is a little bit different, but they come that way, serendipity, unexpectedly, and markets grow in ways that you couldn’t have predicted. And only because you were in the market, were you able to kind of win that market in the future. that’s something that I’ve seen a few times. But let me skip to step four, which is, this is the last book that I’ll cite, but this is the way that I framed a lot of these steps.
Does this book by Victor Frankl call like Mansers for meeting and and he says this quote that to me is just always stuck which is happiness is and must remain a side effect of byproduct and is destroyed and spoiled to the degree to which it has made a goal in itself which is just so for me when it it just punched when it hit when I when I heard it because it’s like it’s so true you can’t make yourself happy like you can make yourself lose weight like you can make yourself have a better job, but you can’t just make yourself happy you only become happy through as a byproduct of doing all these other things and I
Sean (36:16)
Yeah, love that
Pablo Srugo (36:42)
Revenue is and must remain a side effect or byproduct when it comes to that zero to one stage. Like revenue is not a KPI. So a lot of founders will start off, they’ll get, you know, their thousand MRR or whatever. And now the goal is next month’s 2000 and next, and the month after that is 4 ,000. And like the challenge is you don’t have the engines yet. Like when a big company like Uber to go to another extreme says next quarter, we’re going to do 10 % growth. They’ve got proven engines across sales, marketing, product.
They know what their spend is in each one. They have levers that they can guesstimate and say, okay, like because we’re doing this, then that we should get 10 % growth. You don’t have them. So for you to say that next quarter you’re gonna double or grow by 20 % or whatever it is, is just a complete, it’s made up, but it’s also dangerous because it makes you focus on the thing that isn’t a priority. The thing that’s a priority is value and value delivery. And for me, one of the best examples of this was Clio, legal tech startup out of Vancouver that actually just last.
week I think raised $900 million at three billion. But when they started, they ran this beta, which many people do. And what I thought was really interesting that Jack, the CEO did is that he said he added friction to the beta. Like he actually made it so you could only access the beta if you went through, I think it was like a 30 minute webinar. Like it wasn’t a huge thing, but it was still friction. Now you guys know like your growth experts, what you got to do if you want to grow is lower friction, like dramatically lower friction. Find ways to get people through the funnel faster. Like that is how you grow.
Ethan Garr (38:05)
Hahaha
Pablo Srugo (38:09)
This tells you that his objective was not growth. Like it was not revenue. It was not maximizing beta customers to then maximize the number that would convert. His goal was getting the right beta customers to learn the right lessons, to be able to create a product that really delivers value. And only once he figured out that, okay, this thing really does deliver value, which took like six months to do, then he went out and then he launched. And then, you you have all your classic kind of growth things to get two people to a funnel and through it. But that is a different…
Sean (38:20)
No, no.
Pablo Srugo (38:38)
way to think about things, is in the early days, revenue is just, not the KPI, value is.
Sean (38:44)
Yeah, absolutely. it’s one of the companies that I think really represents some of the things that you went through is the last company that I did an interim role with, which was Bounce. I don’t know if you know Bounce, but Luggage Storage Network, probably the fastest revenue growth of any company that I’ve been, while I’ve been a part of that company, they were absolutely on fire. But the CEO in the beginning, was
Pablo Srugo (38:58)
Sounds familiar,
Sean (39:12)
because it was luggage storage, would literally, he literally validate. He was promoting luggage storage. He gets someone saying that they want to be able to store a bag in New York City. And then, and then he just starts, he’s like, yeah, we’ve got a new partner in that area. Let me, let me get back to you. And he’s, was basically brokering it. And he’s like calling all kinds of partner, potential partners and saying, I got someone who wants to store the bag. Will you do it? And it’ll cost this. And you know, and it
just basically hustling to validate that there was demand on both sides of the network. ultimately now he’s got 10 ,000 partners and just like, walk 10 steps in any major city in Europe and you’re going to pass a bounce location. But in the beginning, was just so much of like, is the need there? Can I satisfy the need? And just that total hustle. then from a focus perspective,
Pablo Srugo (40:04)
That’s right.
Sean (40:08)
I’ve never seen a CEO who’s more focused. The dude doesn’t watch TV, doesn’t watch sports, doesn’t like, everything is just all about the business. And I love that about him. Like he is so, so dedicated about
Yeah, definitely support some of the points that you had there. And then another question that I had kind of going a little away from, okay, that’s how to get the product market fit. do you ever, I mean, particularly, guess now that I know that you’re not necessarily looking for product market fit before you invest, do you ever think maybe the product market fit is there and then it’s a false positive once you go in and you’re
Pablo Srugo (40:24)
I love that.
Sean (40:52)
yeah, that product market fit we thought was there is not product market fit.
Pablo Srugo (40:57)
Yeah, I mean, oftentimes or maybe the way that it plays out for us is the value delivery that we’re seeing that we think, you know, would lead to true product market fit, which for us is like, it’s that pull, right? There’s a difference between you have a handful of customers that you’ve always pushed your way into and delivering value and getting all the way till, holy crap, the market loves your product so much that they just can’t get enough. And that often breaks for a variety of reasons
even though you have a handful of customers that really do like your product, that use your product, it’s just hard to get to the point where the market is truly kind of pulling it out of your hands.
Ethan Garr (41:40)
So, you know, obviously this podcast is totally focused on growth and that’s really why we’re so curious about your thoughts on product market fit. We find that product market fit is crucial for sustainably fast growing companies, but how do you view growth in relation to product market fit?
Pablo Srugo (41:56)
I think growth is almost the output, Like you’ve got value delivery leads to, hopefully leads to product market fit, hopefully leads to growth. Like, I mean, you guys are the experts, but I don’t know how you could possibly growth hack your way to success without product market fit or implement even perfect kind of growth strategies, all the testing, all the optimizations, all the frameworks. But if you don’t have that core of product market fit in the first place,
It’s kind of all for naught. It’s kind of like pushing on a string a little bit, would you not say?
Sean (42:32)
For sure. I think if you look at that product market fit as the prerequisite for sustainable growth, I think we all agree on that. I think even if we kind of take that question and maybe dig it a little bit deeper in terms of once you have product market fit, how should that guide your growth execution? mean, maybe you haven’t done necessarily a ton of thinking on that, but if you have any thoughts on that, I think it would
It would be helpful.
Pablo Srugo (43:03)
I think the only other thing that comes to mind is that, and this is something that, because I’ll ask every guest, when was the moment where you felt a true product market fit? And some people answer me, and probably maybe 30 or 40 % will be like, I don’t. There is no one moment. I always am changing and evolving product market fit because the market is always changing. The products that exist are always changing. And so that’s kind of not a one and done piece. So think that’s the other.
Sean (43:17)
Yeah.
Pablo Srugo (43:32)
part of it is you might have product market fit, like you said, in niche market, or you might have product market fit in it today, doesn’t mean you’re going to have it tomorrow. And the other thing around product market fit is some people what I’ve seen is they use that concept for every single feature they launch. And so that’s the more iterative part when it comes to growth is like on a feature by feature basis, this next feature that we’re launching, does it have true product market fit or does it not? And those are the things that, ultimately you hope translate kind of into growth to the extent that you’re
evolving with the market and making sure that every feature you release has that level of product market fit.
Ethan Garr (44:07)
Yeah, I think for me, like, I really believe that. one of things that I found is that companies that are constantly trying to understand their product market fit are the ones that keep evolving and keep growing. When we launched RoboKiller, we ran Sean’s product market fit survey question.
And we did that throughout the… So every time we were making a change to the product, we were looking at how did that impact that product market fit survey question. But even after we launched, even after we found product market fit, and even after I left the company, they were still asking that question to make sure that as they evolved, as new features came into place, that their product market fit, if it was evolving, they were evolving with it, essentially. So I think it’s really… I think it’s a great point. think
product market fit is always going to be a moving target. It’s not about this milestone or this gate you pass through, it’s about constantly iterating and dialing it in over time. So I think it’s a super important point.
Pablo Srugo (45:11)
I think that comes from the founder, whether it’s the founder leading the efforts or at the very least embedding that culture across the entire employee base so that that’s always a priority because one of the challenges that I’ve seen in those slightly later stages is because product market fit is there and growth is there, all of a sudden the founders start spending more of their time on things that don’t have to do with growth.
when that happens and unless you’ve instilled that already in your culture so that everybody else is focused on growth, it’s inevitable that growth is going to slow down and growth has, you know, it’s hard to prioritize anything over that. Like growth can solve a lot of problems and it can create a lot of problems. And so that’s another piece that I have seen happen quite a few
Ethan Garr (45:50)
Right.
Sean (45:58)
Yeah, so what would you say, you know, if growth can cause a lot of problems and can create or it can solve a lot and can create a lot of problems. I think we would all agree that probably product market fit is the biggest challenge for any startup to dial in. What do you think’s the next biggest challenge after you have product market fit?
Pablo Srugo (46:17)
That’s a really good question. I think a big part of it is kind of scaling that early success and transitioning from a qualitative driven organization, which is how many of these founders found product market fit in the first place, to a truly data driven organization. Because what ends up happening, and this is inevitable, and even if the founder doesn’t take their eye off the ball.
they get further and further away from the customer. There’s things they can do to counterbalance that, like the guy who spent every day at a coffee shop and still talking to customers, but there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re gonna go from you doing every sale to you not doing every sale to so on and so forth. And that’s one thing I’ve seen is like all of a sudden the founder who had like the pulse on exactly what the customers were feeling and therefore got that product market fit, a year later,
growth is stalling and frankly they’re not sure why. And I think a lot of that has to do with because you get further out, you’ve got to find a way to still keep those kind of feedback loops, keep that information coming to you. And a lot of the qualitative stuff you were doing before probably needs to stay, but you’ve got to compliment with actual data because the organization is that much bigger, there’s so many more touch points and there’s no other way to keep track of what’s
Sean (47:39)
Yeah, but as you introduce that data and the experimentation and kind all the things that scale, making sure that you don’t get too far away from the customer as well, which is challenge.
Pablo Srugo (47:49)
That’s right, it’s a delicate balance. But what I’ve seen many times is like, you cause you kind of figure till they make it like at the beginning, yeah, your spreadsheets are a mess. Like you don’t have the data, the data is not as clean. Like you just, you’re not instrumented the right way. And you know what? You make it work because you’re so close to everything. But then you don’t, but then you kind of wait till it’s too late and the numbers are already flat for you to revert that and start kind of maturing as an organization from like a data. Like it’s really just
garbage in garbage out, like it’s that classic problem. But that’s what I find, is like a lot of founders honestly don’t have the visibility they need to even understand that like they’re not getting the same sort of product market fit that they used to
Sean (48:30)
Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy, especially when you think about some of the off -the -shelf data systems like a Mixpanel or an Amplitude. They have really generous free services on those, and they’re relatively easy to implement and learn. Yet most companies just don’t prioritize it and kind of fly blindly and try to execute off of maybe a Google Analytics or something that isn’t going to give them very much helpful information.
Pablo Srugo (48:58)
That’s what it is. This story comes to mind, I’ll share it because I think this is the mindset of a lot, especially this honestly, and you asked earlier about first time, second time founders, this is a problem mainly of first time founders. I remember when I was working on GymTrack, and now we’re going back, this is 2015, I’m like 24, 25 at the time, and my mindset was all
building a unicorn, was like landing customers, it was the big things, like those are only things that matter. And I distinctly remember I’m in this kind of meeting and it’s myself, my co -founder, who’s my age, a few other people, and then there’s our CFO. had hired this, he’s a part -time CFO, very experienced, had been through like many acquisitions, he’s kind of in his 50s. And he was desperately trying to get us, like talking about data, like trying to get us to implement like financial controls, like really simple financial controls, the same sort of like fights that I have now with some of my founders where I’m
please just do this the right way and they’re trying to reinvent the wheel. We’re pushing back. like, this is big company stuff. This is gonna slow us down. Ken, I don’t wanna do any of this. And then he’s desperately trying to convince us to see the light of day, right? And so he asks us, he’s like, why do cars have brakes?
What are you talking about? What are you talking about? He’s like, why do cars have brakes? And I’m like, I don’t know, so they can slow down. And he’s like, no, so they can go faster. And like that stuck with me, right? Because that’s like what it like for me, what Ken saw was like, he was just trying to break through with us. And he definitely did. That’s like one Ken zero us, right? But that’s kind of the thing that I see is a lot of first time founders, especially like the difference between second time founders, the first time founders is that everybody makes mistakes.
Sean (50:26)
I like that.
Pablo Srugo (50:42)
First time founders tend to make a lot more of the avoidable mistakes. And like this is one of them. When it comes to data, when it comes to prioritizing like finance and all this stuff, it’s like little nitty gritty, it’s not close to customers, it’s not fundraising, it’s not sexy stuff, tends to kind of get de -prioritized. And there’s a point where that’s totally fine and there’s a point where you cross over and it’s just not. And I think that’s the reason why a lot of founders, know, even though it’s really easy to implement mixed panel and it’s really easy to have like clean financials, you know, they tend not
Ethan Garr (51:12)
Yeah, it’s a constant struggle. I feel like every day I’m fighting data challenges, matter how big or small the company I’m working with, it seems to always be the limiting factor. So, Pablo, we’re running against time here. We don’t want to keep you too long, but we always ask one question before we close. What do you understand about growth now that maybe you didn’t understand a few years ago?
Pablo Srugo (51:18)
Hahaha
I think it’s the evolving nature of product market fit. think from the outside looking in, you do really start to feel like it’s a zero to one event. At some point, you’ve got product market fit and then things take off. But just realizing that the fight is never over, that you’ve got to keep reinventing yourself and seeing how the best founders are able to stay close enough to their customers, even at scale, to continue to get, like have tight feedback loops, iterate the
again, against changing markets, changing competition so that they continue to have product market fit, think is probably the biggest insight that I got through the product market fit show when it comes to growth.
Sean (52:19)
Awesome. Yeah, my key takeaway is definitely mapped to that as I think through what you’ve covered. Obviously, product market fit near and dear to your heart, near and to my heart and Ethan’s as well. That’s the foundation of any successful company. You’ve built a whole podcast around it. So you’re bought into the concept of product market fit. And I like your systematic way of thinking about how you get there from
you know, the research initially, research is actually skipped over by a lot of people, but you can probably eliminate a lot of ideas based on that research. then, yeah, having that focus and the MVP, but with the focus on making sure that you create value and that ultimately, even as you get through that early scale, you talked about the importance
Focus on the value and not so much on the revenue. The revenue is a byproduct of that value. And so that was another really good takeaway. And I completely agree with that. But ultimately, if you want to scale into a big valuable company, you do need the data and the processes in place and the systems in place. Because the what got you here won’t necessarily get you there approach that simply talking to customers every day and only using that to kind of one off iterate.
is probably not going to scale into that big company to be really successful. You do need to really have a foundation of data and what you’re doing. And what I find is that when you have really good data systems in place, it actually lets you know which iterations you make are working and which ones aren’t. And that the experimentation mindset ultimately can’t
be created and evolve if you don’t have really good data as the foundation. So while we focused on product market fit in this conversation, I think it all maps ultimately to building really big valuable companies. And that’s what your podcast is all about is like not talking to a bunch of companies that are trying to get to product market fit, but taking those really successful companies
going back to their early journey to product market fit. And it’s a fascinating topic, and I’m excited to go through more of your episodes.
Ethan Garr (54:41)
Yeah, likewise. just building on what Sean said, think you really hammered home this idea that product market fit is not a constant, right? It’s something you have to constantly work for. You have to constantly dial in. And I think this, you know,
your whole approach to product market fit being focused around getting and staying close to the customers is really important. you’re right, it does change at the beginning. It’s qualitative later on. It’s data focused.
But I think that’s, know, especially from seeing that from someone who’s in the world of VC where you’re constantly talking to a variety of companies, it’s really interesting to think through that. And the other key takeaway is if you want to stay close to your customers, I think you have to open a coffee company because it just makes it super easy to go to the coffee shop every day.
Pablo Srugo (55:29)
Yes. Yeah, he it easy.
Sean (55:34)
Yeah, thank you so much, Pablo, for sharing your insights on product market fit and helping us make the connection to long -term sustainable growth. And for everyone tuning in, thanks for listening.
Ethan Garr (55:45)
Thanks everyone.
Pablo Srugo (55:46)
Thanks guys.