The art of pivoting with Rajiv Ayyangar (Tandem + Product Hunt)

What happens when you can't find product-market fit with your startup idea?

It's time to pivot, and Rajiv Ayyangar, CEO of Product Hunt and co-founder of Tandem, is a master at that.

In this episode, Rajiv shares his journey from the highs of rapid growth to the tough calls of pivoting and transitioning Tandem to a self-sustainable business. 

Gain actionable insights as Rajiv recounts how tracking metrics and learning rates helped him and his team decide when to pivot, especially during the pandemic when the stakes were incredibly high. 

Learn about the importance of co-founder alignment and structured methodologies for idea validation as we discuss the successes and setbacks of Rajiv and his team. 

This episode is packed with real-world examples that showcase the complexities of startup life and the power of resilience.

We also explore the nuances of product positioning, remote work solutions, and the intense journey of fundraising. 

Listen to Rajiv's experiences under the guidance of Y Combinator and understand the critical role of refining product positioning for success. 

From handling the surge in demand during the pandemic to making strategic pivots, this episode provides a comprehensive look at navigating the most complex moments behind finding product-market fit. 

Episode Transcript

Rajiv Ayyangar (00:00):
In the early days we would do sort of a
weekly retro and sometimes wewould track a metric relative to
where we were Like how manyuser interviews did we do, how
many people said they wereinterested, how many people
actually tried it, how manypeople are using it?
Usually these are like singledigit numbers because it's so
early.
But one thing that we alwaystracked was learning rate Low,

(00:20):
medium, high.
And then why and that was kindof interesting because sometimes
we'd have different numbers,we'd have different, uh,
learning rates the three of us,depending on what we were doing
one kind of consistent patternwas sometimes we get to the end
of the week, learning rate low,low, low.
Why, what can we do to changethis next week?
And when there were a coupleweeks in a row, we were just

(00:42):
like learning rate is stillUsually that correlated with we
should pivot.

Ariel Camus (00:57):
Welcome everyone.
This is Ariel Camus, and thisis the only thing that matters
the podcast where I interviewsuccessful founders to
deconstruct their path toproduct market fit and to
extract the principles and theframeworks behind their success.
My guest today is , CEO ofProduct Hunt and co-founder and

(01:18):
former CEO of Tandem, a virtualoffice tool for remote teams.
Tandem saw explosive growthduring the pandemic thanks to
its innovative approach tosupporting collaboration among
remote teams.
Rajiv's journey with Tandemstarted in 2018, and over four
years, they raised $7.5 millionfrom top investors like

(01:39):
Andreessen, Horowitz and YCombinator.
In this episode, we dive intoRajiv's experience with building
Tandem, the highs and lows ofstartup life, and his incredible
insights on pivoting,fundraising and finding product
market fit.
We'll also discuss his currentrole as CEO of Product Hunt,
where he's helping otherentrepreneurs launch and grow

(02:00):
their products.
Get ready for a masterclass onthe art of pivoting with all of
you, Rajiv Iyengar.
Hey, Rajiv, thank you so muchfor dedicating us some time
today.
Really appreciate having youhere.
You have an amazing story as anentrepreneur.
I can't wait to hear, so pleaseintroduce yourself and maybe

(02:24):
the company you built over thelast few years when we met.

Rajiv Ayyangar (02:28):
Oh, it's good to see you after all these years.
My name is Rajiv.
I previously founded Tandem,which was a virtual office for
remote teams.
It's like a desktop app whereyou can see who's around and
talk in one click.
Yeah, we ran the company fromaround 20,.
We started in around 2017,pivoted several times.

(02:48):
Crypto, personal financeeventually built this virtual
office tool and when you and Iwere in Y Combinator together in
summer 2019, we launched it forthe first time within YC and
then on Product Hunt, where itreally took off.

(03:08):
That led to this several yearjourney where we had just a
crazy growth and traction.
And then the pandemic hit andit got even crazier and we
thought we had product marketfit.
We made the app, we built outthe app, we made it kind of

(03:28):
deliver on its promise and overthe next couple of years, as
people started returning to theoffice, we just saw the top of
funnel dry up and, yeah, it waskind of a crazy thing to
experience like this this spikethat seemed like product market
fit, and then kind of a dryingup of people looking for this

(03:49):
solution.
And, um, I know we weren'talone.
Like the entire video space andthe entire video chat space saw
similar spike and then drop.
Yeah, it was, it was.
It was pretty eyeopening to see.
In any case, like the shortversion of what happened was we,
um, we, we couldn't, wecouldn't find a larger market.
So we we ended up first tryinga pretty crazy pivot around

(04:13):
hybrid work where we hadhardware devices in offices and
let remote people teleportaround the office.
Uh, that turned out to be justtoo early, too expensive to set
up, so we kind of shut down thecompany.
We gave the company to two ofour engineers who were excited
to like run it as a kind of aside business.
So it's still going.

(04:33):
There are a couple hundredteams that use it, but it's just
not not on the venture trackanymore.

Ariel Camus (04:38):
It's uh, let's unpack that, that story which,
uh, it took you like a minute ortwo to share, but there are
four years of ups and downs and,yeah, I can't wait to go all in
.
You talked about a few of thepivots and to me as an
entrepreneur, that's always oneof the hardest things is to

(04:59):
decide when you have reallytried something enough to give
it a fair chance, but also hownot to delay the decision
unnecessarily to say you knowwhat it's time to move on, and
how do you take what you learnfrom that experience to feed
into whatever you do next in thenext pivot.
So can you share a little bitabout the pivoting experience in

(05:23):
those years that you werebuilding what happened before
Tandem, and Tandem on its own?

Rajiv Ayyangar (05:28):
Yeah, you know, pivoting is so much more common
in early stages than peoplethink.
I actually kind of agree withDalton Caldwell where he said we
really shouldn't call itpivoting, we should just call it
changing your idea.
And you're going to change youridea in small ways and big ways
so many times in the early days.
So let me describe like sort ofI'll trace the arc of what we

(05:52):
did and then maybe share somelike reflections on that journey
, cause it's so relevant to likewhat I'm doing now at Product
Hunt, figuring out the nextdirection.
It's relevant, you know,relevant.
The next time I start a companyso we started out with so it's,
first of all, founding team.
It's me.
My old co-founders were Tim Hsu,an incredible engineer, who I

(06:14):
met at Yahoo, and then BernardFortet, an incredible designer
and engineer, who we all met atYahoo.
And initially we had this ideaof a cryptocurrency portfolio
tracker um, that with reallyhigh data density, beautifully
designed, like the most powerfultracker.
This is in 2017 and, um, we hadthis like seed of an idea.

(06:36):
We put us, we put some mocks ona facebook group and we got
like tons of people saying, hey,take my money now, like I want
this.
So we had a little bit of anidea and a little bit of
traction and mostly we justwanted to work together.
So we jumped in.
We built the product, like very, very quickly.
We launched it on product hunt.
We got a little bit of traction.
Then we, very quickly, thecrypto markets were crashing and

(07:00):
we just saw that our retentiontracked with the price of
bitcoin.
We like reached the ceiling.
We couldn't figure out how tomonetize.
We started exploring paths tomonetize and we didn't like any
of them.
Like we didn't feel like wewere the right team to build,
build out tax advisory servicesand we didn't want to sell ICO
ads.
Those seem pretty sketchy In2018.

(07:21):
That was probably the hardestpivot.
It was our first one because wehad like thousands of people
using the app and like hundredsof millions of dollars tracked
on it.
So it really felt like therewas something there.
There was love, people loved it, but we just couldn't figure
out how to grow it.
We couldn't figure out how tomonetize it.

Ariel Camus (07:37):
And Did you try to charge?
Like you mentioned that thepeople in the Facebook groups
were like saying, take my money,Did they actually deliver on
their promise?

Rajiv Ayyangar (07:47):
You know I'm trying to remember.
I think we didn't chargebecause we weren't growing.
We'd raised like a very small,like pre-seed round and we
thought, like we did the math onlike how much we thought we
could charge, and we did someexploratory conversations and
like it just didn't like wecould probably get some people
to pay, but it just didn't likewe, we could probably get some
people to pay, but it justdidn't seem worth it.

(08:07):
In hindsight I think it wouldhave been interesting to charge,
because what happened was whatI would not recommend for a
pivot, which was just we keptthe product around and just
didn't develop it until it likeeventually broke and then we
tried to transition people offto some competitors who we
thought were good.
It was really sad.

(08:28):
I think we should have eithertried to charge and get it to
self-sustainability or just shutit down.

Ariel Camus (08:36):
What do you think made you not?
I know it's been a while, butwhat do you think was the
disconnect between this initiallike?
Let me explain why I'm askingthis.
I think sharing a mock-up on aFacebook group and getting
people to say, take my moneyseems easy, but it's actually

(08:59):
not that easy.
But at the same time, it's notenough to validate that actually
that's a viable business.
But in your case, what was thedisconnect between what they
were saying and what they wereactually doing after that?
Was it that you decided not tocharge for some reason, or was
it that they were actually notwilling to pay for what you had

(09:19):
built?

Rajiv Ayyangar (09:20):
I don't.
I think they were probablywilling to pay, but there just
weren't enough people.
We had like 4,000 users.
There was a lot of, there was alot tracked on it, but like I
don't think the users would havebeen willing to pay enough for
it to be worthwhile.
I think, like maybe we couldhave questioned this, but I
think at the time we werethinking like, look, we could

(09:42):
get, we could get maybe enoughmoney to, like you know, reduce
our burn a bit if we're notgrowing.
Like there's nothing big here,there's nothing like venture
scale here.
Also, like we, we, when themarkets went up and down and we
saw the usage go up and down, wereally started questioning our
value.
And also we thought the path.

(10:02):
Because we had people trackinga lot of funds.
We thought the path tomonetizing would be to build
more complex tools.
My co-founder had builtportfolio tools at Palantir for
hedge funds like Bridgewater, sowe had the experience to build
much more complex tools.
But when we did user interviewsand we asked about calculating

(10:23):
a, a Sharpe ratio or likediversification, nobody cared.
Zero people cared.
Nobody wanted to manage riskand it makes sense Like the core
impulse of like cryptoinvesting, especially then, is
gambling.
People wanted more upside.
They didn't want to limitdownside.

Ariel Camus (10:41):
They were worried about FOMO right.
It's so accessible to everyoneand it was so hot that everyone,
including my uncle and my mom,were FOMO right.
It's so accessible to everyoneand it was so hot that everyone
including my uncle and my mom,were investing in crypto right.
So, like probably the typicalperson that ended up using the
product probably wasn't my mom,but it was someone who was not a
sophisticated investor thatreally needed the complex tools
that a complex, sophisticatedinvestor will be willing to pay

(11:02):
for right.

Rajiv Ayyangar (11:05):
Yeah, they don't need the tools for pro traders.
So I think that was a littlebit of the product insight that
made us feel we were at a deadend.
But if I step back, pivoting isso personal, so much about you
and the team, and I think whenyou pivot, or how long you
persist on an idea, is the sumof the traction and your

(11:28):
personal conviction.
You can have very littletraction, but if you have high
personal conviction you canpersist, and I think in this
case we didn't have reallystrong conviction that what we
were doing was good for theworld, enabling crypto trading.
I don't think necessarily.
Retail, um, you know, retailtrading is necessarily good for
people, right, it's.
It's often pretty irresponsiblefinancially.

(11:50):
So we were very mixed on that.
We thought it was good if wecould help people do it more
responsibly, but people did notwant that very clearly I think
that's we didn't have a ton ofpersonal conviction it's such a
terrific insight.

Ariel Camus (12:02):
Uh, what you mentioned of it's the market,
but also your conviction, andit's a hard balance because you,
on one hand, like for someentrepreneurs, often have this
biased view of the market whereyou only see the successes of
companies and it seems like it'sovernight, and you feel like,
well, if it doesn't happenovernight, it's really not a
good idea and more often thannot, it just takes a lot of

(12:23):
hustling to get to success.
Right.
But at the same time, if youjust fall on the side of, well,
it is supposed to take a lot ofhard work.
How do you decide when to, like, you know, say it's enough, and
I think the the recipe that youjust gave it's an important one
, right.
You have these two pillars thatboth can provide support to an
idea, and it's your conviction,your passion, passion as a team,

(12:45):
as an entrepreneur, and themarket, and you could probably
do well, even if you don't havea huge passion.
I mean, it's a handicap, butyou could do well if the market
is exploding, you might be ableto do okay in an okay market if
you're extremely passionateabout it, because you're willing
to, like, endure the probably,you know the.

(13:07):
What's the name the valley ofsorrow of, like you know, not
seeing any growth like for years, uh.
But if you have none of that,probably that's a very easy call
uh to say, like you know, let'smove on yeah, yeah, there were
a couple.

Rajiv Ayyangar (13:21):
There are a couple other things I think we
learned because we the the firstpivot was hard because we had
so many users using it, but thenwe built a personal.
We had talked to them and we hadtalked to a lot of people and
asked what their problems were,and they we really felt like
going beyond crypto finances totheir personal finances was a

(13:43):
big need, and so we ended uplike going from the portfolio
tracking to more of like givingyou clarity and like helping you
get to a better state on yourpersonal finances as a problem,
and we spent, like I think,about a two month cycle working
on a few different types of appsand like exploring monetization
.
At the end, we pivoted awaybecause we couldn't get anybody

(14:07):
to use our app.
Like, personal finances are sostressful, it's just a lot
easier not to open the app thanto use it and we had spent a lot
of time grinding on like wewere taking a lot of inspiration
from Headspace, like justreducing the stress, like
simplifying things, giving you aclear progression, and we I

(14:27):
think it came to a head when myco-founder could fail to
convince his sister to put moneyinto an investment account like
a basic investment accountbecause of like decision
paralysis and we were like okay,we, this is a really hard
problem and we have not managedto make any progress on this and
we also don't know how tomonetize it, so that that was
like an not managed to make anyprogress on this and we also
don't know how to monetize it,so that that was an like an

(14:48):
easier pivot to make by the way,I'm laughing here because it's
one of my pet peeves, likeseeing how much lack of
financial education there is inthe world.

Ariel Camus (14:58):
and in fact, before I started this podcast, I was
considering starting a youtubechannel on personal finance.
And I decided I'm going tostart something on the
entrepreneurial side because Ihave way more experience there.
So more to you know to bring tothe world.
But it's one of those problemsthat seems so obvious, yet at
the same time it's you know,people, they make such

(15:21):
irrational decisions with theway they, you know, they save,
the way they invest.
And I had that same experiencewhere I tried to, like I'll say,
teach to some people that Iconsider, you know, very smart,
very, you know, thoughtful, andthe reactions were also so, so,
so irrational.
And that's when I realized, wow, that's going to be a much
harder problem to solve thanjust, you know, posting nice

(15:43):
videos on YouTube.
So totally understand that part.

Rajiv Ayyangar (15:45):
It's hard.
Yeah, totally.
And that one, I think we feltit was a, we felt really
strongly it was a, it was aproblem, but it was hard to find
an, a, an entry point that wehad conviction on and we had no
traction.
I guess, like one other thingthat's coming to mind in the
early days, would track.
We would do sort of a weeklyretro and we would track.

(16:06):
Basically sometimes we wouldtrack a metric relative to where
we were, like how many userinterviews did we do, or how
many people said they were.
You know there's a whole bunchof different levels, like how
many user interviews did we do,how many people said they were
interested, how many peopleactually tried it, how many
people are using it.
Usually these are like singledigit numbers because it's so
early.
But one thing that we alwaystracked was learning rate low,

(16:30):
medium, high, and then why andthat was kind of interesting
because sometimes we'd havedifferent numbers, we'd have
different uh learning rates, thethree of us, depending on what
we were doing and, um, one kindof consistent pattern was, you
know, sometimes we get to theend of the week, learning rate
low, low, low.
Why?
What can we do to change thisnext week and when there were a

(16:53):
couple of weeks in a row, wewere just like learning rate is
still low.
Usually that correlated with weshould pivot.
We're not making progress hereanymore, like regardless of the
traction.
So that was maybe another kindof loose way to think about when
you should pivot.
It's very subjective.

(17:17):
But another thing that comes tomind I'm just kind of
remembering what made us betterwas, I think, a big art to
pivoting the early days is howdo you pivot together, like how
do you come up with ideastogether and pursue them
together?
One framework we came up withwas just flagging conversations
with either growth, where youlike build up the idea into its

(17:39):
strongest form, or convergence,where you're like more critical
and you look at well, will thisactually make sense?
Like, what are we actually?
How are we actually going totest this?
What's the quickest way to testthis?
How do we disprove this, this,how do we disprove this?
When we flag conversations likethat, it let us all try and
have the same conversationtogether rather than so.

(17:59):
The problem with pivoting in theearly days is that, or the
problem with coming up withideas in the early days is like
especially if you have a fewco-founders.
When I come up with an idea,it's early, I haven't thought it
through, I'm kind of amped onit.
There are holes in every idea.
If you share it with aco-founder and they just see the
holes, they shoot it down.
It's really easy to shoot downideas, right?

(18:22):
So then what happens is likenobody one, from an energy
standpoint, nobody's everexcited about anything.
Because, like you get a littlebit excited, then cold water,
like a wet blanket, gets put onit and so it kind of feels like
no ideas reach escape velocity.
And then, also, like from arelational standpoint, it's just
like really tough, even ifyou're really good friends, to

(18:43):
have your friend tearing downyour ideas and to then tear down
your friend's ideas like everyday.
So when we, when we startedtrying to have the same type of
conversation together, theamplitude of ideas and our, our
conviction increased, right,like we'd all be really pumped
about an idea and then we'd likeall tear it down, be like, yeah

(19:03):
, no, that's a terrible idea.
Next, and and I think that one,it was much more, it let us
explore further.

Ariel Camus (19:11):
And then, two, I think it just increased the
chance that some idea wouldreach escape velocity and then
we all start start building itsounds like what you did there
was to like take kind of likethe the emotional aspect of
ideas being something personal,and kind of extracting them from
you know your ego or you knowyour persona as an entrepreneur,
and say we're going to come upwith a methodology together to

(19:34):
judge and explore ideas and wehave an agreement on what that
exploration looks like so thatwhen we decide that it's not a
good idea, it's not going to bethat I'm going against you.
It's that together we wentthrough the process that we
agreed to follow and we provedthat it wasn't a good idea.
And it makes a lot of sense ifyou need to go through that
process of finding ideas makes alot of sense is if you need to

(19:57):
go through that process offinding ideas.

Rajiv Ayyangar (19:58):
Yeah, if you're pivoting and learning more each
time about yourselves, aboutfounder market fit and about the
market, it can feel like you'regetting warmer and warmer.
But if you're not, if you'relike I think the worst, the
worst cases I've seen when I'vemaybe like talked or like
loosely advised friends startupsare where they pivot because
one person had conviction topivot but the other person is

(20:20):
still looking back at that doorlike what if we've gone through
that door and then that those,those doors that you could have
gone through create.
They nag at you, they weigh onyou over time and at some point
you can get to this place where,like, you're not excited about
the current direction and all ofthe doors that you didn't walk
through are kind of pulling atyou, and that's what you want to

(20:42):
avoid.
And sometimes it can be helpful, like if somebody is like,
really there's an idea that'sreally pulling at them.
Maybe the best thing that theirco-founder can do is ask Hey's,
let's test this as quickly andas high conviction as possible.
Do you remember uh, I think itwas peter reinhardt, the segment
founder how he he hated he'stalked at our yc batch and he

(21:06):
hated the idea of segment.
And so he told his, like cto,let's test this, let's launch it
on hacker news, and then we canwalk away from it forever, and
sometimes the the very test thatwould cause you to walk away,
is the right test to make you goforward.

Ariel Camus (21:20):
And it's so hard to know what the market truly
wants.
I mean, we have so many biasesand I have the feeling you have
this element in who you are aswell, which is kind, you know,
kind of the vision-ledentrepreneur.
You have ideas of how you wantthe world to look and sometimes

(21:41):
those biases that come from thevisions are very powerful, but
also they can blind you fromwhat the market really wants and
I think until you put it outthere you don't know.
But the sooner you put it outthere, the better to really find
out.
Is it something that the marketwill want?
That I am passionate about?
Both things are important, Ithink.

Rajiv Ayyangar (22:00):
Yeah, yeah, and that passion, yeah.
It just reminds me of theconviction part and I guess one
of the next pivots we had was, Ithink, a very low conviction
pivot.
We saw a market inefficiencyfor crypto traders and we
launched an exchange for hedgefunds like a b2b exchange and we

(22:23):
immediately got a lot ofinterest, got about 20 hedge
funds signed up, but it was thekind of thing where we thought
there's either a marketefficiency or not.
We launched it.
It wasn't close to.
It was like about 100x belowthe scale for any sort of
liquidity and we justimmediately walked away.

Ariel Camus (22:39):
You build the actual product.
Yeah, like an mvp of theproduct.

Rajiv Ayyangar (22:43):
We built the mvp , but it was.
It was fast, it was kind of acool product.
It was like a low informationuh network matching auction.
It was based on hinge in theearly days, the dating app,
where it would match you withfriends of friends.
We'd match hedge funds withkind of like friends of friends
or counterparties ofcounterparties to increase
liquidity.
Fairly straightforward productto build.

(23:04):
The hard part was the incentivealignment, pricing the set, like
selling it to people,convincing people.
That was a, that was just astrange one.
And then at some point we justhad to launch it and then we got
clear signal.
But that that's actually whenwe started working on remote
work, because I think it took Iwant to say it took us four days
to build the product and thenit took me like two months to

(23:26):
get 20 contracts signed.
So I was just kind of likedoing, you know, say, doing
enterprise sales, and then timand bernat were kind of like
twiddling their thumbs and atthis point Bernat had had a kid,
so we were working remotelymore and so we were feeling more
disconnected.
So they started kind of hackingand prototyping on that problem

(23:48):
and then when we launched themarket it was clear.
There was no liquidity.
None of us had conviction thatwe should persist here, so
started working on the.
The remote work thing reallyresonated with us.
And going back to the thingabout conviction, I think we
built five completely differentprototypes in the first, like
few months.
Like we built a walkie talkieapp.

(24:10):
We built a voice messages.
Voice messages it was sort oflike an answering machine where
if I talked to you, it could, itwould record at the same time
as talking.
We built and then we built thislike.
There's probably a few morethat I've forgotten.
We at some point we built adocument editor with voice and
video attached nice with theidea that if we are your
workspace and then you'll beavailable to be called.

(24:33):
And each time we were testingsome theory we had a few people
try it.
Going back to the thing aboutconviction, we had so little
traction for these earlyprototypes, when I think about
it, people were interested butbasically nobody used them and
they were kind of unusable andwe weren't even using them.
But we were kind of trying touse it and I think from the very

(24:56):
first one, the problem we felt.
We felt the problem every daybecause we're working remotely.

Ariel Camus (25:00):
What was the problem exactly?

Rajiv Ayyangar (25:03):
we we used to be working in the same room,
whiteboarding every day, and nowwe were working remotely and we
weren't talking as much, ideasweren't flowing as much.
Um, we were losing context.
We felt you know what it feltlike.
It felt like we were in anairplane before and then the
airplane hit water and now we'rejust like felt it felt and also

(25:24):
just like, from a personalstandpoint, like these were.
We started the company mostlyto work together, and it and it
just felt like we weren'tworking together, felt like we
were kind of off in our owncorners and it sounds like you
were coming from.

Ariel Camus (25:35):
Uh, an operational velocity of like building
validating, trying chatting wassuper high, exceptionally high,
super high.

Rajiv Ayyangar (25:43):
So remote.
Yeah, it's tough to toexperience that, so I can see
why you experienced that intensepain yeah, yeah, yeah it was,
it was, uh, that was somethingthat we just, we just felt so
viscerally.
So you know, hindsight, I thinkthat was a big reason why, even
though the first few prototypes, you know, really didn't get

(26:05):
much traction, we kept oniterating on it and each time we
iterated we solved a littlepiece of it and we, we mapped
space a little better.
It's like we initially wethought it was just about
friction.
If we remove the friction,people will talk more.
Not true at all, not true atall.
Like people won't pick up or itcan feel invasive, right?

(26:28):
So then we started exploring,like how do we get people to be
online?
And the workspace idea.
We thought, hey, if we couldbuild your code editor and your
document editor, yourspreadsheets figma, and then
have voice and video attached,you'll have to be available.
We can't build all of that.
What's the minimum thing we canbuild?
Maybe we can build a documenteditor.
And so we built a doc editorthat was very tuned to real-time

(26:51):
collaboration, because that'swhat we felt was missing, and
then had voice and videoattached and we thought, because
you're working in the docs,you'll be available to be called
.
Kind of true, but also, wecouldn't get anybody to switch
to our kind of brittle documenteditor that sometimes lost your
documents and like notion waspretty good at this point, so it
was like a really hard sell.
What was true was when we addedthe ability to see what document

(27:15):
people are in, and that startedus thinking about this idea of
presence as not being just greendot, orange dot, but like what
are you doing.
And so we removed the documentsand instead showed what app
you're in.
Are you in VS Code coding?
Are you in Notion?
Are you in Google Docs in?
Are you in vs code coding?
Are you in notion?

(27:35):
Are you in google docs?
Are you in figma?
And that started to.
That started to work a bit.
And that's when we that's or wehad like a two-week old
prototype when we applied to ycand and then we went through one
more.
We basically cut the product inhalf in uh after our book face
launch, because we had thischrome extension that showed

(27:55):
cursors on websites and wethought it was a lot easier
product to build than the voiceand video calls.
So we were kind of hoping thatthat maybe that's the product,
um, and then we launched in bookface.
It didn't go that.
It didn't go that well, likesome people installed the app,
but, um, I distinctly rememberlike it was hard to get feedback
but I started calling peopleand texting people on their

(28:19):
phone and eventually got.

Ariel Camus (28:21):
And, by the way, this is people on Facebook,
which is a social network, theinternal social network for Y
Combinator founders.
So you were talking to YCombinator founders that to a
certain extent, you have somekind of like shared trust, that
or like a shared identity thatmakes you more likely to want to
help each other.
Right, and they were not reallywilling to help.

Rajiv Ayyangar (28:44):
Well, they were just busy and they had kind of
used the product Like these are.
That's another thing that, like, I think people forget.
In the early days there's a lotof indifference.
You know, if you're, I thinkthat talking to customers is not
easy and it's it's not supposedto, it's not.
I've never, you know, found itto be easy like maybe

(29:04):
post-product market fit.
It's really easy because youcan just get a fire hose of
customers and then the challengeis talking to the right
customers.
But in the early days, like wehad a dozen teams that had
actually downloaded and triedand were using tandem and still
it was hard to get them on thephone because they're all
founders, they're all like superbusy, they're building, so like

(29:25):
they would occasionally send uslike bug reports.
But then when I started talkingto them, I got really clear
signal that they really caredabout the see who's around and
talking one click use case likethe, the voice calls and video
calls, and they really caredabout the see who's around and
talk in one click use case likethe voice calls and video calls,
and they really didn't careabout the shared cursors on
browser.
Yeah, and that was kind of thelast super big iteration before

(29:47):
the pivot a couple of yearslater.

Ariel Camus (29:49):
This was while you were in Y Combinator and it was
before the end of the batch,before demo day.

Rajiv Ayyangar (29:55):
This was early in Y Combinator.
Oh, so then there's this.
There was this really keymoment.
I remember I think it was aweek or two in and Gustav uh,
who is the like create thegrowth team at Airbnb, was our
group partner basically pushedus to launch much faster than we
were planning.
We, our plan was hey, we, wedidn't have self-serve at the

(30:16):
time.
So we thought, hey, we need tolike build out self-serve, we
also need to make the calls morereliable, we need to build a
few more features and then we'lllaunch to our bash inside, uh,
in a couple weeks and then inlike midway through the batch or
like a little bit furtherthrough the batch, maybe we'll
launch to all of yc and thenproduct hunt, like closer to

(30:38):
demo day.
And gustav is like uh, launchyour batch today or tomorrow and
then you should launch to bookface like a couple days later,
and then, like next on thursday,you should launch on product
hunt.
And we, and then we just likehad all these excuses.
We were like so freaked out andwe're like but if we don't do

(30:58):
this, they're not going toretain blah, blah, blah.
It's not, this isn't workingnow.
And he's like that's, that'sright, that's all true, but you
need to figure out whetherpeople want this more than you
need to figure out whether youcan keep them super, super
amazing feedback.

Ariel Camus (31:13):
Right, it's like go one step at a time and I can
relate to that.
You think, well, what is thepoint of like burning or wasting
a bullet, of launching on, youknow, product hunt which I might
not be able to do again so soonand if I'm not going to retain
those users, well then you'regoing to learn very fast that
maybe no one wants your productand that's time that you're

(31:34):
saving a lot of time.
So like it's such a good pieceof advice, but it's very
counterintuitive when you are inthe moment of building stuff
totally, totally because youyeah, you are spending a bullet.

Rajiv Ayyangar (31:47):
There are there are more bullets than you think,
because you can launch a hackernews, but you are, you're
spending a bullet, but reallythe the highest, highest
probability of the thing.
The thing you should be afraidof is that nobody wants it.
I still think that that was theright insight.
My really summarized orcondensed version of what

(32:08):
happened was we launched onBookface.
People didn't really want it aswe were describing it.
We found through a bunch oftesting this is why you should
go to demo days and like testyour positioning and talk to
friends found the virtual officetagline really, really helped
explain what this was.
We launched on Product Hunt,which, with a much crisper

(32:30):
positioning, and that was justnight and day.
It just went viral.
It spilled over into Twitter,linkedin, everywhere.

Ariel Camus (32:37):
So you launched on the internal YC network with a
different kind of descriptor ofwhat the product was and that
didn't catch.
But then you changed it throughexploring it with people
discussing different ways ofexplaining it, and when you
found the one the virtual officefor your team you used that on
on Product Hunt and that reallyworked really well.

Rajiv Ayyangar (32:56):
We also simplified the product because
we cut out the collaboration inbrowser piece.
We were trying to make everysite like Figma in the browser,
and I think that's a very coolvision, but it was not a thing
that people necessarily wanted.
If they're on Figma, theyalready have cursors, and for
other sites it's just not thathelpful.
Wanted.
If they're on figma, theyalready have cursors, and for
other sites it's just not thathelpful.

(33:17):
And having to install a desktopapp and a chrome extension um,
I think when we cut out thechrome extension, we quadrupled
our activation rate, becauseit's it's like quadratic risk.
Right, it's not.
You don't lose half of people,you lose three quarters of
people when you add an extra app.
So we we cut that out of theproduct and we simplified our

(33:37):
description.
I think initially it wassomething like remote
collaboration platform orcollaboration, real-time
collaboration for remote anddistributed teams, which is too
vague.
You know, in hindsight, right,it's just a little broad, it's a
little vague.
Never tested that well, andvirtual office we initially

(33:57):
didn't want to do because wethought people would think it's
vr.
But it turned out that oncepeople learned it wasn't vr,
they quickly found their way tothe idea, which was like an app
that helps you connect with yourteammates, and it turned into a
category.
It's like kind of crazy.
We were the first ones to tohave that virtual office
positioning.
A whole bunch of differentapproaches to it came out.

(34:18):
Like Gather Town has gottenlike crazy big.
You know, we've got their newentrance.
Now Rome is a virtual office.
It's turned into this categorythat, like, I still think has
potential but nobody has likecrushed it yet.
But yeah, that positioningreally resonated.
We found out that a ton ofteams wanted it.
Our retention was terrible atfirst for all of the reasons

(34:41):
that we knew.
But we had such an insane spikethat we kind of just spent the
next year and a half making theproduct great and making it
deliver on that.

Ariel Camus (34:52):
And we did.
What was the spike?
What level of spike did you seewhen you launched a product
while you were in Y Combinator?

Rajiv Ayyangar (35:00):
in Y Combinator I think we had.
There were very, very smallteams, but we had like, uh, you
know, hundreds of teams signingup and using the product.

Ariel Camus (35:12):
Um, but then you went on to uh raise a lot of
capital, uh, even before them,when they from andreessen
horowitz and you were kind ofone of the hottest startups of
the batch.
What was it?
What do you think was it thatmade it, um feel like, okay,
this is the one company that weneed to invest in?

Rajiv Ayyangar (35:34):
I think there's a little bit of well.
So for context, the previousround we raised like.
We only raised half of it.
We raised like 600K.
It was for the crypto portfoliothing.
We had a lot of traction but itwas in crypto.
I think it took us three monthsand we got 30 or 40 rejections

(35:55):
right.
It was like a absolute grind.
And then this round for yc wasabout 10 days, start to finish
and I think I think there were afew factors.
I think it was, I think we justfit a lot of general theses at
the time which we weren't awareof, like we were in the right
space.
Zoom had just ipo'd, bottoms upsass like slack, slack had just

(36:17):
had a huge exit.
So this kind of like theopportunity and sort of bottoms
up sass seemed enormous.
We were founders who had, like,worked on consumer products at
yahoo and were working onenterprise, you know.
So that that, I think, was athesis that a lot of VCs had.
But I think, most of all, Ithink it was just attraction and
I actually think about therewas a moment before, I think

(36:45):
before Demo Day, there was amoment where we'd had a good
initial spike but it hadn'treally exploded.
I think it was four weeks outfrom Demo Day and we asked
Dalton like hey, we've got someinbounds from investors.
Should we start building therelationship now?
And he's like you could spendmore time with investors.
That would increase the qualityof the fundraise a little, or

(37:07):
you can iterate and take moreshots on goal and see if you can
get a hockey stick, and that'sgoing to increase your outcome a
lot more.
Regardless of what happens withthe raise, you will have moved
the company forward, which isthe real game we're all playing.

Ariel Camus (37:23):
And so he was basically like YOLO.
What was the metric you weretrying to optimize at that point
?

Rajiv Ayyangar (37:26):
We were just trying to get growth.

Ariel Camus (37:28):
But as measured by.

Rajiv Ayyangar (37:31):
Like active users.
Active users okay.

Ariel Camus (37:34):
Like call hours.
That's the key, that was thekey.

Rajiv Ayyangar (37:37):
Okay hours spent on calls gotcha.
Okay, because that's the keyinteractions like you talk with
your teammates what was, and sowhat was that number?

Ariel Camus (37:44):
what did that number look like by the time you
started fundraising?

Rajiv Ayyangar (37:48):
I don't, I don't know.
I think it was not very high interms of absolute value, but it
was very steep gotcha.

Ariel Camus (37:55):
It was growing really fast and initially, when
we slide in, like you know fordemo day.
Let's say it looked very steepand you know it's.
It's an emotional reaction to ahockey stick kind of curve
probably there were four weekswhere we grew 50 each week.

Rajiv Ayyangar (38:07):
Yeah, and I I think I mentioned this in some
email to paul graham and he'slike that means some huge number
per year and that seems insane.
I think he's like making fun ofme for saying we've grown 50 a
week for the last four weeks asif it's going to continue.

Ariel Camus (38:23):
Of course it's not going to continue, but it was
like a very steep spike and andanyway, it does make sense that
that in a market or operatingunder a hypothesis that VCs are
exploring and passionate about,you can't control that part and
in your case I was like you werenot even aware of that.

Rajiv Ayyangar (38:43):
But weren't aware.

Ariel Camus (38:44):
Yeah, it does count .
I mean timing, it's superimportant there's a lot of luck.

Rajiv Ayyangar (38:49):
There's a lot of luck to it and that and there's
a and also we didn't know isgonna be a quick fundraise when
we started out, and that's thething with fundraisers you
sometimes don't know whetherit's going to be easy or hard
until you start.
You have to be agile.

Ariel Camus (39:02):
How will you compare time-wise?
You said you know three monthsversus 10 days, but when you
look at the nuances, the quality, you know how people are
talking to you.
How did those two processescompare, the one with the crypto
tracker and the one with tandem?
I've had very differentexperiences.

(39:23):
Yc was like Disneyland for anentrepreneur.
It was crazy.
How was it for you?
How did they compare?
I'm asking you this in casesomeone is listening, so that
they can maybe extract from heresome signaling that they can
also observe in their ownfundraising processes.

Rajiv Ayyangar (39:41):
Well, anybody who's the hot rounds are a
really unique thing.
They're incredibly stressfuland incredibly difficult in
their own way.
At the same time, you're veryfortunate to be in a position
where you have to, where you canpick the right partner right.
So you try and use that to likeclimb the maslowian hierarchy

(40:03):
of needs of fundraising to giveyourself an unfair advantage and
like everybody's got their ownhierarchy.
But I think it's like do youhave enough capital in the bank
at not a terrible valuation tokeep building?
That's great, that's awesome.
Next level is like bettervaluation, less dilution.
Next value is like good partner, maybe a brand name that gives
you some you know, some brandrecognition.

(40:25):
And then the next level, likethe high, the highest level for
some people is just minimaldilution, maximum money.
For some people it's like hey,I want a partner that gives me a
completely unfair advantage,who I want to work with for a
very long time, so you can, likeyou, you know you try to climb
up as high as you can on anyfundraise.

Ariel Camus (40:44):
How do you know that you can climb that?

Rajiv Ayyangar (40:47):
You don't, it's.
You have these early signs atevery step.
I think if you've been througha fundraise before, you can sort
of read the signs a bit better,especially if you've been
through a range of like like.
I've been through terriblefundraisers and I've been to
through I've been through thefull spectrum.
We got a lot of advice.
I think what can be reallyhelpful is advice from a really
good friend who's in venture,who's either in your sector but

(41:11):
not your stage, or your stagebut not your stage, or it your
stage but not your sector.
So they're they're not in thegame, and that you know you have
a lot of trust with them, sothey can be confidential and
they can give you like anaccurate read.
For us it was.
It was the YC partners.
You know they, they know themarket so well.
At every stage they would saylike okay, there are a couple of
possibilities based on whathappens next.

(41:34):
We think you'll go one of thesedirections and they were pretty
accurate.
They were pretty accurate,which is crazy.
You know it's a crazy advantageand I think one of the reasons
why YC is such an advantage forfounders the what was I going to
say?
I think that the thing.
Maybe there are two things thatwould be interesting to people

(41:55):
about like really hot raises.
One they're.
They're horrible, like they're.
Just you're sleep deprived, youdon't know who to trust.
Everybody's trying to sell youand then you build relationships
with people.
Then you have to say no becauseyou can't take all of the
investors, and that sucks.

Ariel Camus (42:13):
So they're both great and horrible.
Does it suck more that no onereally offering you anything?

Rajiv Ayyangar (42:19):
nope okay it doesn't it doesn't, but in the
moment it can feel really badbecause it's so compressed, so
like you're very grateful forthe position and at the same
time, from an interpersonallevel, it's like it's a
different, it's an interestingkind of rough.
And the second thing is thatthere are so many distractions
that I think you just have to.

(42:40):
There's so many distractions,right Like there there are some
VCs that will, you know, giveyou tickets to ball games and
like give you gifts, and there'sa lot of like, a lot of
conversations.
You'll have Really anything yousay, people will love the idea,
right, and you, you start torealize very quickly it's not at
all what you're saying.

(43:01):
You just have heat, you havemomentum and it got to the point
.
It can get to the.
It can get to this point likewhere I walked in, cold sleep,
deprived, to a full partnermeeting, hadn hadn't met anybody
, and two hours later we had aterm sheet and it's like it's
just about the signals and themomentum and they've already
done diligence and so, like youstart to learn like what is real

(43:25):
and to kind of like be moremeasured and see, well, do
people follow through on whatthey say?
And for us I think a lot of thatseemed like a distraction
because we only cared about onething Was this firm gonna help
us build the kind?
So I think that was reallyhelpful for us to stay focused.
Oh, and then the other thingI'd say for any fundraising for
any fundraise is like if you canspend like half a day or a day

(43:51):
with your co-founders justthinking about the future and
like possibilities and justgetting in sync, that's really
helpful because things canchange in a matter of minutes
and you wanna feel like you'reyou're just.
You want to feel so on the samepage that you're all
interchangeable, especially inthe days of when we raised it

(44:12):
was.
You're probably driving up anddown the peninsula, going to
meetings in person, and so we'dsplit.
You know, like one founderwould go to one meeting and we
just all had to be.
I think it was helpful that wefelt so interchangeable.

Ariel Camus (44:28):
That is a rare thing.
I think right that you feel thetrust that anyone will sell the
company as well.
That is rare and amazing, rare.
Yeah, so you raised this round.
Things kept growing.
You kept seeing traction.
What happened after that?

Rajiv Ayyangar (44:45):
Well, it was rough because we raised the
round and things were alreadystarting to falter from the
product hunt and demo day spikeas they do.
And the reason is, one, thereisn't as much buzz and, two, our
retention, as you recall, washorrible.
And we told investors this.
It was on the slides.
They were promising retentionneeds work.
So we started grinding onretention and at the same time,

(45:09):
because the adoption had kind ofslowed, we were also thinking
like do we need to work onpositioning and like the go-to
market as well?
So we were trying to do threethings.
We're trying to make theproduct deliver on the promise,
make it more stable, build it,build out the features, improve
presence, figure out all thesemechanics, make it less awkward.
We were trying to hire we wehadn't hired anybody, it was one

(45:30):
engineer, my co-founder, and wewere dying like the product was
, you know, very brittle.
And then three we were tryingto figure out like do people,
how do we test?
How do we figure out how to,you know, get more people in the
door?
And so we're like in this stateand like the numbers are like
growing, but very slightly.
And then the pandemic hits andit was insane.

(45:52):
There was a day, a single day,where we doubled Right.
And then there was a period ofthree weeks where, you know,
we'd go down every couple ofdays and it was just.
It was just like horrible.
You know, I think Mike Seibelsaid product market fit feels
like being punched in the face.
That's 100% what it felt likeNot in a good way.

(46:14):
We felt like we had a 3%, maybea 5% failure rate in calls User
reported failure rate and weknew it was terrible and yet
people were still using it andthey were frustrated and we were
struggling.
And it was just Tim onengineering and like there was
one day when all of Italy likegot shut down for the pandemic

(46:37):
and tried to download tandembasically and it's like Figma,
the company is downloadingtandem Like every big company in
Silicon Valley that we'd heardof was trying to use it and
running into problems.
Uh, yeah, yeah, it was.
It was like it was really.
It was rough.
And also we felt like we had tofocus.

(46:58):
We felt like it was sounambiguous that people wanted
this.
We needed to focus 100% onmaking it deliver, and so we did
that.
Over the next year and a halfwe tried a bunch of different
things, figured out a bunch ofproduct and user interaction
issues.
I think we 2.5x'd retention.
It just started working in theway that we wanted it to work.

(47:21):
You could see people havingfluid conversations and it was a
grind.
It was like a lot of differentthings over a year and a half
and as we were doing that, likefewer and fewer people were
downloading.
But we just thought, like likethere's still a market out there
, we just need to make it evenbetter.
And this is, you know.

Ariel Camus (47:45):
Were you measuring?
Did you know where the trafficwas coming from, why they were
finding you, how they werefinding you?

Rajiv Ayyangar (47:52):
This is the thing we really didn't.
We had a rough sense At somepoint when the pandemic hit.
We were like, where are peoplecoming from?
We had a survey.
It was mostly word of mouth andthen we never really
interrogated it because wedidn't need to, and that I think
you know.
Going back to Gustav's question, you need to know whether
people want it more than whetheryou can retain.

(48:14):
I think you always got to belike when you're dealing with
market shifts, you always got tobe a little paranoid whether
people still want this orwhether people wanted remote
connection.
But did they want the format ofthe product specifically?
Yeah, by the time we realizedlike, oh, this product is
performing but we're not growingbecause it's not clear that

(48:35):
people want this.
We started doing a lot of, westarted digging into who's
coming in the door, why we didlike hand sales, we tried some
enterprise sales, we did a bunchof funnel and growth
experiments and it took us awhile to get a baseline because
we just hadn't interrogated thego-to market that much.
Yeah, it was.

(48:57):
It was kind of crazy.
It's just like we.
We realized through launchingit that there's there.
There wasn't, um, it didn'tseem like there was a market for
the product as it waspositioned, like there was a
small one.
The teams that use it loved it,but we couldn't like access a
bigger market.

Ariel Camus (49:14):
How?
What did you do when yourealized that?

Rajiv Ayyangar (49:18):
We pivoted.
We realized that like a bigpiece of this and what we were
hearing in all the userinterviews was people coming
back to the office, and that abig topic of conversation was
the problem of hybrid work, thethe second class citizen problem
, where people who are remotefeel different than people in
the office.
And also we were feeling it too, because we were we.
You know, we're a team thatlikes to work in person but was

(49:40):
forced to be remote, so we hadan office the whole time and
some of some of the time we'dwork in person and we were
feeling the problem.
So we explored a lot ofprototypes and came up with
something that was kind of crazyAgain hardware that lets remote
people teleport around theoffice but also kind of worked.
You would forget who was in theoffice and who wasn't.

(50:00):
It made the remote peoplereally powerful.
It felt fairly natural whenyou're in the office.
There's so many reasons this isa bad idea.
It's hardware.
We were a tiny team.
We weren't well capitalized, wehad very little runway, we
weren't clear where the budgetwas going to come from.
Very few people had like peoplewere kind of coming back to the
office, but it was oscillating.

(50:21):
It was in that period wherepeople would like Google's
coming back to the office nextweek.
No, they're not, they're kindof coming back to the office.
So it was a really unstabletime and this was one of those
times where we thought like, hey, we need to launch big uh to
see if people like actually wantto this.
So we pulled out all the stops,we got a fair bit of play on
the launch Uh, it was an ideathat resonated with a lot of

(50:55):
people, but I think we got fivesignups for the like we.
We had an incredible splash, alot of traffic and five actual
signups and I think that was howdid you launch, or where, uh,
product hunt, product launchwent really well.
It also got picked up by techcrunch.
We demoed, for you know one ofthe reporters there and he like
saw it.
He saw it, he visited ouroffice and like felt what it
felt, like nice.
We also did a little bit ofcollaboration.
We got it working on ciscohardware and also on on uh, on

(51:19):
other other companies hardwareand they they did a little bit
of co-marketing because it waslike it's sort of like an
evolution of Cisco telepresenceand we I mean billboards are
really cheap at this point.
So we did a billboard on 101 inthe Bay Area.
I think it said like be at theoffice when you can't be at the

(51:39):
office, which was kind of fun,and like I think it was like 10
or 15K, it was like surprisinglyaffordable.
And I think it was like 10 or15K, it was surprisingly
affordable.
This is when people were stillworking from home.
There wasn't a lot of traffic,but the combination just made
this huge splash.
We saw a lot of traffic, a lotof interest, a lot of buzz, but
when it came to actually signingup, yeah, it was crickets.

(52:02):
I think that's what it feelslike to be way too early or just
have the right problem but thewrong solution.

Ariel Camus (52:09):
Yeah, so do you think the problem was like
pricing or that it felt likeweird to have that type of
solution?
What was it that people werenot really buying?
They liked the concept, thatthey were not willing to really
act on that.
What was it that caused thatthat they were not willing to
really?

Rajiv Ayyangar (52:25):
act on that.
What was it that caused that?
Yeah, I think it was like maybethe problem wasn't acute enough
.
This is the problem with teamcollaboration the problem isn't
acute and also the friction wasinsanely high.
It was expensive, the hardwarewas a little unreliable, it was
hard to set up, there were someawkward things.

(52:45):
There was a lot of awkwardnessto it that you had to smooth out
.
It's like the people in theoffice kind of need to get used
to having people pop in and popout.
For some teams, that was great.
They loved it.
For some teams, you know,people were a little shyer.
They didn't want people poppingin, which never made sense to

(53:12):
me because they're working in anoffice with other people.
You know it is.
It's, it's a real.
There's some psychologicaleffects that we could have
smoothed out with more, withmore time, but I think it was
like it had.
If it, if it was going to work,it was going to work rough and
it didn't work in a rough state.

Ariel Camus (53:21):
it felt more like a , like an expensive vitamin.
Right, it wasn't a pain killerfor something that people were
very acutely feeling and it wasexpensive to try it.
Expensive, I guess,operationally speaking, but also
financially speaking.
So I can see why that was hard.

Rajiv Ayyangar (53:37):
Just the wrong market, wrong format as well,
like there's a company, tanari,in Japan that builds a portal
between offices and they sellmostly to larger enterprises.
They have an extremelywell-developed wall video chat
where you can actually make eyecontact.
The audio is good, it'sextremely low latency.

(53:59):
It's expensive it's like 50K aninstall but for the companies
that can afford it it's like amuch cheaper alternative to like
Cisco telepresence.
So, different market, differentform factor, different
go-to-market motion.

Ariel Camus (54:14):
And they're getting traction.

Rajiv Ayyangar (54:15):
As you said before, they were super well
capitalized, which probablyallowed them to iterate enough
and eventually build the scaleto like, which is super
expensive with hardware so wellthey actually weren't well
capitalized, but the installsare so expensive Like they were
able to deliver so much valueper install that they've like
been able to make it quite faron like not a lot of capital,

(54:39):
which is even more impressive.

Ariel Camus (54:40):
It's very impressive.

Rajiv Ayyangar (54:41):
That's an example of like yeah, I think
there are other things in thespace that would have worked,
but we very clearly didn't havethat what?

Ariel Camus (54:48):
what was the moment you decided to, like you know,
to pull the plug and youmentioned you um allowed two of
the team members to keep running, you know, like a spin-off
version of the company, that islike self-sustainable um, what
was that?
That must have been a verydifficult moment to say like,
okay, this is it yeah, there, Imean it's, there's another.

Rajiv Ayyangar (55:10):
There's another thing that was happening where
you know we had a few planspivot.
It was like raise, raise asmall bridge to give us time to
launch the pivot pivot.
If that doesn't work, see if wecan find a strategic
acquisition.
If that doesn't work, see if wecan find a strategic
acquisition.
If that doesn't work, see if wecan find at least a good hire,
because the team was awesome andwanted to work together.

(55:31):
And if that doesn't work, shutdown.
And then in the midst of that,two of our engineers said like
hey, let's just chart, let's puta pay gate on and see if this
can be self-sustaining.
And we did that and like twothirds of the teams using it
stayed and started paying.

Ariel Camus (55:48):
You were not charging before.

Rajiv Ayyangar (55:51):
We weren't charging.
We were kind of, we were likesoft charging, but the scale
wasn't like.
Scale just wasn't enough thatit would have changed.
Anything Like we weren'tgrowing wasn't a high scale.
But when we started charging itopened up another end game
which was keep itself sustaining.
It's not going to pay anybody'ssalary but it can keep going.
And so they opened up that.

(56:12):
So then, when we were shuttingdown, we had this other option
which we, which we took of, likespin it out into a different
entity and keep the companygoing, and so we had like this
this is like plans A, b, c, d,and we actually went through all
of these phases in a few months, and I think either it's a the

(56:32):
markets were shifting quickly orI couldn't read the market well
.
But you know the we started outlooking for acquisition
interests and there was a tonlooking for acquisition
interests and there was a ton.
And this was around the timewhen the market was crashing and
, one by one, companies startedinstituting hiring freezes and
pulled out time, so it was areally yeah, it was a really

(56:54):
interesting experience where westarted out talking about
strategic and productacquisitions and ended up
talking about aqua hires, whichis quite a shift and it requires
a different approach, and inthe end, we got a couple offers,
but nothing that seemed goodfor the team.
At that point we're optimizingfor the team and their careers
we actually just said, oh, we'regoing to shut down, we're going

(57:15):
to keep the product alive, notkill the product.
It's not, it's not fun, but Ithink, like I'm I'm proud of how
we did it and like, optimizefor a team, then customers, and
then, yeah, yeah, you should beproud.

Ariel Camus (57:32):
And I think if there is something that I get
from this, well, it's two things.
One, your capacity to not justto pivot but then to build stuff
and ship software and validateideas is exceptionally high.
I wish I had that level ofvelocity.
It's super impressive.

(57:53):
And then the rest is, as yousaid, it's luck, right, it's
timing, it's right time, rightplace with the right idea, and
that makes the whole thing.
But then you can't control thatand that makes the whole thing,
but then you can't control that.
But the other part, maybe as awrap-up, is that there is this
consistent theme in every singlepivot, which is that you first
launched on Product Hunt andtoday you are the CEO of Product

(58:17):
Hunt, which is pretty cool.
I've been a huge fan for manyyears.
Well, many, many years.
Now it's one of the fewnewsletters that I open every
single day.
I'm a nerd of new products.
We don't have a lot of time andyou know the topic is the
zero-to-one stage findingproduct market fit.
But as the CEO of Product Hunt,who knows the insides, what is

(58:40):
some advice that you can give,both as the person that launched
Product Hunt but also as theperson now building the launcher
for hunt.
What I'd like two, three piecesof advice for anyone who wants
to leverage product hunt to gettheir first customers like to
get customers for their productsyeah, the first thing is launch
sooner than you think.

Rajiv Ayyangar (58:59):
Uh, as we talked about before, uh, most of the
conversations I have are peoplefinding some excuse not to
launch.
I talk to a lot of people whohave gotten a story in their
head that maybe product huntisn't like good for this sector.
It almost always is.
There's a lot of diversity onthe leaderboard and you should
launch.
I think that one of the keyfactors for launch is that

(59:22):
tagline and there's a reason why.
Like you probably remember, inY Combinator, in group office
hours, the first question wasalways where are you building?

Ariel Camus (59:31):
We spent a lot of time on that, for sure.

Rajiv Ayyangar (59:33):
A lot of time on that.
It's like we go around what areyou building?
You describe it in a line.
Your people in the group, yourfellow founders, say I didn't
understand that at all.
I'm going to be honest with youI have no idea what you're
building and you iterate on ituntil you forge something that's
clear and compelling.
And where I think a lot ofpeople fail is the clarity part.
Here's the thing you can't goviral if I don't know what

(59:54):
you're building because I can'ttell a friend.
So, clarity above all.
Test the tagline with people whodon't know what you're building
.
I think it's good to test itwith friends.
Test it with friends, test itat demo nights.
We started like hosting and ourcommunity started hosting demo
nights all over the world.
So that's a good place to testthe tagline.
And then let's see a couplethings that are specific.

(01:00:15):
Yeah, explain in the, in thefirst comment that you leave,
like explain a bit about whyyou're building this and how you
built it.
Um, add some shout outs.
So shout outs are like a newthing we added where you can
call out two or three of theproducts that you loved, that
you found indispensable inbuilding it, and that helps.
It's an audience of builders,right.

(01:00:35):
So it helps like tell the storyof your product and the craft
behind it and also it just likespreads the love a little bit.
I love that and it shows otherbuilders what are the top tools
that they should use.
So those are kind of like themain things.
I'm trying to think aboutmistakes and our launch flow
describes a lot of this but acommon mistake is doing a video

(01:00:57):
that doesn't show your product.
Trying to do a video that'slike higher production and
fancier Look.
I think videos either need tobe sandwich quality extremely
high production Sandwich is likethe best at explainer videos or
a very well-executed loom ofyou the founder talking through
your product Makes sense andlike the in-between stages are

(01:01:19):
not very helpful.
People on Product Hunt lovelooking at the products.
That's it's in the name, sojust show off the product.
Other that I think well knownlike there's a big component
that's the community support.
Tell your friends like that's abig part of the launch as well.
It's sort of like a good eventto to tell your friends and your
network about the launch andthat's part of how you get the

(01:01:40):
word out and uh, yeah, I thinkthose are the main things that
all makes a lot of sense and I'mgoing to stay with the launch.

Ariel Camus (01:01:47):
Now I'm going to apply that to myself.
I'm actually about to launchsomething, so I'll ping you in a
few days to to tell you aboutit and maybe to test the tagline
with you amazing.
I'm looking forward to it it'sbeen a pleasure having you here.
Thank you so much for your time.

Rajiv Ayyangar (01:02:04):
Good to see you.
Great to be here.

Ariel Camus (01:02:08):
Thank you so much for tuning in.
Your support means the world tome.
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