1st time founder completely pivots after YC—then grows 30x in a year to $2.2M ARR. | Pablo Palafox, Founder of HappyRobot

Pablo is the first guest that has the same name as me-- so you KNOW this episode will be great. Pablo hustled for months just to get to $70K in ARR. He got rejected from YC, re-applied, and finally got in.

But after months in YC, he realized his first product was not going to work. He had some traction, but not nearly enough customer pull. So he shut it down. He went back to square one. He did customer discovery in a totally different space and leveraged the latest in Gen AI. He then built AI agents that automate calls in the logistics space.

Just a year after shutting down his first product, he'd grown to $2.2M in ARR. In December, he raised $15.6M from a16z.

Here's how it happened.

Why you should listen: 

• Why you should be careful of "free" money from grants.
• Why YC changed the trajectory of Pablo's startup.
• How a big pivot is often necessary-- even when you have customer traction. 
• Why the key is to find a true, no-brainer pain point.
• Meeting customers where they are can lead to smoother adoption of new technologies.
• How to build a product that provides clear ROI is essential for customer buy-in.
• Continuous exploration and adaptation are key to finding the right market fit.

Keywords

Happy Robot, startup journey, product market fit, early stage funding, co-founders, computer vision, YC, venture capital, entrepreneurship, business development, funding, European founders, Y Combinator, customer acquisition, pivoting, logistics, AI agents, startup growth, Series A, market research

Chapters

• 2:24 How it all started
• 8:29 Getting Rejected by YC
• 15:09 Why grants are often a huge distraction
• 21:02 Raising a Seed Round
• 29:15 Getting into YC & Pivoting on Demo Day
• 39:02 Starting Over
• 51:06 Growing from 0 to 2 Million in a Year
• 53:00 Piece of Advice

Transcript

Pablo Palafox (00:00):

We go really back. we go back to the drawing board and just throw everything, like nothing clicks. And then somebody's like, “okay let's just build stuff.” Your supporting system. We'll support you at times that you need it. And sometimes it's actually not the case. Well, it was hard. We felt that we were losers. What are we doing here? Like, we've gone to YC and now we don't even know what to do. I would say find a niche that you're semi passionate about. You'll get more passionate about it if you are actually doing well. I would've never imagined I would be selling to logistics companies and now, I love it. It's great. Sometimes the customer might not even know themselves, that they have that pain point. We were at $0 of revenue in January, 2024. Today we're at 2.2 million.

Previous Guests (00:47)

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I call that the product market fit question, product market fit, product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Speaker 2 (00:57):

Think back to the last few months, the last few years as you've been running the startup, how many different founders have helped you out? The reality is founders help each other out. That's just who founders are. They pay it forward. So help a founder out. Take literally five seconds, take your phone outta your pocket and hit five stars.

Pablo Srugo  (01:15):

Pablo, welcome to the show, man.

Pablo Palafox (01:16):

Thank you Pablo. Great to meet you, man. Thank you,

Pablo Srugo  (01:18):

So, I mean, I reached out. I basically said, listen, you just raised. The name. We have the same name, so, you have to come on the show. And you're like, yeah, that's legit. <Laugh>

Pablo Palafox (01:26):

Great sales pitch. Yeah, I loved it. <Laugh>.

Pablo Srugo  (01:30):

It worked, man. <Laugh>. Well anyways, though, look, it's exciting to have you here. I mean, you went through YC , you raised a $15.6 million series A from A16, which I think, you know, I mean YCs got that brand name, A16 certainly, Sequoia for example, has that brand name. I think for a lot of early stage founders, you just kind of all on the path that they want to be on as well. So I think the goal here is: I just wanna walk through your journey, talk about some of the, some of the things you had to do, you know, I think from the outside looking in, you see these, got to YC news, you got the series A news, and it just seems like up and to the right, person must be killing it. I'm sure you are, but I'm also sure there's a lot of pain along the way. So like, we'll get through all that. Maybe just to start off, I mean, tell me a bit about Happy Robot. Like where did the idea come from? Like what's the origin story?

Pablo Palafox (02:24):

So to actually answer that question, there's multiple stories of course to tell. The most fun one about the name actually relates to our prior live-in computer vision. So I'll explain that one as well. But I think if I wanna explain how we got here, I should probably talk about the founders. So the founding team is my brother Javi. My best buddy from Uni, Luis. He's my CTO. I met Luis on my second day of college. He basically is sitting next to me and this guy is like, Hey, do you have a piece of paper? Like, dude, like the first day of class <laugh>, you come to your first physics class with No pencil or paper? Sure, yeah, here you go. It was like

Pablo Srugo  (03:05):

And this is college? Where by the way? Is this in the US? 

Pablo Palafox (03:07):

This is in Spain actually. So called industrial engineering. Pretty much a bit of a mix of everything. from robotics to chemistry. We actually majored, if you will, in robotics. But yeah, these guys are just great dudes. We actually went and built stuff together during college. We did a robotics underwater robot, like a submarine. Basically like a group that would build a submarine, go to a competition in italy or whatever . It was fun. We did that kind of stuff. We then worked together during our masters. This is another funny story. Like we're starting our first year masters and I'm like, Hey, I just found my first job. And he is like, oh, me too. I’m like, “oh, cool. Where?” He’s like, this drone detection startup. I'm like, dude, I'm also starting like a drone detection job.

Pablo Srugo  (03:55):

<Laugh>.

Pablo Palafox (03:56):

Looks like our paths have been crossed or just we're meant to work together. Same with my brother. He's always been pushing me to, do stuff in computer science. Like he was almost guiding me towards, let's build a mini co-founder here. Like, he's 10 years older than me, and he's always been almost creating his perfect co-founder, if you will. So he is doing that. I think this speaks about the importance of something Michael Sebel one of YC’s partners and most probably one of the most well known recently due to the podcast he has or the YouTube videos he does. Michael talks about, I mean, one of the co-founders of what is now Twitch Justin TV before he talks about the importance of college as a way to find buddies to work with. I think that's actually true. Like, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for my CTO, Luis and my co-founder. It’s just one of those things that you don't get to find if you don't go through painful things together with your co-founders. 

Pablo Srugo  (05:02):

Remember like Paul Graham obviously another legend from YC, his formula when he is asked, Hey, how do you start a startup? How do you come up with ideas? Was similar to that. It was just, find people you like, work with them on something that you're interested in and just kind of keep, keep doing. I don't remember this wording, but it was something like that. It was a little bit more poetic. But basically that's the idea. Like, just find people you like, find things you like working on and just start working together on things, random things and just go down rabbit holes and then out of there maybe you'll come up with something interesting versus trying to force it out. Starting with a pitch deck. Like that's never a good plan. I did that actually, by the way. I know exactly what it's like. It's not good. Don't do that.

Pablo Palafox (05:38):

your co-founders. it is a marriage and it's even worse probably than a marriage because there's a lot of hard positions to make. And we actually went through like a lot of those. I mean maybe fast forward to when I was doing my PhD in, in Munich, I started my PhD in computer vision, if you will. like deep learning, ai, computer vision stuff in Munich, in the group of Matthias Niessner and Angela Dai. Matthias Niessner is actually one of the co-founders of Synthesia, a unicorn now, on the video synthesis side of things. So thankfully I've really been lucky enough to work with these guys on the bleeding edge of computer vision. I learned a lot during that phase. It started in 2020. back in 2020,  AI was not really a term you would use. It would be more like computer vision, deep learning.

Pablo Srugo  (06:27):

Yeah, there was the hype before, like 2018 and then it went down and then after ChatGPT,, then it just brought right back <laugh> to the forefront. and it became real, end of ‘22.

Pablo Palafox (06:37):

and we just use it, the term I guess, so that the broader masses understand what’s going on here. Like they don't probably understand deep learning. But yeah it was that early stages, I guess of, I mean, transformers had just started to to be a term back in 2017, right? Like it was still starting. But yeah, super grateful for that time. I did a couple years of the PhD, did some cool papers the CVPR, if that rings a bell the folks in the new computer vision arena in Europe. I had a couple papers there and somehow I'm like, this is not for me. Like, I'm not a writing machine, which is a bit of what the research world is for. So I tell my professor Angela, who had been great supporting me along the way, like this is not for me.

Pablo Palafox (07:20):

I just wanna do something on my own. And I literally quit the PhD and back in 2022, February, I still remember the last day, like, okay, this is it. Like, I'm just on my own now. And I tell Luis, dude, just come to Munich, which is what we were at the time or what I was at the time, come to come to Munich, just like build or just rent a place and build stuff. I don't even know what at that time it was. let's just do some computer vision stuff because I guess I know something about it. Come to Munich, we do stuff together and then we go from there. We also involve my brother Javi who, you know, like as I mentioned before, we had always like been thinking about doing stuff together and we just go from there. Like we start ideating what we can do. I start with the synthesis of like training images, like basically like virtual roles for training robots with fake images, if that makes sense. Like that, that space was interesting for us. We go and build for like three months without talking to a customer. First mistake there. We'll do that. So we go- 

Pablo Srugo  (08:28):

So what were you building at that point?

Pablo Palafox (08:29):

So we were building like an engine, a virtual reality engine, if you will, for computer vision models to be trained faster. So basically create fake images from, I dunno, like we were trying to detect let's say drones as, as the example before you would just like randomly place 3D models of drones on in the world, in like a virtual world. And just render those images. So you would just try to improve computer vision models by generating fake images pretty much

Pablo Srugo  (09:01):

Which is a real- I mean, it's a real space. I know there's big, big business in like autonomous driving, right? A lot of them need a lot of synthetic data. And so there's a lot of, kind of simulations that are being built just for that purpose.

Pablo Palafox (09:12):

That was actually one of the problems, these large players, this is critical to them. So they would build that internally. There was actually a company that went under or like just wrapped up. It was an israeli company that we were pretty big in that kind of synthesis or like fake imagery, generation space that really had to shut down because you know, like at the end of day. computer vision is actually tricky. Like there's just not enough enterprises that need that. And the ones that actually need it, it's so core, think like Cruise or Waymo like it's core to them. they're not gonna outsource that to a shitty startup.

Pablo Srugo  (09:50):

<Laugh> that's legit. Yeah, that makes sense. But you didn't know 'cause you're talking to them, you're just building.

Pablo Palafox (09:55):

We were just building, man, we just found one customer. It was like, oh yeah, perfect. We found it. Now we have a customer. They were not even paying. So it was like, we're billing for these. It was a super cool German startup. Kudos to them, they were really good to us. They were just building, basically building like a model for detecting capacity for solar panels detecting different types of rooftops and whatever. So we just started randomly generating images of rooftops for these guys so that they could train better models. And I remember going with Luis, walking down the street there in that village we lived in, near Munich. Dude, that's like a saddle roof. Oh wait, that's like a flat roof or whatever. Like, oh yeah, yeah, let's generate more of those 3D models and rendered it.

Pablo Palafox (10:42):

It was crazy. we were just building for no one. So first mistake we learned a little bit I guess because that summer in 2022, we then pivoted to actually more of an auto labeling tool. I dunno if you're following that kind of phase of like Sam and all these tools that started popping up, like basically you would just like not even have to generate fake images. You would just literally show an image to a model that already kind of has a bit of knowledge about the world. He would just basically say, Hey, this is a strawberry. And he would basically compute an embedding, a so-called embedding or like a representation of that strawberry. And he'd be like, okay, now I know what you mean. I can find it in other images. So that's auto labeling, if you will. And that's something that is really helpful for computer vision projects because you like essentially 10x or a 100x your productivity in terms of model creation. So we started going down that round. It seemed like there was more use cases that we could tackle with that. robotics companies were like pretty interested

Pablo Srugo  (11:42):

in this phase, did you start talking to more customers?

Pablo Palafox (11:46):

We did, we started talking to more folks also, like outside of Europe if you will. We got some initial traction here in some robotics companies in the US, and we applied to YC with almost like the idea. That was summer, like that was gonna be for like winter 23, I guess. So we applied and we actually got into the interview. I remember having that interview, our first interview with YC folks literally having nothing to show. I mean, just some platform that was not even in production yet with some of those customers, but starting to be something real and they're like, okay, we got rejected obviously, but it was okay. Yeah, this looks interesting. Doesn't it feel like it's exactly the same as like Scale AI is doing or like RoboFlow is is doing, kudos to Joseph from RoboFlow.

Pablo Palafox (12:40):

He has also been a bit of an inspiration for us back in the day with computer vision. We actually play soccer on Mondays here in San Francisco. That's anyhow, so it was a bit of a, yeah, this sounds too familiar. The computer vision space is tricky. Not to say that there's not gonna be big businesses built around it, but like, it's kind of come to like a small end for now. Realistically, there's just less companies building or that need computer vision stuff. We got rejected. We are still pushing. That was like January 23.

Pablo Srugo  (13:12):

Was that like a punch to the face for you guys? or was it just whatever, we didn't get in no big deal? Or did you take it or reflect like, ah, we really thought we wanted to get a YC. why not? 

Pablo Palafox (13:22):

It was a big punch, but just for a week and it was sad. Like, oh, it's our dream. We really want to go there, in San Francisco, whatever. But it was like, okay, we'll just keep building. they're waiting for us to do cool stuff. Let's just keep doing, keep going. So we actually keep going. We continued getting some traction and we got to a point where we had 50 K in ARR, something that obviously is hard, but also in retrospect, stupid. we were feeling so proud, oh, people are actually paying. But I mean, it's actually hard to get your first-

Pablo Srugo  (13:58):

100%. Like, it's hard.  it's interesting you say that because I mean, zero to one moment is a big deal. Like, it's really hard to get somebody to part with their money for anything. But then on the flip side you don't wanna overweight it either. because 50 ARR  is actually trivially small. So it sometimes makes you think you have something more than what you do. So it's a balancing act, right? It's not, but it's not easy. But, but it is real, it's real, it's a meaningful and hard thing to do to get anybody to pay even a dollar for anything.

Pablo Palafox (14:30):

And that's actually, that was one of our problems actually. And I'll speak about it in a minute. Basically the problem was we indexed too much on the fact that we had someone paying. And it was a painful process because it was harder for us to pivot away from what we were doing. Prior to that. Maybe before I go into that, I'll probably briefly mention the state of things in Germany, which is where we started building stuff. We didn't even have a company back then. we hadn't even incorporated. It was just a couple of guys doing stuff because honestly, we knew that we were gonna incorporate in the US.

Pablo Srugo  (15:09):

And by the way, how many months at this point? you started when? Early 22 to just build?

Pablo Palafox (15:14):

We started officially March 1st, 2022.

Pablo Srugo  (15:17):

Okay. And how are you guys paying yourself? Like just basic stuff, what's the personal runway situation? Like? =

Pablo Palafox (15:22):

just our own savings pretty much.

Pablo Srugo  (15:24):

You mean ramen noodles, like you guys living together and stuff, or what was the setup? 

Pablo Palafox (15:27):

Yeah, we were living together, Luis and I, in this little village next to Munich, really thankful to the folks from the incubator there in the TTU Munich, the technical University of Munich. They helped us a lot. There were some grants that we actually had access to on a personal level. So that was helpful. I was actually gonna bring out this topic of the whole grant system. It was great for us. It worked, but we saw other folks that were just living off of that. Like, oh, this is a dream we're doing a startup.

Pablo Srugo  (15:57):

It's addictive. Yeah, it's addictive. You can get hooked on grants. 

Pablo Palafox (16:00):

Yeah. And they would just keep going for these mini grants. Like, oh, we got another 30k grant, great. Now you can spend, they actually forced you to, spend it on stuff sometimes. Like, oh, you need to actually use this for like, stuff like, we almost bought some computers because we actually had to like, use that grant. And some folks do that. And unfortunately, I have a couple of cases from good friends there from Munich that recently had to shut down their companies because they just ran out of the 1 million that they got. I mean, we didn't get as much, it was more on a personal level to live and pay ourselves minimum wage or whatever, just eat. But these guys got actually a million dollars to build something and transparently they were billing on the medical space. So pretty complex. Like they're trying to really solve important problems, but you need more than that and you need a better ecosystem. You need like-

Pablo Srugo  (16:49):

 and you can get carried away. you know, we have this in Canada as well. I think in the US maybe there's less so, but I know in Europe and in Canada, there's a lot of these grants and they can be useful if you leverage them in the right way, but they are addictive. And I mean that because you can start building for the grants where you get into this mindset of, how do I get the next grant? How do I get the next grant? and we did that actually. We made that mistake. But you know, one of the things, dude, I hadn't thought about this since it happened probably, but like, just a funny stupid little anecdote. and we were young, like, you know, kind of just, just off university when we started gym track, I guess a decade ago.

Pablo Srugo  (17:22):

And so every dollar counted man, every dollar counted, right? Like, and, and I remember there was, back then there was these Facebook kind of contests, you know, the win random stuff. I don't remember what even the end goal was, but what we found, one, it was to win a Lenovo computer tower, you know what I mean? Like back then dude, and we just like, oh, we're gonna win this tower. it was eight, you know, we didn't even need it. we didn't need a computer and we just got so many people to just like, you needed people to like, like your project. That's what it was. It was like you submitted an idea for a business and they wanted, I don't remember what the idea was, who the sponsor was, I guess Lenovo, but what the goal was. So we got people to just click on our project, then we got this computer and then we sold it for like, on on Craigslist or whatever. We got like 600 bucks and that was, you know, a few sandwiches or whatever I paid for. But the stupid little things you do, man, just to like, you know, get to the next week, you know, but I don't know,  it’s all part of the fun for sure, but it is kind of a little bit part of the game. Just that resource <laugh> on this every time counts. 

Pablo Palafox (18:23):

I think it's, Yeah, it's tricky, right? Like you can optimize for the wrong thing. Like you’re optimizing for these grants or, winning that Lenovo or whatever, you're optimizing for the wrong thing versus talking to customers and building.

Pablo Srugo  (18:35):

Exactly. Exactly.

Pablo Palafox (18:37):

Your whole YC model, just build something people want, iterate, just like super simple but super hard at the same time. 

Pablo Srugo  (18:43):

But like you said, there is a reality which, you know, you do have to eat. So it's like, how do you find, you know, you get into YC, you get some seed funding, great, just optimize for that. But like, you know, if you need to eat and pay rent this month, these grants can do that. But you can get hooked. So yeah, it's definitely, it's a fine line.

Pablo Palafox (18:59):

It’s a very fine line. So at some point, I guess going back to the story that, at some point it's 2023, like January, I remember actually December 2022, it had been almost, I guess 10 months since we had started building stuff. Nothing there yet. Like we had some pilots that were starting with I think we maybe had like, yeah, like 30, 40 kits at some point in December, 2022. And I remember sitting down with my brother and co-founder Javi in our place in Spain, visiting family during Christmas we're like building these business plans for raising some money and at that point it was more like, okay, this is starting to like feel more serious because now we're like trying to get some seed money. One of the things I've actually realized in building a company is if you really want things, they actually can happen.

Pablo Palafox (19:47):

And sometimes, you know, like that, that can be great. But, but be prepared that things can actually happen. Like I wasn't prepared to be leading a team of 15 folks now. Like having to have back-to-back meetings with enterprise customers every day. Do I like it all the time? Maybe not because be prepared to actually go through this. Like in paper it sounds all amazing, but then there's a lot of hard work that you'll have to go through. Anyhow, a bit of a disclaimer there that if you really want things that can happen and sometimes you know, it can be like not what do you expect, which we can talk about later, right? Like, there's a lot of things today that I'm like, I wasn't expecting me doing this kind of bullshit stuff for running a company, but you have to.

Pablo Srugo  (20:30):

I mean, it's a legit tangent for what it's worth. And I think like, be careful what you wish for kind of thing. And sometimes-  I've met some- like obviously you go down the venture train, that's one path and you could build something massive. But sometimes I meet founders who bootstrapped the business. that people would've called lifestyle through it, but now they have like a $10 million, $20 million top line business spinning out profits. Nobody can tell 'em what to do. Nobody can tell 'em they have to grow next year. and you look at that and you're like, that's winning. That's also winning for sure in a big way, right?, and anyways, yeah, be careful what you wish for I think it’s legit. 

Pablo Palafox (21:02):

That's the sentence I was looking for. Be careful what you wish for for sure. So anyhow, we're planning this, this seed round. And that's like January now, 2023. Like we actually start talking to some VCs in Germany or in Europe that's not VCs like, I mean, sorry. But that is not VCs. Like if you talk to someone and they tell you like, oh yeah, great, let us know when you like find a lead or like, let us know when you like, have like a lot more- like a half a million revenue. I dunno, like I'm just making it up, but like-

Pablo Srugo  (21:33):

 Sure, Yeah, yeah.

Pablo Palafox (21:34):

In Europe it is really hard to actually find people to just literally throw money at you. Like, let's see what happens. And we actually had that with a, with a VC in the valley that we fortunately were able to connect to somehow our array ventures. They were our first actually our, our third check we had like, 

Pablo Srugo  (21:49):

and this is still pre YC? 

Pablo Palafox (21:51):

this is pre YC, this is January 2023. 

Pablo Srugo  (21:55):

And had you shifted at all? Like chat gpt had happened. are you guys talking about this at this point?

Pablo Palafox (21:59):

Man, that was again, like the biggest mistake we did. Like, we were just like, oh, these LLMs shit. Like what is that? Like, that's not gonna work. Like, we're just super focused on our thing. Like computer vision is our, our mode because Pablo has the PhD in, in computer vision, big mistake. Like over indexing on what you think you're good at is harm. be more open-minded. I think that's also one of the learnings we got, like, just be open-minded, see what's going on in the world. Like then just like not read the news and like be coding in a cave for forever because one, you're not gonna talk to customers too. You're not gonna see what's going on in the world in terms of technology. So that was a big mistake. And I remember clearly with Luis sitting down there in Munich and something like, ah, these people with yellow limbs, this is not gonna go anywhere. Like, what is that? So anyhow, that was a bit of that mistake.

Pablo Srugo  (22:49):

It's tough because you do, like, you're also taught to be focused, right? And, and so once you go down a path, you wanna hone in on it and not be distracted. startups are so weird, like you know, almost seeming like contradictions or cognitive dissonance I guess is the right word. Where like you have to be focused but not too focused. <Laugh> you know, you don't wanna change grants, but like a little bit. Yeah, <laugh>, it's weird, but that's what makes it hard.

Pablo Palafox (23:16):

They are. startups are not intuitive.  that that really is what, what the whole learning we've gotten so far about services, they're just not intuitive. Like there's things especially in the early beginnings that just are not what you would expect. And in this case, yeah, that was a bit of, of that like actually the biggest one is always like, oh, I'll first have to build like the product and then I go to customers. That's the biggest mistake you can do. And, and the most obvious one that is at Intuitive actually. Like, oh, don't I need to have something to sell? Like if I ask my mom, he is like, oh yeah, I guess you first build it and then you go sell it. It's like, not really. It's a balancing act. So, that was obviously the biggest learning about startups that one can get from YC or really any medium today.

Pablo Palafox (24:02):

But anyhow, going back to like our seed round preparation. Yeah, I remember making up stuff about the projections from the company, like what are we doing here? But we just felt that we needed to do something like that, which then we learned when we went to YC afterwards that like, you don't need that if you have certain leverage. AKA if you're like part of YC that just goes away, you just need like 10 slides and like, that's it. Like that's that you don't need a business plan or whatever. Anyhow, we're building our little business plan there. We reached out to people, we actually, it was really funny, like I was having these calls at 6:00 PM 7:00 PM this Monday. I had talked to some VCs there in, in the, in the European world. And I was devastated.

Pablo Palafox (24:46):

Like no one was talking to us seriously, like, oh great, you are building some little cool stuff with computer vision. Oh, you have like two customers, great, let's just talk later. And I was kind of pissed and sad. And then I accept this call from some random guy that reached out to us from Zurich, this PhD guy wrapping up his PhD in computer vision and robotics. I'm like, what does he want? Like, does he wanna work for us? Like, does he wanna learn what we're doing? And then I just talk to him like, ah, what's up? Yeah, how's it going? I'm always trying to be nice, but at that point I was super tired and then at the end of the call, so I do like angel investments and I really love these things that you guys have built.

Pablo Palafox (25:26):

The tech was really cool, right? So the tech piece was super fascinating what we were doing with the auto labeling. Like just click here, like auto labeling the, and entire data set of strawberries or whatever. So like the tech was cool and these guys,, I actually do angel investing. Do you wanna get like a 25K check? What do you say there? Yeah, like, I do some, some tickets. I'm like, do people do that? Like where do you get that money from? Like, you rob a bank or <laugh>? 

Pablo Srugo (25:50)

So this is totally foreign to you, being in the ecosystem, you were?

Pablo Palafox (25:54)

super foreign. Like, I didn't even know, people could -I mean we had heard some stuff about like YC, we had to like watch all the videos, whatever. But I didn't know that people would actually do that.

Pablo Palafox (26:03):

Like, oh yeah, let me just throw 25k at you, you see what happens. Obviously this guy now is happy that we're going so far because you never know what's gonna happen with three guys who are just trying to build stuff and they actually wanna do it. So see that was our first check actually back in again like January 23. And then we got another guy to like the CEO of one of the largest consulting companies in Spain to actually do another 50K check. And then we go from there and then suddenly we are connected to these VCs in San Francisco and they're like, oh, let's just do half a mill. That's a big deal for us. Like that's gonna let us-

Pablo Srugo (26:36)

That's real money. That's real money. Yeah. That moves, that moves the needle. 

Pablo Palafox (26:39)

Now we're talking, that's real money now we can start really working full time on these, because at the time Javi he was still working.

Pablo Palafox (26:46):

He was not working in happy robot but he was just supporting us from the sidelines. There's some help that he was doing here and there for certain things financially also like thinking strategically. But he was working somewhere else and he was more of a mentor and advisor to the company almost, you know, like just doing stuff. But on the sidelines anyhow, we were really pressured to get some money so that he could join full time because we knew that if he didn't join full time, there was not gonna be a company. Like we needed to all be in the same boat suffering the same pain of like not getting paid, like just doing stuff. So yeah, like it was, it was a big deal. We went for it. We probably could have optimized a bit better for terms as much as we love array, I always say that they got a great deal, they didn't put a gun in our, in your head, but-

Pablo Srugo  (27:33):

Well, like for half a million they got what, like 10% of the business?

Pablo Palafox (27:36):

Roughly.

Pablo Srugo  (27:37):

Not bad, not bad.

Pablo Palafox (27:38):

Even, I mean eventually they did another half a mill because it was the SVB time, you remember the Silicon Valley bank stuff? Yeah, of course. We got really scared, man. We got really scared and my brother was like, dude, we need to get more, like we need to get more money. Like we just need to get more now that it's possible after this everything's gonna collapse. And I was like that as well. Like let's get more. And then our CTO is like, you know, that if we raise too much now, like we're diluting ourselves? and also do we need that much money? Sure, yeah. We need more. Why not? Which again, it's one of those balancing acts.

Pablo Srugo  (28:14):

Balancing acts. I know it's tough, but back then SVB was crashing. FTX crashed. The whole macro was turning around like, you know, it wasn't a bad idea to get more optionality. Yeah, it's more dilution. But if you make it to the end you'll be fine. Yeah. If you don't make it, that's gonna be a problem.

Pablo Palafox (28:33):

That's true. That's also something that we chat about with our partners at A16  now. Like, hey, equity doesn't mean anything if you don't really build a big business. Which it's true. Anyhow, we got that money we maybe could have raised on better terms but we are still super thankful as well for array, like trusting us. They're early and what I would mention there is the disadvantage of being a European founder. Maybe let's touch on that a little bit. Being a European founder already, like has some form of like aura on you that actually like a bad aura. Like, oh, these guys can actually, like, we, we can get-

Pablo Srugo  (29:12):

More of a stink, more of a stink than an aura. But yeah, get with me <laugh>,

Pablo Palafox (29:15):

It's more of that stink actually. I agree. that didn’t help in getting, you know, like either customers or or VCs who trust us except for array in that case. And also the terms obviously are typically worse, especially if you don't understand what a good term is. Like you don't have a network of people to ask at the time we just knew, knew like a few people around, but we didn't have like, oh, let me ask my buddy Matt about what he did in his prior round. I'll just pick up the phone and call him because I have his WhatsApp. that is not the case as much in Europe and there's just like, not that many successes I guess. And also like in Europe they do weird stuff like price rounds from the very beginning. Like you'll just raise a price round for like 5 million valuation. Like you'll just raise like 1 million at five or whatever and it'll be like a price round, which is a lot of paperwork. Germany loves their paperwork. You have to go to the notary every time you do a round. sign through like 800 pages or something. I've never done it, but I've heard that's the case.

Pablo Srugo  (30:14):

I saw that post too. But you know, I'll say some about, like, the other thing is you don't have the knowledge. You also in a sense don't have the power. Like even if you go back to these guys and you're like, well actually you know, the value should be 10 'cause my friends are all raising at 10, you know, maybe they move to a little bit or maybe they just say like, okay, well then go find somebody and you're like, ah, I don't have anybody. All right, pause. You know, like, whatcha gonna do? 

Pablo Palafox (30:35):

So, yeah, I think that speaks to the fact that being in SF, where the value is. it does pay off, it does give you that aura. So as much as it is hard to get a visa and everything I highly recommend folks to obviously try to get here somehow. It just gives you that aura, not the stink of someone that is building cool stuff. Especially if you add the whole AI thing.

Pablo Srugo  (31:00):

You add ai, you add the YC like in the early days, that stuff, I mean it does, it makes a difference. There's no doubt about it.

Pablo Palafox (31:05):

So anyhow we got that money, we had like a million points, something from these angels and IRA ventures and it was great. Like perfect, we have money now, but do we apply to YC again? So that was like the whole conundrum, like what do we do? Like we don't need the money, but we also wanna go for YC because YC right?

Pablo Srugo  (31:22):

We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You wanna be part of the group? You wanna be a part of those tens of thousands of followers? So hit the follow button. 

Was it more- what was it that called, right? Was it more the brand, the network, the learning? Like out of all three, what really was the thing you really wanted?

Pablo Palafox (31:41):

It was the network. Like being part of the startup ecosystem, like from Munich, we honestly couldn't have been part of like what we are today. I mean, it would've been harder. So it was definitely like that ecosystem, being part of  the team, the people that are actually building stuff here. So yeah, it was like a no brainer for us. We did apply. Some people were like, why are you doing that? Like, you don't need the money. But you know, it was, you know, for us, we wanted to do it. So we applied. We got into the interview again, that was again like probably April, May, 2023. We did the interview with Diana, who was an amazing partner and has been super helpful for us during the whole process now raising the A as well.

Pablo Palafox (32:23):

So we did the interview with Diana. She completely destroyed us in the first call. Like bad. Like she's like, wait, you're saying that you're helping your customers do X, but in reality your contracts say something else. Why is that? It's like, well, like we signed some contracts to do some consulting things like first blah blah blah, blah, blah. It's like, let's do something. You're gonna get back to work and you're gonna redo all your contracts. And we had like 70K at the time, 70K ARR. You're gonna redo all your contracts, you're gonna state clearly what you're helping them with or what you're doing for them. And you're saying that you're gonna have these cool things that does whatever, do it, build it, show me that you can. actually, it's like the most stressful week probably of our lives.

Pablo Srugo (33:12) 

a week? to do all that in a week?

Pablo Palafox (33:13):

Yeah. Yeah. It was like,, in three days let's catch up. And like,, <laugh>, let's call on Thursday, we'll sync on Thursday again. Like you have me there, like reaching out to like all the customers we had, like can you please help me redo this contract let's sign something differently because that's really what we are doing for you guys. Let's reflect it properly on the contract, blah, blah, blah. And all the while, like Luis is redoing or like building this stuff that we actually had planned to build in that sprint, which was great. Like we were still, we were building that, but it was like, I dunno, it was gonna take like two weeks or something. 

Pablo Srugo  (33:44):

The urgency. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's funny what what urgency can do 

Pablo Palafox (33:46):

so much. I mean this is crazy. Like with a clear goal and like, and a target you can do so much. And we did it actually we went back to, we went back to Diana. I was like, Hey, this is what we've done. She was like, okay I'll get back to you guys in a few days. No, please don't do that. Yeah, she did that. she was like, yeah, I'll catch up with you on Monday. Like, you're not gonna tell us now. Like, can you please tell us yes or no? I just need to know. And no, it wasn't the case. We actually had like a whole weekend of just thinking about what's gonna happen if we get in, great. If we don't. It's no, no big deal guys. Like, almost convincing ourselves like, it's fine guys. Like we're probably, it's gonna be a no, so don't worry too much. And then come Monday it's like, Hey guys this is, you've done a great work, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. However <laughs> in the batch, but you have to demonstrate that you can target enterprise customers. And that sentence has been the problematic thing during the batch. what we were building. And now we can go deep into what happened. 

Pablo Srugo  (34:48):

But so they let you in, they just said, you have to do this. 

Pablo Palafox (34:50):

if people haven't understood what happened here, yes, they, they got us in and we got in. So yeah, the answer was a yes with a bit of a warning. Like, Hey guys, looks like you have some traction. People are paying for this thing for whatever reason. Now the type of customer you're selling to is a tricky one. We were selling to series A, series B startups doing computer vision stuff or basically doing like robotics most of the time where we would be helping them do computer vision related tasks. Like we could help them automate the streamline, streamline the generation of models or streamline the generation of, or the training of AI models for computer vision would help them organize their data sets, find the key images to train or whatever.

Pablo Palafox (35:36):

But really, we struggled a lot with selling into enterprises, and that's what Diana kind of feared. And it was a right fear. Like we almost felt something was off when we got into the batch and everyone was, in this retreat that the YC does now, like in person, everyone was like, oh, we're pivoting. Like we don't know what to do. And we would tell our story and they would be like, oh, like you're doing so great. Like, you have ARR already, like you're selling stuff to someone. Like, that's amazing. But something didn't feel right and we were right, something was not right. So during the batch, we struggled a lot to increase our revenue, like to sell to more people. And eventually we were like, this doesn't feel right. This is like not enough pull from these computer vision things we were doing. 

Pablo Palafox (36:28):

Transparently, there's companies that have or are doing great today. RoboFlow is a great example of that. Kudos to them. They're doing great. But we just like maybe worked either too late to the party or didn't know how to like, pitch that directly during, or actually prior to demo day. Obviously we're not, we're not raising. We decided not to raise, almost at all. I mean, we had a few tickets here and there. We actually pivoted slightly in mid batch. We actually pivoted slightly towards satellite imagery data, basically like we started selling into satellite imagery companies that would like wanna find that little car on a satellite image. So we kind of semi pivot towards that vertical because we thought that maybe that would help us find a better ICP like a better customer persona. And as much as we tried there, we didn't even find the fit yet.

Pablo Palafox (37:15):

So at some point, prior to demo day, this just doesn't feel good. So on demo day. I literally slacked Diana, like Diana, we're pivoting. like demo day. Like, we have this presentation prepared and like we're pivoting away completely from this computer vision platform thing that we've built. this auto labeling thing. It's like, okay, no worries. Just present, <laugh> present what you've done and what you're doing or have been doing so far. We'll just think through things later. Next comes the worst month of my life, probably super painful. Pivot Hell. We just went to Pivot Hell for like a month. 

Pablo Srugo (37:54)

Did you turn all your customers or like what did you do with your ARR? 

Pablo Palafox (37:57)

emailed, called, Slacked customers. Like really, sorry, we're moving away from these. Obviously we'll do good by you guys. We can help you wrap it up. Give you guys some tools that we've developed internally. Some of the customers actually were like, Hey, can we buy these from you guys? We're like, we don't even have the brain capacity now to like think how to wrap this up and how to give it to you because,, it was a cool platform. Like we had done cool tech with a bit of engineering and like, some good engineers and time that you can like replicate that, especially now today with like these models that are like really good, like a Sam V2 or whatever, like these click here and find the segment in these cows or whatever, they're so good at few shot or one shot learning. just detect all the cows and it'll detect all the cows, whatever, or find all the cars and you'll find all the cars. So it was almost like a bit of a commodity. So anyhow, we ended up not even selling the stuff we had built. 

Pablo Srugo  (38:54):

And what do you do? Like what’s square one? do you have At least a space where you start interviewing customers? or how back to the drawing board do you go?

Pablo Palafox (39:02):

We go really back. We go back to the drawing board and just throw everything, like Luis wanted to build like an English tutor, like an AI tutor thing.

Pablo Srugo  (39:14):

Oh, you're going all the way. so YC I'm sure is cool with it, but what about your early investors? Like were they totally fine with the full pivot? 

Pablo Palafox (39:21):

Not everyone. I will say we got some folks saying -, I mean maybe by that time we have like, let's say seven folks in the cap table, let's say like some, some angels, some, some small VCs or whatever. Some of those without pointing my finger here were not cool. And we went through a bit of a hard time there because you know, you hope that your supporting system will support you at times that you need it and sometimes it actually is not the case. 

Pablo Srugo  (39:52):

The Opposite. Yeah. <laugh>,

Pablo Palafox (39:54):

Well, it was hard. We felt that we were like losers. What are we doing here? Like, we've gone through YC and now we don't even know what to do. 

Pablo Srugo  (40:01):

Yeah, you're kind of like worse off-, you know, seemingly you're in a worse place after YC than before. At least with the outside it's probably that perception, you know?

Pablo Palafox (40:09):

A hundred percent. Yeah. Like I guess if we had stayed in our computer vision arena doing stuff, maybe we could have gone to some revenue, just pushing harder. But at some point it's like, well, yeah, now we're worse, like worse off than before. So now,  we go for a month just thinking about stuff. We're based in these apartment in SF. Luis and I were living together. Javi's actually living up the street with his girlfriend in another apartment. And we're just like, every day we just go to the office or our apartment, we go to the living room and we start thinking about stuff, writing things in the blackboard, whiteboard and nothing, nothing, nothing clicks. And then somebody's like, okay, let's just like build stuff. Let's just like do whatever. And Luis builds like an ai financial assistant copilot thing, the usual thing that everyone's built.

Pablo Palafox (40:59):

Like let me find all the reports about public companies and see which one to invest in. I don't know, like the usual thing that people have done with RAG and whatever. So like to build that. We also, well I also wanted to like do something on the yellow and piece related to voice as well. Luis was the primary proponent of voice as well. Like he just wanted to do something with voice. he's like, actually let's, let's just build this ElevenLabs thing that people. you know, ElevenLabs, right?

Pablo Srugo (41:27)

Yeah, of course

Pablo Palafox (41:28)

 Unicorn now building some of the coolest voice technology in the world. And we're like, let's just try to compete with that. I'm like, hmm, I don't feel like I'm in the right mindset to do that. Why don't we like to go into these other tangents, which is like, AI agents. look like we can verticalize maybe on some vertical and like maybe carry out like or develop or produce some more value, add to these verticals.

Pablo Palafox (41:54):

And actually Javi he had been CFO of a shipping company. He had been on the logistics side of things for a while. He knew that there was something there with communications. So meaning when he was the CFO of these largest olive oil distributor bertoli, if you use any olive oil, he was moving this brand bertoli to move stuff from A to B. You need tracking companies you need a truck that's messy because trucks break down and there's a lot of issues. So what you do is typically have an intermediary that is called a freight broker. A freight broker will basically help you move things around. They'll just do that white glove support for you that they'll just find all the good trucks and do it for, so he was using  a freight broker at the time, but even if they were doing that, they still had to hire interns internally in the shipper in that in their company to call drivers directly and check on them like, Hey Pablo, are you gonna be good on good for your delivery tomorrow at 5:00 PM and everything good?

Pablo Palafox (42:54):

Oh, and actually my tire is flat. Oh, perfect. Let me escalate this to my, so he was like hiring people internally to bypass that broker as much as they would try to help. And they were great. But he saw that that was an opportunity. Like there's something related to communications and logistics that is broken. The dynamics of the industry are really interesting. 95% of the tracking companies in the US are owner operators, pretty much like 10 or less trucks. So there's no easy way to bring everyone onto the same platforms. So you have like just folks with trucks and phones and that's it. Like they just use email and, and they make phone calls. So that was really interesting. It's like, okay, maybe there's something here. So we keep exploring there.

Pablo Palafox (43:42):

After that pivot hell that we had for like a month, we started actually trying to talk to companies in that arena, funnily enough we didn't start directly with a logistics company. We started with moving companies because it was more attainable. Like, we're like, okay, let's try to find moving companies in the area. Let's see what we, who we can talk to. And, and then we actually have a session, like a partner session with one of the YC partners Tom Bloomfield, built a couple unicorns in the financial space. And he is like, we go to his place, he's like, whatever you do, don't touch healthcare or finance yet. Like,, don't do any agents for healthcare or finance. It's gonna take a lot of time. Especially because we didn't have any expertise in those fields, right?

Pablo Palafox (44:23):

Like, do something, I dunno simpler, like moving companies. Like wait, wait, wait, moving companies, we said like, that's exactly what we've been thinking about. So then we go into that, we find some moving companies. We see that it's not a great market anyways. And, eventually we transition into the broader logistics space. Man, you would imagine that logistics is old fashioned. It is, but there's a lot of money. not a lot of margins, but there's a lot of dollars that are moving around and there's a lot of inefficiencies So it's like perfect. We found it. We, we kind of knew that, you know, like we, we had found something and it felt right. Fast forward to 2024, like around February we signed our first draft.

Pablo Srugo  (45:00):

'Cause This was when, this was like mid 2023 that you're feeling it? 

Pablo Palafox (45:03):

This pivot hell thing was on September 23. Fast forward to February 24, we find our first customers. That's a customer that is willing to pay a thousand bucks a month. That's it. we somehow convinced these guys to sign for like a thousand bucks. And

Pablo Srugo  (45:17):

What was V1, what was the product at this point that he's paying for?

Pablo Palafox (45:20):

The product is these voice agents that basically do a phone call and we go to them saying, Hey, we're, we're billing these voice agents, these voice bots that can do or handle all of these phone calls that you guys are handling on a per day basis. We're gonna do it for you and we're just only gonna escalate issues to your team, to your reps, to your human reps.

Pablo Srugo  (45:41):

 And do you update like a-  because like you said, the example was like you're checking in on someone, Hey, are you good? You're gonna make it? or you're doing that phone call and then you tie into some CRM or how are you getting that information back to whoever needs it?

Pablo Palafox (45:53):

The integration to their system of record, the so-called transportation management system is key. So we basically integrate to their TMS and then the body's able to kind of handle phone calls from a carrier calling in, asking if there's, if there's a load available. And then the bot will be like, oh yeah, what's up? I typically do some demos live. So if you let me actually call and like show you guys how.

Pablo Srugo  (46:14):

Sure. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah.

Pablo Palafox (46:16):

If I am a driver, I saw a load posted on some online load board. What I'm gonna do is call the number I see on the screen. So they call and then it's a mess. There's a lot of phone calls coming in. The AI will basically, yeah, calling to see: is  the Dallas to Kansas city I saw online? 

Happy Robot ChatBot (46:33):

Do you see a reference number on that posting?

Pablo Palafox (46:35):

Yeah, I think it's gonna be 574798. 

Speaker 4 (46:39):

What's your empty number?

Pablo Palafox (46:40):

843818. 

Happy Robot Bot (46:42) 

Thanks. Lemme find you guys.

Pablo Palafox (46:43) 

So basically this is all a rep does every day all the time. A carrier sales rep, whatever a fancy term to like one of these figures in a freight broker, is doing these all the time. Collecting those, those details like the load number they're asking for and the they're motor carrier number. That was like, perfect. that's yeah, that's us. Yeah, that's a great example. That's a great use case and now it's gonna find this load and pitch it to me. So we build this workflow of a super-

Happy Robot ChatBot (47:11):

One pick and one drop. It picks up today in Dallas, Texas between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM

Pablo Palafox (47:16):

Yeah, you know what? I gotta go, actually, I'm in the middle of something here. Thanks so much. 

Speaker 4 (47:20):

No worries. Feel free to reach out if you need anything else. Appreciate It. Have a good one. 

Pablo Srugo  (47:24):

It's pretty cool. You know what's pretty awesome about this is it really bypasses like this AI agents thing, you know, you used to have to get people to do something new, like, okay, you should automate this stuff, so get people to use this app or the software. No one does it, you know, people just want to call. Now you just put an AI agent and it's like, Hey, do whatever you used to do. You're just not talking to human anymore, which is so much smoother.

Pablo Palafox (47:49):

That's the biggest point here. Meeting players where they're at. more apps will not help. There's already tools and apps and dashboards and whatever, meeting players where they're at, that's huge. Like being able to communicate with a trucker, with a trucking company with a driver, a dispatch team from a carrier via email, via phone. That's huge. That's what they use. They don't wanna have another app on their phone. They just don't wanna quote another dashboard to like book a load. Some might, but not everyone. And it's just covering all the surface area that you can. So really these voice agents now actually we're moving towards like multi-channel agents really are able to do so, so we can have an assistant or an agent like hearing or picking up a call and then based on that call, like triggering another email to somebody else.

Pablo Palafox (48:35):

Actually we have a cool thing now that if the bot determines, it can put me on hold and trigger another call in parallel. a fun use case that we are building now is a driver calls in with an issue. We put them on hold and we then find the nearest location for them to go and fix their truck. And then we get back to them like, oh, we found like three quotes from three different dealers. Which one do you wanna go for? So that's huge, right? 

Pablo Srugo  (48:59):

This is where verticalization comes in too because obviously like the voice part of it is the commodity or at the very least is taken care of. Whether it's elevenlabs or you know, GPT or whatever it is, like that's gonna do it. Somebody's doing it at a foundational model, but to understand the specifics and then the integrations I think are the other key piece because it's one thing to answer a phone call and sound realistic and understand it's another thing to be able to take an action on the ERP for this specific and, and the CRM for example, for this specific space. And to be able to do the action that they want you to do, the workflows they want you to do. Like that's where verticalization I think comes in and, and you know, is an edge in the same way that like, you know, anybody can build any SaaS app, but like once you've built a SaaS app, it's still hard to build, rebuild all those features because there's a lot behind. I think it's the same thing here.

Pablo Palafox (49:47):

Exactly. That is the mode, being able to understand the use cases that the customer needs to do speaking their language. That's huge. Plus, you know, just connecting to their systems. The voice piece as you're saying, we actually build our own orchestration platform. We do work with Eleven, they're great. We fine tune some transcribers as well. We use LLMs out there, like a GPT4O like whatever works at the time. we actually fine tune sometimes the model for specific customers. we actually started fine tuning the LAMA tool and whatever. I don't recommend it today. I mean at least like six months ago it was painful as hell. So definitely don't recommend going down that route today. But yeah, the tech stack is plain easy. I mean, people know how to build voice agents today. Certain tricks and tips that you can do are like, I don't know, interruption handling that's still hard, like knowing if you've stopped talking whatever, all that quick stuff. Hard but doable. The integration as you're saying, that's the real like mode, like being able to fully connect to a customer. They trust you, you're their provider now. Boom. Like you have a customer for live phones.

Pablo Srugo  (50:49):

And so how fast, so February 1st customer with this new product that obviously you develop over time fast forward from February 24 to December 24, there's a $50 million series A there. So how fast do you things take off? Like what happens after?

Pablo Palafox (51:06):

We are at $0 of revenue on January 24. Today we're at 2.2 million ARR. So, I mean, it could always be better. But -

Pablo Srugo  (51:18):

<laugh> Nice

Pablo Palafox (51:19):

in between, you know, a lot. One of those things is the series A which has been amazing. Like, I couldn't think about better partners or just something else from day zero before investing and all. They're just like connecting us to all these different potential customers helping us think through things. And I'm really, really great. What happens again is listening to customers, building what they need and having something that gives them ROI like showing that this actually is ROI generating. a customer of ours always says, you're the only platform I got approval for because there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of like, oh, well this is a new platform for automating demand planning, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or finding that -sure, like it's gonna like help like 2x, they needed something.

Pablo Srugo  (52:09):

It's a no brainer. Like that's the thing that I come back to and it's so hard to-, I don't know. I mean, when you don't have it, it's hard to use this, but the reality is if somebody tells you, hey, you've got a bunch of people taking these like mind-numbing calls all the time now an AI could do it. It's a no-brainer. It's just a matter of like, when you gonna do it, who you gonna do it with? 'cause You're gonna do it <laugh>. Like, it'd be crazy not to. That's the kind of thing that you, and this is a question to you, like in retrospect, how do you find that kind of thing? Because yeah, you wanna listen to customers, you wanna find ROI, but you were kind of doing that before, like you were kind of listening to customers in the computer vision thing. You were finding some ROI, it wasn't no brainer ROI, you know what I mean? Like what do you, now looking back, like what would you tell a founder who's still in that stage of I got a thing, it's kind of working, but it's not like really taking off.

Pablo Palafox (53:00):

It's a tough one. find a bigger pain point, but it's easy to say, hard to do. I mean, I don't have an easy answer. Just like keep exploring, keep talking to those folks. See what is really, really painful. Like people will lie to you. Like, they'll just be like, oh yeah, this is a nice little thing. 

Pablo Srugo  (53:17):

Eh, yes, A hundred percent

Pablo Palafox (53:18):

I might use it. But if they really scream at you, if something breaks, I mean that's what you wanna see now. And I mean thankfully today we're at that point there's less screaming now because we've robustly defined the platform a lot. But there were some screens like back in summer, like when we were still robust and finding the infrastructure. I mean we're handling many thousands of phones calls every day. So it's like, in the order of dozens of thousands of calls every day, it's messy. There's a lot of things to build, but when they start screaming, if things fail, that's, that's good. If you don't, if you don't see that, if you don't feel that pain from that pull from the customer, yeah, maybe it's, it's better to continue exploring or maybe don't change customers.

Pablo Palafox (54:00):

I mean, something that Michael Sebel always said was also like, enjoy the problem, right? Like, find that problem. Like find that hard problem, change the solution, right? Don't keep changing problems. So I think it's good if you find something that you kind of are passionate about or like, you know, something about and keep drilling down. There might be a bigger problem that you, they, they might, the customer might not even know that they have that problem. We sometimes actually go to customers and we're like, you know that instead of these things you're asking for sure, that's nice to do, like easy to do whatever. We can do it. Where's this other thing? They're like, huh, yeah, yeah, actually that, that would bring me like 5x more ROI than the other use case, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like that's what I was telling you. So sometimes the customer might, might not even know themselves that they have that pain. So I, I would say find a niche that you're semi passionate about. You'll get more passionate about it if you are actually doing well. Like, I would never, I would've never imagined I would be selling to logistics companies. And now I love it. It's great

Pablo Srugo  (55:01):

<Laugh> money talks, man, money talks. But I agree with you. I know. We'll getting to the end of this, like, you know, there's this line like Warren Buffet, Charlie Marger was saying like, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And I think the startup version of that is like, you know, an ounce of research is worth a pound of building. I think a lot of folks are stuck in the kind of, I've got the thing, I'm just kind of building where you were with the 50k, a hundred K ARR, like, I need to build a bit more, sell a bit more. And like the thing's gonna pop. And as painful as it might be in going through pivot, hell, like, you go back to the drawing board and you spend that time in, in the research and the exploring phase tool, you really find something where it's just a true problem.

Pablo Srugo  (55:39):

Like, and you're gonna get that pull. Oh man, the dividends are so big and I know it's so much easier said than done, but like, if you hit it, you'll know the difference and it'll be so worth it. And it's kind of hard to replace if you don't do it. A hundred percent. Cool, man. Well, dude, it's been great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for taking us through the story. Crazy, crazy Ride. I know it's only the beginning, but I think you're in the right place at the right time building the right thing. And that sounds like you have insane pull. So it's great to see it.

Pablo Palafox (56:05):

 Thank You. Let's see. I appreciate it.

Pablo Srugo  (56:07):

You remember like the first person who told you about Bitcoin, the first person who told you about Uber. You want to be that person because being first is cool. So be a cool person and tell your founder friends, set it to them on Whatsapp. Put it in a WhatsApp group, put it on a Slack channel. Let people know about the show. Let people know about this episode. Don't let somebody else beat you to the punch and share it with your founder friends first, remember what Ricky, Bobby said. If you ain't first, you're last. I.