He made 100 cold calls a day. Now his startup is worth $600M. | Harman Narula, Founder of Canary Technologies

Harman went from cold-calling hotels 100 times a day to building the category-defining guest management platform for the hospitality industry. Canary built a $600M company by first solving one tiny, annoying problem: paper credit card authorization forms.

In this episode, Harman breaks down how a simple digital form became the wedge into thousands of hotels. He reveals why they stuck with outbound sales long after hitting millions in revenue, the terror of collecting physical checks during the first week of COVID, and the exact moment he knew they had hit product-market fit.

Why You Should Listen

• The "Activated Hair on Fire" framework: How to turn a latent problem into a must-have purchase.
• Why outbound sales (and cold calling) is often your top early growth channel.
• How to use a simple, "unscalable" wedge to unlock a massive market.
• Why you should celebrate the lows: A counterintuitive take on managing founder psychology.
• The story of signing 200+ customers in a single day (and finding true PMF).

Keywords

startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, vertical saas, outbound sales, cold calling strategies, early stage growth, b2b sales, hospitality tech

00:00:00 Intro
00:02:13 From Management Consulting to Hotel Tech
00:11:32 The Paper Form that Launched a Company
00:17:35 The Activated Hair on Fire Framework
00:24:26 Landing the First Customer via Cold Call
00:28:21 Applying to YC 
00:32:35 Making 100 Cold Calls a Day
00:43:42 The COVID Cash Flow Panic
00:48:27 Signing 200 Customers in One Day

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 2:13 From Management Consulting to Hotel Tech
• 11:32 The Paper Form that Launched a Company
• 17:35 The Activated Hair on Fire Framework
• 24:26 Landing the First Customer via Cold Call
• 28:21 Applying to YC
• 32:35 Making 100 Cold Calls a Day
• 43:42 The COVID Cash Flow Panic
• 48:27 Signing 200 Customers in One Day

Transcript

Harman Singh Narula (00:00:00):
You have to have these power users early. These people that really care, like you are eliciting that reaction when you're talking about the problem that you're solving. If you call a hotel, they have to pick up the phone. Which for somebody cold calling is amazing. We were just making eight to a hundred dials a day to try to book demos with people. You know, we had blurry vision of like, when are we going to launch the next product? When are we going to expand? What is that going to look like, right? It was so early that a little bit of like, OK, we need to first prove that we can find product market fit on the first solution. We can scale that and then we can kind of expand from there. I remember this distinctly, because it was actually on my birthday. I remember the pump up talk with the team and that morning was like, if we sign twenty hotels or ten contracts, or whatever the number was. It was a pretty small number. That'll be phenomenal, I'll feel like really great. That'll be a really cool birthday gift. We ended up signing more than two hundred hotels in eight hours.

Previous Guests (00:00:57):
That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it 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.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:09):
Do you think the product market fit show, has product market fit? Cause if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Harman it's great to have you on the show.

Harman Singh Narula (00:01:26):
Yeah, thanks for having me, Pablo.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:28):
I'm excited, man. I'm excited to do this one. I mean, I'm excited to do. Frankly, we were just talking about the podcast, you know, then like. I think it's like two hundred episodes now and I'm still so, you know, as excited to do these each time. Because every founder story is so unique and I think the key here is just. Obviously we're talking to founders either that have been very successful, a late stage company or that are being very successful at the early stage. But there's something they've done, they've really figured out and in your case. You're a successful late stage startup. So anyways, maybe let's start at the beginning like we always do. You started in about 2018. Tell me a little bit about, what you were doing before you started. Maybe in the 2015, 2016, '17 period, just to kind of set some context and then we'll go from there.

Harman Singh Narula (00:02:13):
Yeah, so directly right before Canary Technologies, I was working in management consulting. I was at Bain, and I had spent most of my time pretty focused on hospitality technology, software, private equity, diligence work.

Pablo Srugo (00:02:28):
What do you do, by the way? There's a bit of a black box for people like us that haven't been in management consulting. You're at Bain, you're helping hospitality companies. What's a typical project that you might be on, and what's the output? Just give us a sense.

Harman Singh Narula (00:02:41):
Yeah, I mean, it really varies, right? They do a host of things, it ranges from, you know, on some of the larger clients like that, or kind of what they think of as a kind of GP cases, digital transformation, strategic advisory around go to market, org designs. It literally spans the entire gambit of things and so I had worked on a variety of different projects there. It was some of it was just, you know, there was some digital transformation work that was happening.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:05):
And what's one case that you remember? One specific output that you would have then presented sort of thing?

Harman Singh Narula (00:03:10):
Oh, that's a good one. There was one that I worked on. It was like advisory work around digital marketing and so they were thinking about kind of revamping their digital marketing organization. And kind of where they should be spending their dollars across the different types of brands, and so forth that they had. That was one of the ones that I did when I was at Bain.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:30):
Got it.

Harman Singh Narula (00:03:30):
Yeah, so I was at Bain right before Canary. But as you're aware, we're a vertical software business. So we're focused on the hotel industry and so, earlier in my career I had actually spent a bunch of time in hospitality. So I went to the hotel school up at Cornell for undergrad. Kind of totally by chance, to be honest with you, or kind of serendipity.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:48):
Yeah, how'd that happen? It's not a normal undergrad to take.

Harman Singh Narula (00:03:52):
Yeah, I did a leadership program when I was in high school and they kind of placed students at different universities, and I got placed at Cornell. I'm from the Northeast originally. I kind of fell in love with the campus. I don't know if you've been up there but Ithaca in the summer is pretty hard to be and they have this  beautiful campus. And I didn't really know what I wanted to study and or where I wanted to go to school. But Cornell definitely gave me this view of, wow, a traditional, beautiful campus school and so I kind of fell in love with that. And then as a part of that program, Cornell has a bunch of different colleges within the university. And so each college kind of comes, and chats about their program, right? Because as high schoolers are trying to figure out what they want to do. And the hotel school kind of came in and they were like, hey, we're kind of this undergrad business degree. But all the professors align around the similar domain and so you kind of see how things tie together.

Pablo Srugo (00:04:46):
And the goal is what? You become a GM of a hotel? Is that kind of what that path takes you down or?

Harman Singh Narula (00:04:50):
I think it used to be a lot more on that and there's probably still a little bit around that on operations. But, you know, more than a third of the students. I recently had a conversation with the dean about this is, you know, more than a third of the students are going into finance, real estate, et cetera, and so that's actually what I did after school. I really enjoyed my experience at the hotel school. I kind of did the finance thing for a little bit after school and realized I didn't really enjoy that deeply. And so I ended up at a hotel company called Starwood, which you might be familiar with. They had this loyalty program that folks really remember and were pretty obsessed with, it's called SPG. They own brands like Westin, Sheraton, W, St. Regis. It was one of the largest hotel companies in the world at the time. They're now part of Marriott and so, I ended up at Starwood kind of earlier in my career and really enjoyed that experience. It was really cool, I worked on a bunch of kind of strategy projects across the board and I was there for a while. Before leaving and then kind of going to business school and then doing the management consulting thing.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:47):
What takes you from management consulting to starting this company?

Harman Singh Narula (00:05:50):
You know, it's interesting. I knew I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I tried to start some other businesses in the past. I tried to start another hotel technology business also in the past, prior to business school, during business school.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:02):
What drove you? There's many reasons to start a company. What was it for you that really drove you to do it?

Harman Singh Narula (00:06:06):
You know, I like the concept of anything's possible and you can kind of build something from scratch. I think the other piece also that. It was theoretical before I became an entrepreneur but was this idea of  you get to A, you work on all sorts of different things, all sorts of different product, initiatives or kind of areas of the business. It's not like problems you're trying to solve a bunch of different problems and so it's not like you're only working on marketing or you're only working on sales, or only working on product, right? It's like you get to kind of see it all and so my nuclear family, nobody is an entrepreneur. Both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs. You know, they're immigrants in India and, they're kind of retail entrepreneurs, right? They had these shops and so, I think maybe hearing the lore of my grandfathers had also kind of seeped into me.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:55):
This is completely unscientific, not data-backed but there's a part of me that just feels. Just hearing you talk, my grandfather was also an entrepreneur, I'm like, maybe that stuff skips a generation, you know what I mean? Because the kid is looking like, dude, this is way too much work, I don't want to do it but then the grandkid's like, dude, that looks awesome. Grandpa was a G, I want to do that.

Harman Singh Narula (00:07:10):
It's so funny you say that, because I think it's. My view is, I feel like people. So my family is pretty deep, deeply in kind of healthcare medicine. Which is interesting, because my grandfathers were not, one of my grandfathers was a very strong advocate for his children and or his children to marry into families with this medicine or kind of doctor focused. And he did not want people to be entrepreneurs. And then I talked to my nuclear family, you know, my brother and stuff. And they're like, yeah, I don't know if I really recommend people go down the medical pathway. And when they talk to me, I'm like, I don't know, man. Being an entrepreneur is like, there's a lot of ups and downs in that. You know, I don't know if I'm like a hundred percent advocating and so, it's like everyone almost is deterring people for, or not deterring. But, you know, kind of the grass is kind of greener in other professions. You know what I mean?

Pablo Srugo (00:08:01):
Yes, exactly. So you're tying all this together, deciding to leave Bain. Tell me a bit more about that decision point.

Harman Singh Narula (00:08:10):
Yeah, so I actually, it's interesting. I actually think management consulting is a really great place for entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed my time there. I think it's because you get to see a lot of different businesses and a lot of different verticals very quickly. And this is true of other professions as well, right? But I did a bunch of work on the private equity side when I was there, and that's like sprinting. You're like a few weeks on, you might look at the fertilizer industry, right? And you become an expert in that, or as close to an expert in that very fast and you start to understand the different parts of the value chain and who are the different players. And then the week after that, you're in medical devices. And so for an entrepreneur, it's just this firehose of ideas that are coming to mind. You're like, oh wow, this seems like a gap over here. This seems like a big gap over here. I actually really enjoyed it and I think it helps you think about how to break a problem and so forth. But for me, I also knew going into it that it wasn't the long term career path that I wanted. There was a certain skill sets and being surrounded by what I think was really hardworking, kind of ambitious people was the environment I wanted to be in. But I knew I didn't want to do that long term. So I was waiting for the right moment for me to kind of take the leap and kind of go down the entrepreneurial pathway.

Pablo Srugo (00:09:31):
What was that moment?

Harman Singh Narula (00:09:32):
It was a bit serendipitous, to be honest, right? So I had this background in hospitality, a space that I knew really well. One of my really close friends, I was living in San Francisco at the time. One of my really close friends who I'd grown up with, he had been out in San Francisco for a while and he was kind of a serial entrepreneur. But right before Canary, he was working in the hospitality technology space and so, he was getting deep into this space as well, learning about it. And so we were living in SF at the time, and we would chat a lot about hospitality, and technology. And things that I had known for my career, and I had seen and things that he was seeing. And that was where things kind of started to bubble together. And I think that's one of the really important parts of being an entrepreneur or running a startup is, that co-founder relationship as well. And so, him and I were naturally talking a lot about Hotel Tech. You know, I had been at Bain a couple years at that point and it felt like the right moment. It was the right person to kind of work with on this and it felt like the right moment for us to kind of take the leap together again, and so that was it.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:34):
Did you leave to work with him or did you leave because you guys had an idea that you wanted to pursue?

Harman Singh Narula (00:10:39):
That's a great question. I'd say it was a combination at that point, right? We both probably see ourselves as kind of pragmatic entrepreneurs, right? And so, you know, we have this broader thesis. And then there was a bite sized part of that that we were like, we can attack this. And now seems like the time. And for me, I felt I had kind of established myself in my career. To the point where I felt like if I was going to take the leap, I had to do it now. I didn't have children, I had been recently married and so I was like, OK, now is a good moment for me to actually take another risk and try it. And if it doesn't, you know, you can kind of go back to the world of kind of like professional services. Hopefully, and so forth. So I think it was a combination of we thought that we had the right working relationship and it was something that we both saw as attackable. A bite-sized problem that we could start on.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:30):
What was that first attackable problem?

Harman Singh Narula (00:11:32):
We had this overarching thesis around technology and hospitality becoming much more guest facing. We thought that, you know, the as many verticals and it had been a little bit slower to adopt technology that was focused on the end consumer. So in the hotel case the end, you know, the guest it was more about just operating the property of the hotel and so, we thought that was where the kind of puck was going to go in the industry. But at the same time, as I mentioned, we were kind of these pragmatic entrepreneurs. We felt as though we had to earn our right to sell into the industry and prove that we could bring something that was going to help hoteliers, run more efficiently or drive their bottom line and so, rather than going in and saying like, hey, we have this brand new full system or platform. That either is going to replace something core that you're on or going to sit on top. It was, let's find a specific workflow that we can solve for you and kind of earn our right to be entrepreneurs in this vertical. And so we started on this thing that's called digital authorizations. Basically what this thing was is and it still is the largest player in that space is, we got rid of pieces of paper called credit card authorization forms. And so you may have done this at some point in your life or maybe even for a hotel. It's very common. Basically what it is, is take any booking at a hotel. Let's call it non-traditional booking. So outside of you go on an OTA, Hotels.com, or maybe you're a loyal. Maybe you go on Bonvoy or Westin.com and you book your rooms. Everything outside of that is kind of non-traditional for a hotel, right? So let's say you're hosting an event at a hotel and you're like, hey, I need, x number of room nights, I need some F&B, I need some banquet space, etc, etc, right? And so there's going to be a sales manager that's going to send you a proposal. You're going to flip through all the options, they're going to send you a contract that you're going to eventually need to sign and then they're going to want to collect a deposit in some form of payment. And pretty much every hotel in the world used to send out these pieces of paper called credit card authorization forms. And other businesses do this too. And you'll print this out, you'll fill in your credit card information, you'll scan it back, you'll send it back to the hotel. When we were first starting the business, I think the stat was seventy-five percent of hotels were saying to fax it back to them. Which at that point, it was already a little bit crazy. Where am I supposed to get a fax machine? But, so hotels get this form, they print it out, they hole punch it, and they put it in a binder. That was the process for these credit card auth forms and so we were like, hey, this is not a great experience for the guest. This is not a great experience for the staff member either. This doesn't seem the safest process either and so that was the first thing that we went after. Where we were like, we can solve that. We can make this better for hoteliers.

Pablo Srugo (00:14:18):
How did you uncover that specific problem?

Harman Singh Narula (00:14:21):
Yeah so I think this is where also for vertical software businesses, having the domain knowledge is pretty helpful. I think of this problem as an activated hair on fire problem, right? Whereas we would call people and talk to them about this. And it wasn't these guys are going, you know, folks are going online and searching for a solution to solve this. But when we surfaced this thing to them, it would be like, it was that thing in the back of their head. They're like, yeah, I've got that binder. Probably shouldn't have that binder full of people's credit card numbers and so it was activating a little bit of the problem. And it was because we were deep in the industry actually being able to see these minute workflows, and issues that the hoteliers were dealing with. And I also gave one use case, another very common use case that a lot of folks had seen and you may have experienced is when you work with a third party. Like a travel agent or something, and when they're sharing your payment information with a hotel. They would use these forms as well.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:18):
Got a few questions. Maybe the first one, you uncover this workflow. Because you worked in the space, your co-founder had worked in the space but did you make a list of all the potential things you could solve? And this was the one that rose to the top. I'm sure it wasn't the only thing that you noticed. So how do you land on this thing as the first thing?

Harman Singh Narula (00:15:33):
No, I wish it was that well thought out initially. That would make for a really good story. 

Pablo Srugo (00:15:39):
It rarely is. It rarely is.

Harman Singh Narula (00:15:41):
Here's all the ones and we ranked them all, and we got to this one. Although I'm sure we would have gotten stuck in some paralysis by analysis at that point if we had done that to be frank. But no, I think it was, you know, there was constantly things that me and my co-founder were just talking about in hotel tech, right? Because it was an industry that I had spent a lot of time in and he was seeing things firsthand as well. And he'd be like, hey, have you seen this? Have you heard this? What did you think about this? And then, I'd be like, oh yeah, when I was at Starwood, XYZ would come up a bunch, right? Like, oh, we had actually tried doing this. You know, mobile keys and then we'd call hoteliers. And he had developed some relationship with hoteliers too. And he would talk to them and be like, hey, what are you? What's going on with this? And so it was more so there was a few other things that we had talked about, but this was kind of one of the ones that had come up. And then we had both just started to talk to more people and we're like, yeah, this is a thing. This is a, this is a problem that we can solve.

Pablo Srugo (00:16:36):
Tell me more about this, you mentioned this kind of inactive hair on fire problem. It's challenging because the kind of standard mode of operation is, if I ask you what your big problems are, you need to have. There's going to be two kinds. Maybe the ones that are so big, they don't show up that often but they're massive and then the ones that just showed up in the last 30 minutes or something that, right? They're very recurrent and those are usually the things you want to go after because people already know that these are big problems. Maybe they're, you said, already searching about them. All these sort of things and the challenge is when you have to say to them, hey, is this a problem? And only then are they like, oh, right, that thing, yes, it's a problem. The worry is, do you fall into nice to have territory? Do you fall into second priority territory? Because there must be something else they're thinking about if that's not the thing they're thinking about. In your case, you built a big business around this. So, maybe tell me a bit more about why, even though you had to remind them of it. It was still, you know, hair farm problem and just give me the nuance around it. So it's clear how that worked out.

Harman Singh Narula (00:17:35):
Yeah so there's a lot that gets talked about and I know there's conventional wisdom a lot of folks talk about. The investor community says it a lot around this painkiller versus vitamin. Which is basically,  what I think you're alluding to as well and I apologize, you didn't use the conventional. 

Pablo Srugo (00:17:50):
I didn't use it, man. I can't be blamed. 

Harman Singh Narula (00:17:52):
Are you building a painkiller or are you building a budget? 

Pablo Srugo (00:17:56):
Use that lingo.

Harman Singh Narula (00:17:58):
Intuitively, that made a lot of sense. I was like, yeah, you want to be building a painkiller, right? Because they want to be pulling the problem out of you, right? I think over time and you know obviously I'm biased given the business that we've built. That was just one, our first solution, you know obviously we've built a bunch of other stuff now too. But I think the sweetest spot to be in is actually potentially something that could be viewed as a vitamin but it's actually turning into a painkiller, right? It's that's where the puck is going. This is becoming kind of mission critical for them, right? And so activated hair on fire is another way that I often talk about it or I say a lot. It's basically, yeah, I agree. There is this education piece of you have to go and show folks that or surface it. But it's not that you're surfacing that, hey, this is a problem. It's basically, you know, one of those things that people know is a problem. It's just not, as you mentioned, priority number one. Because they don't know how to solve it, right? There's a lot of things where people, if they knew the implications of something that they were doing. They might or, of a process that they might have in place, whether it's compliance or fraud or whatever it might be. They might be like, oh, no, this is actually here on fire. I need to solve this right away. But then they go a step further and they're kind of like, there is no solve. It kind of falls to the wayside, right? Because they're kind of like, I don't know, even if this is my number one priority there's no solution for this. So, what am I supposed to do, right? And most folks, frankly, I think kind of stop there and so this activated hair on fire. That's where the puck is going, or the vitamin turning into a painkiller type of mentality is, hey, if you unearth this problem that they have. They already had it, right? You're not creating the problem. It has to be there, right? Otherwise, you're not going to find any product market fit. Yeah, if you surface that and then you uncover it and, then you help them recognize that it's actually really important or really high priority. That's the sweetest spot to be in, right? Because there's probably not a lot of people paying attention to it. You're probably not really concerned about anybody else in the space and now you've educated people. And very quickly within a vertical, that's going to spread. As you know, because these folks all know each other. Especially within a vertical hospitality, you talk to ten hotels in a city, they all have worked at or know people at all the other hotels and very quickly you're going to get, oh yeah, I talked to these guys, they fixed this thing. You have one of those binders too, right? And so they're going to help you activate the problem to everyone else in the vertical.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:32):
Yeah, I think I could see how that would make sense and I think a big piece of it is. Because a lot of it is accepted as status quo and the industry might just be like, well, it's just the way it works. And so it's just not a thing you think about. The question is, once you show them a new world, a new possibility. Do their eyes light up and they kind of say, oh, my God, I didn't even think I just kind of wasn't thinking about this. But now you show me this, it's I have to have this or is it like, oh, yeah, that's kind of cool. But it's just, you know, there's so many other things going on. Yeah, I could see how this would be helpful but, right? Which of those two. So I'm curious when you started calling customers in the early days of the first five, the first ten. What kind of responses did you get?

Harman Singh Narula (00:21:07):
Yeah, I would love to say that, and I, you know, and this is for the entrepreneurs that are in the earliest stages. I think there's a bunch of conventionalism where it's like you kind of want to have, like, very clear, immediate, everyone, you call ten people and all ten of their eyes lit up and they were like, absolutely, you need to solve this.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:24):
That's the movie version. Yes, exactly.

Harman Singh Narula (00:21:27):
It was, it was mixed. Like most things in life, right? It was mixed. We had some people that were, right from the get go, they were like, oh yeah, you can fix that. And they tell us wild stories actually. I remember so many times some hotelier would be like, oh yeah, I had somebody come into the hotel, they grabbed the binder from behind the front desk and ran out the door, and we probably had hundreds of forms in that binder. And I remember hearing that story, it was a random hotelier that we had called that we were just, you know, we were pitching, and I remember hearing that story and I'm like, oh, that sounds really bad.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:56):
That's not good.

Harman Singh Narula (00:21:58):
Whereas other people were like, you're right. I've got a million things going on. It's not the easiest thing to operate a hotel. Yes, I do want to solve that. I might not be the right person, but call me back in, you know, whatever, three, six months, and then maybe I'll solve it. So, you know, I would love to say that it was every person that we called immediately was like this, but there were more people that were seeing it as an immediate problem and something quick and simple to solve than not.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:24):
You know, and to be clear, I don't, I don't know that it has to be everyone. I mean, you're going to have your kind of life cycle of adoption, early adopters, late majority, all this stuff always. The key question is, I'd actually almost rather have, I'm going to make it up, three people that say, oh my God, I need to have this yesterday, and seven people that don't care, than have ten out of ten people say, wow, this is a really great idea. You know, and just not have that, that visceral, because that's hard to move. But you have some people that see it today. You can kind of deal with that and hope that it'll spread to everybody later.

Harman Singh Narula (00:22:50):
Yeah, I think that is spot on. And that is something that we went through. We went through Y Combinator early in our company's history and also something that, you know, they would talk about. You have to have these, quote unquote, power users early, these people that really care, that you are eliciting that reaction when you're talking about the problem that you're solving. And so I think that's exactly right. That's spot on. And that's probably also the more realistic scenario, right? It's just never going to be a hundred percent type thing. But that's kind of what we were experiencing early with authorizations.

Pablo Srugo (00:23:25):
And when you called these first customers, were you calling, like, oh, I have an idea, I want advice, or were you calling like a sales call? How did you structure it?

Harman Singh Narula (00:23:33):
We tried all sorts of things. We were really refining what was the best mechanism to get in front of people. There was the advice angle. We tried that via the hotel school I had gone to. So there were a lot of people that were in the hotel industry. So it was all like, hey, I'm a student reaching out to learn, but also maybe pitch you a little bit once we can chat. Then there was the straight. We truly built the first part of our business on outbound. And so we would do the, you know, $100 a day, and we would just pitch it. We tried actually in-person sales. We tried walking into hotels and seeing if that worked and then pitching them or asking for advice. So we kind of tried it all in the early days to try to figure out, you know, A, get a bunch of feedback. But also figure out, refine the pitch in terms of how to talk about it.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:20):
Tell me maybe about your first customer. Who was it? How did you land them? What was the MVP at that stage that you sold them?

Harman Singh Narula (00:24:26):
Oh yeah, I will always remember. Our first customer was an individual, independent hotel in the Pacific Northwest. And it was a cold call. There was no one we knew. We cold called the hotel. You know, we had kind of refined the pitch at that point, and we knew how to kind of get past gatekeepers, talk to the GM, explain what we were doing, and explain what problem we solved. He wanted to see a demo, booked a demo, walked him through it, and he bought. He bought and he signed the contract.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:57):
What was the price more or less?

Harman Singh Narula (00:24:58):
Oh, it was the first solution that we launched, you know, that was lower ACV. It was a little more than $1,200 a year or something like that. And so the pricing has changed over time. But yeah. And so he signed. And remember, we sent out the DocuSign, and I actually didn't catch it. We were expecting him to sign one day, and, you know, me and my co-founder were together, and we're like, oh yeah, he said he was going to sign today, and it just didn't happen. And we're like, oh man. And then two days later, it was like it had gone to my spam. He had signed that day, and I was like, oh, that was so anticlimactic. We were expecting to get our first signature today.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:37):
And how long into starting the company was this, more or less?

Harman Singh Narula (00:25:40):
Our first customer, we had first started, my co-founder and I had left our jobs, and we had kind of worked, we kind of puttered around, trying to build a product and talk to people. And that first customer probably signed, you know, six to eight months into first starting to putter around on the idea, I'd say. Maybe a little bit shorter. And then we really officially launched probably right around there, right after that.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:06):
This is, we're talking like late 2018?

Harman Singh Narula (00:26:09):
Yeah, or a little bit earlier maybe. Because we had left our jobs probably later in 2017, and then we truly launched the business in like, 2018-ish. And so that was when the first hotel came on.

Pablo Srugo (00:26:23):
If you had to guess more or less, how many sales calls had you made before you got to this one?

Harman Singh Narula (00:26:27):
Oh, I don't know the number. It was a lot. I guess, also, what do you count? These weren't sales qualified leads, right? We were just making eighty to one hundred dials a day to try to book demos with people. And so how many demos had we done prior to him signing? It probably wasn't super high, to be honest with you. Once we'd actually been able to demo the product, right? We were pitching, I remember I was pitching the product with slides, just like, you know, PowerPoint, before the product, before we had the product to show to anyone. And so this guy, the guy that we sold the product to the first time, he was probably one of the first demos we had done where we could actually show them the demo.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:06):
I see.

Harman Singh Narula (00:27:07):
I see, walk through the product and so forth. And so I'd say it was probably in the first, you know, call it few dozen. So it was the first fifteen to twenty folks that we had shown the actual product to, we got to actually buy it. But there were a bunch of folks before that that I was just showing pictures on a slide, right? Designs. Those were not closing.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:26):
How did the product work back then? What did it do?

Harman Singh Narula (00:27:29):
It's really straightforward, that workflow, you know, exactly as I described it to you, where the hotel sends out these PDFs, and the guest prints it out, they fill it in, they scan it, they send it back to the hotel, the hotel prints it out, puts it in a binder. We basically digitize that workflow, and we mimicked their workflow but made it digital. They would trigger an electronic form to the person. Instead, the guest would click it, fill in their information, and send it back. The hotel had a dashboard, and they would then be able to capture payment information on that dashboard and so forth. It was pretty much their paperwork flow, but digitized. Really straightforward.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:08):
We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. And then you mentioned getting into YC, when was that?

Harman Singh Narula (00:28:21):
That was summer of 2018. We were summer 2018 batch.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:26):
Tell me a bit about that process. There's a lot of lore around YC, and things have changed obviously in the last seven years, but what was YC like back then? What was the process of getting in, and then what was it like being at YC?

Harman Singh Narula (00:28:41):
Yeah, I mean, we had a great experience with YC. So we went through, you know, the application process where you submit your application. I think we actually submitted our application a little bit late because we weren't planning on applying to YC. And then, you know, we probably saw a tweet or something like that, or it was like, oh, YC application, and we were like, oh, we should do that. And we were kind of like, we have to talk about the broader vision.

Pablo Srugo (00:29:03):
Well, that's what I was going to say. Because YC is known to care about massive markets, right?

Harman Singh Narula (00:29:08):
So we had this broader vision of what we wanted to do, but we were just working on that first workflow, right? And at the same time, we hadn't fleshed out, you know, we had a blurry vision of when we were going to launch the next product, when we were going to expand, what that was going to look like. It was so early that, you know, it was a little bit of, okay, we need to first prove that we can find product market fit on the first solution, we can scale that, and then we can expand from there into this broader thesis that we had. And so as a part of the YC application, we had to flesh that out, and it felt a little bit unnatural because we were kind of like, we don't know exactly when we're going to do this, but this is what we want to do. This is the opportunity that we see in the market. And so we ended up applying a little bit late. We talked to other YC founders that we could meet in the community. We were both in San Francisco at the time, went through the interview process, and then ended up getting in, which was really cool.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:03):
Was it easy to raise your Seed round after going through it?

Harman Singh Narula (00:30:06):
Yeah, so we had a decent amount of traction at that point. So we entered YC after we had kind of started selling the product. We had a product that we could actually demo. So we were, you know, there's a spectrum of different types of founders, the kind of businesses that end up going through YC. We were on the side that actually had a product at that point, and we had started selling it. And so we had started to see that people wanted to buy this, right? And so it wasn't like we were looking for a problem at that point, and so forth. And so when we came out of YC, I think that really obviously worked in our favor as well. We were trying to build a vertical software business. We had domain expertise, and then we had traction.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:44):
What kind of traction? What was MRR more or less?

Harman Singh Narula (00:30:47):
Yeah, it was early. So, we were probably, it was the first kind of six, eight months of the business. We were probably sub $50k of MRR at that point.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:57):
MRR or ARR?

Harman Singh Narula (00:30:58):
MRR.

Pablo Srugo (00:30:59):
$750k?

Harman Singh Narula (00:31:00):
No, I said sub $50k of MRR.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:08):
Okay, so probably half a million a year sort of thing, got you.

Harman Singh Narula (00:31:10):
Yeah, probably around there. And we were accelerating from there. So, was it easy to raise a seed round? I don't know if raising capital is ever, quote unquote, easy, if anyone wants to say it's easy. We raised it pretty quickly. I think we raised our seed round within weeks of exiting YC. We probably started raising it on or before demo day. I've heard now from founders that this has changed drastically. It's like people get into YC and they raise their immediate seed fund before they even start YC now, apparently.

Pablo Srugo (00:31:42):
Yeah, because now it's a stigma. It's like if you made demo day, you haven't raised, what's wrong with you. It's kind of crazy, man.

Harman Singh Narula (00:31:47):
Yeah, back then it was, you know, I think that was the year they actually, you know, YC had also experimented with this thing. You might remember this thing called Investor Day, which was basically speed dating with investors the day after demo day. And so most companies, or, you know, I don't know the stats, but I think a lot of the companies and a lot of our batch mates were raising right around demo day. And so that's when we raised our seed round.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:10):
Let's go deep, if you don't mind, on go to market. This is just an area that's always interesting to founders, especially the early stage go to market. You're sitting at, call it, half a million ARR. You probably want to 10X from there in some amount of time. Certainly, you want to make it to a million, three. I don't know what kind of trajectory you want to paint for yourself, but you've got to add the next few millions in ARR. And you've raised the seed round, so you have some capital. What was the predominant go to market motion you were running? What were some of the tactics that you used that really worked for you?

Harman Singh Narula (00:32:35):
Yeah, so our DNA at Canary still focuses on this. We were outbound driven and it's interesting, you know, we take a lot of pride in this, and I can talk about it. We were the original SDRs at Canary, you know, I was making one hundred dials a day trying to book demos.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:51):
Until when? Actually that's really interesting.

Harman Singh Narula (00:32:53):
Oh man. I continued to do that for quite some time even after we brought on, you know, then we started hiring. At the time we didn't know what an SDR was. I didn't know what that acronym was. I remember I went to first SASTR, and I was like, what's an SDR? And I was like, oh, we remember. I think, you know, my co-founder and I went on one of those sites that helped you find gig economy folks. I'm blanking on the name. It was super popular at the time.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:22):
Upwork, Fiverr, like one of these things?

Harman Singh Narula (00:33:24):
Yeah, it wasn't one of those, but anyway, we went on that, and I think we really posted a job for cold caller. That was the title of the role that we put up.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:32):
Right.

Harman Singh Narula (00:33:33):
And we found someone, and even after they started, I was still making dials and taking demos. I made dials and took demos at least through the first couple of years.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:46):
Until you had how much ARR? More or less? Like, $5 million?

Harman Singh Narula (00:33:51):
It was probably a little bit earlier than $5 million. I stopped. But interestingly, I still, quote unquote, make cold calls. The thing about it is the way we view it also is that, you know, we've launched a bunch of products. We've expanded our surface area pretty rapidly. Kind of the playbook for vertical software businesses and additional solutions. And basically, every time we're going through a product launch, which is pretty often, I get back to the cold calling. The first, I don't know how many products we launched. So even after we had, you know, eclipsed $3, $5 million, $10 million in ARR, each time, every time we're launching products, basically me and my co-founder are getting back and either cold calling. Now we have this privilege of serving more than twenty thousand hoteliers, and we have these relationships with the big brands and so forth. So it's a little bit different of a cold call now. And it's a much warmer call if you're calling, obviously, your customers. But even after our first solution, the first few solutions, we would get back on cold call. And that's how we learned to refine the pitch. It was also the advice that I give to entrepreneurs all the time, where it's like, even if you're not a salesperson, you can't just say, hey, I'm going to hire a person that's going to book meetings for me. You have to know that pitch really well. You have to test a lot of things on those cold calls. Today, I talk about it at Canary a lot. SDRs, or sales development representatives, for folks that don't know, they are the tip of the spear at Canary still. Now, inbound has become a large part of our business also because we've built this brand over time and so forth.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:19):
Their job is what? Call a hotel, get a book demo, pass it on to the AE sort of thing?

Harman Singh Narula (00:35:23):
Yeah, yeah. It's still cold call heavy. And so we built the first part of our business, as you asked, we were outbound heavy. We would call hotels, dials. And so one of the cool things, or one of the best things, and for anyone that's ever cold called or, you know, knocked on doors and so forth, they'll appreciate this. We had this huge unfair advantage. If you call a hotel, they have to pick up the phone, which for somebody cold calling is amazing. It's not like you have to make $20 before you get to even take a shot at the pitch, right? They pick up the phone every time you dial, for the most part.

Pablo Srugo (00:36:02):
I remember, I'm not a salesperson, but, you know, a gym track, there was a phase where I was doing cold calls. And yeah, when you have the dollar going and you're like, all right, I'm ready. You know what? I'm ready. Let's get, let's get. And then you get voicemail, like, oh my God. And then you just need to do it again. You get voicemail, like a homie. Then you're like, you know what? I'm gonna take a break. Okay, it's just too much, you know? And so when you actually get reps, it's just such a different feeling.

Harman Singh Narula (00:36:22):
Yeah. And so we got a lot of reps. And it's different, right? Because you have to figure out how do you get past the gatekeeper, the person I'm talking to, the decision maker, etc. But generally speaking, we were pretty outbound heavy. We were dialing. Hotels pick up the phone, so we were able to book these meetings and get in front. But even when we weren't booking a meeting or having extensive conversation on a cold call, we were learning a lot. Every cold call we made, we learned, and this is why I think it's so ingrained in our DNA. When people onboard at Canary, by the way, still to this day, one of the first things that we talk about are our values and our culture. One of the core things that me and my co-founder talk to everyone about is that we are a phone call first company. Yes, with customers, yes, with partners, with team members, pick up the phone. We are in the hospitality industry. It's so easy to hide behind email, and don't get me wrong, email is a great channel as well, but you learn so much from picking up the phone, especially in those early days. And so we built the initial business. That was the predominant go to market strategy, and we got that down to a science. I think also B2B SaaS sales traditionally were pretty scientific, frankly. And we kept refining that funnel and so forth. Outbound was the predominant mechanism. One interesting part about this that I also bring up, that I think some of your listeners will appreciate given it's kind of the early days, is that back then I think a lot of investors also really only wanted to find businesses where it was a hair on fire type problem. If it was inbound, you were driving a lot of your business by inbound.

Pablo Srugo (00:37:57):
Pilgi was like Pete Cool around that time, yeah.

Harman Singh Narula (00:38:00):
You wanted inbound because that really proved that this was a big need. Our perspective actually, and this was explicit, we used to talk about this when we fundraised as well, our perspective was, look, if we can nail outbound and we can do that in a scaled way, in a way where the unit economics are positive on that, that's the harder thing to do. And so when we layer on inbound here, the CAC is going to go down. The CAC for inbound is going to be lower for us. And so we really wanted to prove that we could do outbound and do it well. And it also, again, is a little bit of ignorance is bliss. It's what we thought was the right way to sell B2B SaaS. That was what we were supposed to do.

Pablo Srugo (00:38:45):
It's a good point on inbound now, but I was just thinking about this today. I mean, typically I would argue that inbound is glorified because it's supposed to have this kind of meaning that, okay, people really want your stuff, like you were saying, but there are pros and cons to both. You really have to match that to the product you're selling. The thing about inbound is sometimes it's really hard to scale. You might have a certain amount of inbound and you're like, wow, this is great. Look at all this. Then a lot of people say, and we're spending nothing. So imagine when we spend, and then you realize, oh my God, I can't lift this. It just kind of is what it is, and you just don't have that control. Outbound, by its very nature, you certainly can control. You can add more AEs, you can add more SDRs. If your market's big enough and your deals don't dry up, you really can flip that dollar a lot. Obviously, for most businesses, the best thing is when you reach this combination and you have some inbound and some outbound and they kind of complement each other. But yeah, I definitely, and I think it was more back then, product-led growth with Slack and Dropbox and stuff was so idealized that everybody wanted to be the next one of those because it just seemed to grow like wildfire. There's something specific about those products where inbound works so well with them and they have ingrained virality. I think, in general, outbound is still a little looked down upon when it really shouldn't be, because if you nail it, like you said, it can be an amazing, amazing channel.

Harman Singh Narula (00:39:59):
Yeah, and it's also one of those things where you can really refine the funnel, right? And, you know, for people that are analytical, they'll be like, okay, making this many dials. I remember it was all I ever wanted to talk about was, what's our efficiency?

Pablo Srugo (00:40:13):
Do you remember your funnel more or less?

Harman Singh Narula (00:40:15):
You know, man, you're really testing some of the old.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:18):
I know, man. I know, man. But this is where the rubber hits the road, right?

Harman Singh Narula (00:40:21):
Yeah, I mean, we can work through it. We were probably making $80 to $100 dials a day. Out of that, we were probably booking somewhere around four to six meetings or something like that. Then you'd see about seventy-five percent of those folks were showing up. In the earliest days, when founders are selling and so forth, the close rate was super strong. It was more than fifty percent, seventy-five percent.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:49):
Demo to close over fifty percent.

Harman Singh Narula (00:40:51):
Yeah, demo to close, right? When we got demo to close, our close rate was great at that point.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:55):
That's huge.

Harman Singh Narula (00:40:55):
Now, I mean, we still do this, right? When we go through our planning process, we still model bottoms up. Right now, the show-up rate we see is closer—it's at scale. So about fifty percent of people actually show up on that initial call. We do multi-solution selling and so forth. In the early days, it was pretty wild. It was great.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:14):
But demo to close, it's interesting that you brought that up. I find that as a leading indicator of product market fit, there are better lagging indicators, like retention, word of mouth, and PSLE sort of things. But as a leading indicator, demo to close is a great one because, yes, it speaks to your salesmanship. It also speaks to the fact that if you can get in front of a qualified customer and show them the thing, most of them want it. Okay, that's a good signal.

Harman Singh Narula (00:41:35):
Absolutely. Yeah. And so we kept refining that and we started hiring SDRs. The other part about Amaranth that was really interesting was that it was a very clear roadmap. You know, when, okay, we're at capacity. We can't make more than this many dials in a day. We've got this many demos coming in. I can't take more than this many demos. We need to go hire AEs or other people to take demos. It also laid out the pathway for us in terms of how we had to scale. You knew exactly what the next role was, almost, in terms of where you were breaking in your go to market funnel.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:10):
How did growth go in those first few years? How fast did you hit a million? What was the path like from one to ten?

Harman Singh Narula (00:42:16):
We grew really rapidly and we've continued to grow pretty quickly. Knock on wood, you know, I think we've done a good job of solving problems that the hoteliers need and expanding our surface area. We've 2-3x'ed every year since we started the business. So we've continued to go down that pathway. We hit a million dollars of ARR within, it probably took us about the first year, probably about twelve months, maybe a little bit more, to get to a million dollars of ARR. That's the vaunted number. I do remember it's that vaunted number in the early days: $83,333.33.

Pablo Srugo (00:42:56):
Yes, yes, of MRR. That's right.

Harman Singh Narula (00:42:58):
Every, it's like all you think about when you get to this number. I remember talking to our YC batch mates about that too. I was actually just joking about it with one of our friends the other day.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:08):
All the ones are always milestones, man. One, ten, a hundred, they're huge milestones.

Harman Singh Narula (00:43:13):
Yeah, I mean, we had COVID in between. So that was an interesting time running a hospitality technology company.

Pablo Srugo (00:43:18):
But it was kind of zero to one in a year and then, you know, to three to nine, two to three years later, sort of thing.

Harman Singh Narula (00:43:24):
Yeah, and then we've had some acceleration there. We had some additional acceleration after COVID, like a lot of vertical software businesses. You know, there was obviously that time period where everyone kind of paused and wondered, is the world ending? What's going to happen here?

Pablo Srugo (00:43:37):
Yeah, I was going to ask, like, because I saw it, like, was that near death for you guys, the COVID phase?

Harman Singh Narula (00:43:42):
You know, it's interesting looking back. We didn't have a lot of churn, which was great, right? So we felt really good about that. It was durable. We had just started to kind of launch the additional solutions, now what we call the Guest Management System or Guest Experience System. And so that was good. The part of COVID that was really stressful for us, interestingly, was actually a cash flow piece. And so it's a funny story. Hospitality is a pretty old industry, and the predominant way that people pay in our industry, or used to pay in our industry, was via check. And we were getting, we were scaling because of high-volume transactional selling, so it was like thousands of hotels paying us a smaller amount. And so we had these checks always coming in. That's a whole funny story in the end.

Pablo Srugo (00:44:30):
The problem is on its own.

Harman Singh Narula (00:44:31):
Yeah. Yeah, so we were growing fast, right? And people paid us upfront for the year, right? We were starting to burn money, but we had enough checks coming in; we'd deposit them, and that was good working capital for us also to fund the business. And we hadn't invested in a finance function or kind of rev ops or, like, which people are paying on time, which are not, let's go chase all these people that haven't sent us their check yet. Because we had new customers coming in, and enough of them were just paying their check immediately, and some portion were paying digitally. And so that was kind of finding the business when COVID hit. I don't know if you remember, the first part of COVID before now, looking back, we all remember there were lockdowns, okay, cool. But when COVID first started, there was this rumor around lockdowns. Now we get what that means, but when it first started, we were like, what is a lockdown going to mean? Like, you can't leave your house, no services are going to be active. And I remember there was this moment where I was talking to my wife or maybe my girlfriend, and I was like, oh, there's a lockdown that's going to happen? That means people can't send us checks. That means we can't deposit the checks. That means we're not going to have cash. Oh my God, what are we going to do? And there was this rumor that the lockdown was going to happen next week. I remember it became this frantic thing where we had hundreds of thousands of dollars that were outstanding that people had to pay, and we were all calling hotels. I remember my wife was a part of this too. Everyone was working from home, and we were calling our hotels to be like, hey, we need you to send that check today, you need to send the check tomorrow, so we had the cash to fund the business and pay team members and so forth. I remember that being a really frantic moment during COVID. And then, obviously, a couple of months later, the business was booming; we were growing really fast. But that was a moment during COVID that will be burned into memory for me, kind of pacing around our apartment, trying to think about what we were going to do about all these checks, how we were going to get them.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:36):
And then one thing I wanted to touch on, at least quickly, because PromoFitch, we're not going to go through the whole journey, but something that you did is, I think there's a lot of analogies. There are a lot of founders who want to do this, which is you wedge in with a very simple product that frankly can't scale to venture-scale type opportunity. And you use that to build other products that ultimately drive expansion revenue, and all this stuff is a big opportunity. That's what you've done. What does Canary Technologies look like today, with that little wedge of literally just digitizing credit card forms? What did you end up building?

Harman Singh Narula (00:47:06):
Yeah, so Vertical Software Business, we are the category leader in a space that we kind of, you think of as a guest management system. And the way to think about that is, it's the interaction layer between a hotel and a guest, right? So any digital touchpoint that the hotel has with the guests. So think things like mobile check-in, messaging when you're on property, ordering when you're on property, mobile key, digital tipping, which has been really big in North America, upselling and so it's any digital touchpoint that the hotel has with the guests. And so that's the space that we're pretty widely considered an enterprise category leader in. And then we're now also viewed as the leader in vertical specific AI, so hospitality AI applications. We have what you'd consider native AI applications, and in all the rest of our guest management solutions, there's AI embedded in all of them. And so that's the space that we are the leader in now for hospitality.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:00):
We had a company called Olo on the show. Would you say, is that a good analogy, what they are to restaurants, you are for hospitality, or a little different?

Harman Singh Narula (00:48:07):
Yeah, something like that. A little bit different, but yeah, they also, I think, did a lot of the guest-facing layer in the restaurant industry. There are some pieces of that that I think are a good analogy, and other pieces that are a bit different.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:19):
Awesome. Well, let's end it there, and then let me ask the last three questions we always end on. The first one is, when did you feel like you'd found true product market fit?

Harman Singh Narula (00:48:27):
I think founders generally are probably skeptical. I'm sure you've heard this. I imagine founders are pretty paranoid about product market fit too. And there's almost this strategic motivation that founders have where it's like even if you have it and you're like, I probably have it, you think, no, we might not have it. You're kind of creating these problems or facades. So we probably had it earlier, but I'd say a moment for me that I was like, this is real, was when we went to one of our first big brand conferences. We had started developing this relationship with the big hotel brands, and we became preferred solutions for them and so forth. It's probably in that first year after having launched, or a little after, when we went to one of these big brand conferences for one of these large hoteliers. We really invested; we were like, oh, we're going to invest in this thing. So we got a big booth and basically the whole company, because we were maybe ten people at the time. And so we all showed up. I remember this distinctly because it was actually on my birthday. I remember the pump-up talk with the team that morning was like, if we sign twenty hotels or ten contracts, or whatever the number was, it was a pretty small number, that'll be phenomenal. I'll feel really great. That'll be a really cool birthday gift, and that'll be an awesome day for us. We ended up signing more than two hundred hotels in eight hours.

Pablo Srugo (00:49:51):
Wow.

Harman Singh Narula (00:49:52):
It was crazy. And I remember my co-founder and I looked at each other and we're just like, whoa, this has struck a chord. This is real. And so I guess that for me was one of the moments of, yeah, we really liked that first solution. And, you know, as I mentioned, time and time again, with each solution we launch, we kind of think of that as we find product market fit. That's our DNA. And so this is the cycle that we go through: we find product market fit, we scale it, and we launch more solutions. But that was probably the first moment that I was like, this is real.

Pablo Srugo (00:50:20):
And then my last question, I mean, now you're a late stage company, you're probably gunning towards $100 thousand ARR milestone, but for those that are still in the early stages, trying to get to maybe $1 million or $2 million ARR, trying to find product market fit, what would be your top piece of advice for them?

Harman Singh Narula (00:50:35):
The ups and downs in the early days, they shape you. Those wins, those losses, they actually shape you. And I think general advice out there, which I probably at a high level agree with, is kind of this: you have to stay stable and not let yourself get too high, too low, which intuitively makes sense. But the flip side is, you kind of have to embrace that journey, right? It's okay to lean in, lean into the highs and the lows. That is going to shape how you build a business. And it's going to shape you as an entrepreneur, as a personal growth story. I don't think we're fantastic at this. You should celebrate those wins, celebrate the highs, lean into that, and actually celebrate it because that helps fuel the rest of it. And remember that the lows are not permanent. They will pass; you'll figure it out. I actually tell people to lean in, lean into the highs and the lows in the early days because it's going to shape the rest of your journey as well.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:34):
Love that. Well, Harman, thanks so much for spending the time and it's been great having you on the show.

Harman Singh Narula (00:51:37):
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, man.

Pablo Srugo (00:51:39):
Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.