He shut down his last startup and gave the money back—then hit $1M ARR in 6 months. | George, Founder of Monk

George Kurdin (00:00:00) : We had a few principles. One is, it has to be a massive market. It's going to sound obscene, but we have to see some path to go public or to make a company that will do, you know, $100 billion top line. Not valuation, but top line and the main reasoning for this is, smart, ambitious people want to work with fast growing companies. There's only, so much yapping that I can do to motivate the team. People want to look at graphs and, go up and to the right. What I've realized is that if you got a job at a big enough company to own this function, you kind of want to log into somewhere to see what's happening. It's not enough for it to just happen behind the scenes. You want a dashboard, and then I lost one deal to a competitor. Because we didn't have a dashboard and didn't seem like we were serious. And that was kind of a punch to the face. And so, we built the front end. I signed everyone I could to the point where it hurt and one of the larger mistakes that I've made is I signed a fairly large customer that was just a bad customer for us. This business required a lot of custom work. This business needed an integration that we did not have. It was a sexy company, but I made the mistake of trying to create workarounds. We should not have made a workaround. Pablo Srugo (00:01:02) : How fast did you hit a million ARR? George Kurdin (00:01:05) : We actually started selling last fall and we hit a million in roughly six months. Previous Guests (00:01:13) : 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 (00:01:25) : Do you think the Product Market Fit show, has product market fit? Because 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. George, welcome to the show, dude. George Kurdin (00:01:41) : Pablo, thank you. Pablo Srugo (00:01:42) : So you're running Monk, and things are going pretty fast. I mean, you started a year ago. You raised a seed late last year. You raised a $25 million Series A this year. So clearly you're on quite a ramp. We're going to get into why you started it, how you started it, and how you've kind of grown the business through this. But as a first question, because we like to focus on product market fit as much as possible. Tell me, when was the moment for you when you felt you'd found true product market fit? When things were really starting to work? George Kurdin (00:02:11) : I think for us, for my co founder, Joe. That moment was with a customer of ours today. They emailed us, I ignored it, they emailed again and again. And then I couldn't do a call, so I just sent them our sales collateral. Which is a one pager and then they said, OK, send me something else. And I couldn't do a call again. So I just sent them a Loom, like a Loom of me yapping. Showing our product and then they said, yeah, sounds good, send me the DocuSign, let's do a pilot. Which, in my experience doing B2B SaaS, selling B2B SaaS, takes multiple calls, video calls. So that was a good one for us. Pablo Srugo (00:02:45) : What kind of ACV are we talking about? Is that $10k, $50k, $5k? George Kurdin (00:02:48) : $36k. Pablo Srugo (00:02:48) : $36k, so that, yeah. That's real money. I mean, someone's paying almost $40,000 and not even really talking to them. And it's not like PLG, where they're using the product, they're getting uncomfortable, and they're ramping up. They literally just, they see a deck, they get the Loom, and they're like, this is amazing. I got to have this product. George Kurdin (00:03:06) : Yeah, I think some of it is because the pain is quite sharp and we could talk about that if you want. But the other piece is, I mean, I'm very biased but we're very proud of our product. It sells itself. Pablo Srugo (00:03:16) : Yeah, we're going to get to all that. So maybe let's start there, this is kind of the moment where you really felt like things were working and obviously very scalable if you can sell things that easily. How did things start? Take us back maybe two years ago before, you know, what were you doing two-ish years ago that then led to you even starting this company? George Kurdin (00:03:33) : Two-ish years ago, I was running a different company called Gattaca. Because I liked that film and the scene where he swims, and then he doesn't give up. But it was a different company. It was a YOLO model to do computer vision QA testing. We became profitable quite quickly, but I returned the money. Because it was a small market and I had a co founder breakup. And so, the big learning there was, we're never doing a small market again. Pablo Srugo (00:03:54) : You shut it down. You literally said, kid, it's just not big enough. You hit pause, return to whatever capital you had and moved on. George Kurdin (00:04:00) : Yeah, we're still friends but someone I've known for seven years who was an engineer in the company that I sold. We had a breakup, and then it became clear that, QA is just not it. And I felt like I could bend the world to my will. Every VC said, this is a bad market. I said, no and then. Pablo Srugo (00:04:18) : Well, you know, this is. I know we're just starting, but I'll take you on a tangent even just right now. Because this is a classic failure mode in the sense that founders, they want to feel like they're relentless, like they never quit, they never give up and yet I've met many founders like you who gave up on a certain feature or idea or even company. But didn't give up being a founder, which is effectively what you did. How do you think through that? When is it kind of like you're giving up prematurely and you should have just fought harder, and success was right there? And when is it like, you know what? It's actually OK to say this is not going to work. Give the money back, refresh, restart, and go a different direction? George Kurdin (00:04:52) : I think it's a tier zero question. I would not listen to anything I'm saying. That's because I'm a nobody. I'm still figuring this out. My stance on this is following your energy and, if you have energy, and if chasing this idea brings you curiosity, then yeah. I think the question is insanely good because the valley and everything around us valorizes, like, pain tolerance. And, you know, you read about the guys at Notion. They suffered for four years, went to Japan, suffered more, and now its revenue is half a billion. But yeah, following your energy, thinking about all the signals, that's my take. Pablo Srugo (00:05:21) : I like the energy as a concept. I thought about that a lot myself. It's like it carries through, even when you think about hours worked. Like, how all in are you? And it's how much time you're at the desk. How much you're gonna count this, you're gonna count that, but it's really all about energy. Where does your energy go? You wake up in the morning, what are you thinking about? At night, you're watching a movie, you zone out, you're zoning out to what? That's where your energy is going. That's what's pulling you. George Kurdin (00:05:41) : I will say that today it's so easy to build things. It's certainly easier than it was a year ago, and I think a lot of people jump around. I jump around quite a lot. I do think you have to commit hardcore to a thing. I don't want to say how many months. Our stance was at least six months to a year. Hardcore, obsessed, crazy hours, sell it, code it. I do think there's a specific amount of sweat you have to put into it before you can build conviction of, Oh my God, I'm losing my energy versus, Oh I'm just tired. Pablo Srugo (00:06:11) : Once you give the money back, are you in this valley of despair or are you ready to go? Where are you at? Talking about energy, where are you at? George Kurdin (00:06:18) : Despicable, sitting on the floor at South Park Commons seven days a week, reading books, rethinking my life. Super miserable, I would not wish it on my worst enemy. I mean, it's kind of interesting, but also quite miserable. Because I felt like time is running out to build something epic, and then. Especially with the alarms around us, and I felt like I'm going to miss my window. Pablo Srugo (00:06:38) : What year was this? Where are we at, timeline-wise? George Kurdin (00:06:40) : Summer/Fall 2024. Pablo Srugo (00:06:41) : Yeah, OK. I can say there's already a lot of AI native startups having built and kind of growing around you. George Kurdin (00:06:49) : Yeah, people are taking off, right? I was miserable. But then I met my co founder, who is incredible and an amazing human. And is, one of the main reasons why I even decided to go at it again. And then we did a new set of discovery, which I think is your question. Pablo Srugo (00:07:02) : How did you meet your co founder? That's also a big one. George Kurdin (00:07:04) : Very lucky. I would strongly recommend South Park Commons. It's a community for founders slash engineers that people just want to tinker. We got introduced there. Pablo Srugo (00:07:14) : And he was? Was it kind of like you were technical, he was technical, one of these kind of compliment situations? George Kurdin (00:07:18) : I feel odd saying this, but the person that introduced us felt like we were both very intense and that was the reason for why. And then we would just spend time together, like, train for a marathon at the same time. We're both running a lot and we didn't even think about co founding. We just talked about life. Pablo Srugo (00:07:36) : And so, when does the idea come together? OK, you guys are going to build something. Obviously, it's going to be something in AI. Do you have any ideas of what you want to do? What problems you want to solve? What's the starting point? George Kurdin (00:07:44) : We had a few principles. So one is from this car tissue, from this QA thing. One is, it has to be a massive market. We have to, it's going to sound obscene, but we have to see some path to go public or to make a company that will do, you know, $100 billion top line. Not valuation, but top line and the main reasoning for this is, like, smart, ambitious people want to work with fast growing companies. There's only so much yapping that I can do to motivate the team. People want to look at graphs and go up to the right. And so, A, big market. B, actually use AI. Not like a bolt on, not a nice to have. I thought it would be a travesty for us to build a business where we're not using what the labs are doing and three. And I still have this in all the recruiting docs, and at the time it was about Satya and Sam. Now it's Claude but at the time I was very worried about Microsoft and OpenAI. And so, we wanted to pick a problem where we would not get nuked by Sam and Microsoft. We can skip the reasons for why I was worried about those two, but I would much rather compete against. Respectfully, all the founders than the labs and so those are the three things. Don't get nuked by the labs, build something very big, and actually use AI at the application layer. And we picked FinTech, and we did Discovery, and then we landed on this AR. Pablo Srugo (00:08:56) : It's easy when you start with a clear pain point or a problem to solve, how you would go to try to build that company. Not to say it's easy to build a company, but the steps are clear. When you start how you started, which is top down. Which I've seen other founders do that. What I always want to know is how do you go from there to the first thing? You mentioned FinTech. How did you narrow all that to FinTech, for example? George Kurdin (00:09:16) : OK, a few things but it's messy, so forgive me. So I started my career at D. E. Shaw, which is a hedge fund and my co founder went to Penn. So we had some roots, and people will respond on LinkedIn if I message, selfishly. Because we have fancy LinkedIns. B, many companies are massive in fintech. If you can touch the flow of money, I'm not going to recite the examples. You can build a very big business. The best case outcome is you can somehow index global payments, which is what we're aiming to do and C is just. It goes back to the second thesis, it was an incredible use case for AI. There's so much unstructured data. It is, like, purpose-built to use the models and then we had a number of ideas. Some of them were derivative ideas of what's in the market already today. Some of them were quite boring. Some of them were innovations and I made a fancy Figma as if we have them all. And I went to people, I was like, "Hey, Pablo, we're building this company, it's called Atlas. We're called Atlas at the time and I already built these five products. Which one do you want to pay for?" Kind of acted as if we have it, made a very fancy landing page, made each slide as if I have the solution, and just was like, "Which one of these do you want to buy? I have them all." Pablo Srugo (00:10:25) : So you, like each person? It's not like you A, B tested it, like each person you would pitch all five products to and just see which one resonated the most. George Kurdin (00:10:33) : Yeah, precisely. Pablo Srugo (00:10:35) : I'd never heard of that, to be honest and I talked to a lot of founders about customer discovery. But I'd never heard of, just give the buffet kind of playbook. You're like, five potential ideas, and it's usually one by one. It's usually very serial. It's interesting you did it that way. George Kurdin (00:10:48) : I don't think we're very good at discovery. What we ended up with is what I think is analogous to customer success, which is it's a no brainer problem. So there's, respectfully, no PMF risk. What we do, we get people paid fast, we solve our receivables, every business has it's problems just the customer support and it's just execution risk. We're builders, but I don't think we're very good at discovery. So I would not necessarily advise my smorgasbord of slides. I think it may have been confusing to some CFOs that we spoke with. Pablo Srugo (00:11:18) : But and yet, you say you're not good at it and yet it got you to identify the problem pretty quickly. George Kurdin (00:11:25) : Yeah, we put in some hours, and I think we were fortunate with a few meetings. We were also very deliberate about not asking for help. We wanted to make sure that we can do this part and, each share ourselves. But yeah, we got there and then I think what got us over the top was the same anxiety that I had sitting on the floor. Which is, we just felt like we have to jump off a cliff and build. At some point, I think you have to just, you just kind of have to go for it. Pablo Srugo (00:11:49) : Yeah, the stupid thing we say is, "you have to be in the market to win the market." Which is at some point, you got to get in there and do something in order to actually have a potential of doing something big. I have two questions. I'll ask one, then the other. The first one is, you said you had these five ideas. Can you just, again, because I'm always thinking of the mindset of a founder who's like, OK, I get, you know, how you could end up in FinTech. Because maybe you're credible and it matches all your other checklists. How do I come up with great ideas, right? So you had five. Some were better than others, I'm sure. But what was the process for just even coming up with these ones? George Kurdin (00:12:19) : Yep, I like how you're doing this because you're really teasing out whatever alpha I have to maybe help someone in some capacity. I think it's good. I had a doc on my phone of all these tailwinds that I think are happening in the world. Everything from nuclear to education to just crazy things, completely out of fog, and all even to fintech. And so, there was a fintech bucket and some of these ideas were married to tailwinds, like structured data and payments. Then another bucket of ideas that spawned a slide in that presentation was, how do I say this nicely? Companies that I think are attacking a big market, but are executing poorly. I just think I can do better. Even without LLMs, like, OK, I'll say one complete thesis. If a company is bought by a private equity firm, that typically to me means that A, it's a big market but the people are sharks. But B, the PE firm will, rip out the people. They'll go through, a period of fast growth, and they're gonna sell it. There's gonna be a period of, two to four years where I can pounce. Someone already did the diligence for me. They think it's a big market. One example for this is sales tax. There was a company that was purchased by PE from called Avalara and sells tax. There for $9 billion and then now we have NROC and Sphere, et cetera. So we have an equivalent of that in my space. That's another angle that I used to come up with an idea. Pablo Srugo (00:13:38) : And you were just, you're really deducing these ideas. You're looking at the market one way, who's there, who can I crush off? And then the other one is just, OK, what are big tailwinds that we could apply to FinTech, for example? George Kurdin (00:13:49) : I tried all the things. I ran a company before this. I was responsible for three hundred people at the last company. I did all the things. I tried to think of what problems did I have and I spent ten years in consumer. What problems did I have in my company? What problems would I pay for? What brings me joy? What am I good at? What are other founders that I know? None of that stuff worked for me. I couldn't come up with anything. I mean, there's the ubiquitous stuff, like hiring is very hard. I wish I could hire more engineers faster, but I didn't want to build a recruiting company. But I could never come up with anything based on my experience and my personal pain. Pablo Srugo (00:14:26) : So that's how you get this list. The other thing that I think is really important is, one of the things that I think founders struggle with until they have the experience is, what does validation really look like? There's the simple one, which is here's, $20,000, go build it. OK, cool, I'm validated, right? But there's always a level before that where you're pitching something. It's like people always smile and nod, and whatever. So you got to differentiate that from eyes lighting up, this is a real thing. What did you see? You pitched five ideas. You kind of almost had this baked in, you know, way to compare. The one that you went with, which I assume ended up being Monk. What did you see? What did you hear that told you that this was the best idea? George Kurdin (00:15:06) : Yeah, I'll do a fast plug for, probably a very simple book that was discussed on the show by a lot of people and then my process. So the plug is for a book called The Mom Test. It's like a hundred pages. It's written for someone quite new to this. I found it useful. It helps you deduce, as you said, fake compliments. Which people often get from actual real feedback and then listening to people, looking at them, and then seeing concessions. So the penultimate test is, hey, let's sign this doc, give me some of your resources, sign this pilot doc and or dedicate some resources to implement my thing. An NDA could be a good signal and then I think a lot of it was listening. In my space, our first product automates accounts receivable. No one raved about their accounts receivable solution. Everyone was fairly displeased to quite unhappy, and we're stuck with this. It was very obvious. Pablo Srugo (00:16:02) : But do you remember specifically what you heard? When you told them you would solve AR for example? George Kurdin (00:16:07) : It was a lot of, I don't want to talk too much about the competitors. I respect these businesses, they're all doing as well as they could. But it was a lot of folks being frustrated with what we already had today. So, yeah, we use X, and it took a year to implement X, and we failed to implement. And it was so disastrous that my team, my entire team, had to take a vacation after implementation. Or, we use X and we're stuck with X, and for us to request any change in X. We have to, log a ticket that goes somewhere in a foreign country and my thing never happens. Things like this. Pablo Srugo (00:16:42) : So it's actually more the frustration of the problem. The status quo that you picked on than the eyes lighting up for your solution necessarily. George Kurdin (00:16:50) : Yeah, the thing that we do. Which is accounts receivable, we manage the revenue side of the business. Is it's a hard fact that the world accepts that exists, that is broken. Everyone already has some sort of solution, whether that's spreadsheets or another piece of SaaS. We're not inventing that new thing, it's just that we're making the existing thing better. So yeah, everyone was frustrated. Pablo Srugo (00:17:10) : So you take this, you know this is where you want to go. What is V1 of the product that you decide to build? George Kurdin (00:17:15) : Awful, awful thing. So at this time we have the basics of the cursors of the world, and my co founder and I went crazy building too much stuff. So the V1 had no front end at all. It was, a back end service only. It was a black box, and we started to sell it and we made some money in the beginning. And we've learned very quickly that finance leaders don't want a black box. Pablo Srugo (00:17:37) : How did that work? They would just say, here are accounts that are laid, go collect for me. What was the? George Kurdin (00:17:42) : Yeah, yeah, just connect to my systems and then give me the money. Pablo Srugo (00:17:46) : So this is a classic service as a software play, the way that you approach it. George Kurdin (00:17:50) : Yeah, yeah, and in the beginning I was doing things manually. We had our LHF based on me. I was doing things manually and then automating them as I'm doing them. Pablo Srugo (00:17:59) : Were you calling customers, were you emailing customers yourself to try and collect? George Kurdin (00:18:03) : Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. Super painful, crazy hours. Pablo Srugo (00:18:07) : So you're almost running an outsourced collections agency, except you're trying to automate some pieces of it but that's where it starts. George Kurdin (00:18:14) : Automating myself out of it, yes. Pablo Srugo (00:18:16) : Got you, yeah. It makes sense, though, for what it's worth. I mean, I know you all, and we'll get to what the next evolution was. But today there's just so much, like, services and software is a big category. A lot of founders are thinking about doing something AI native first and it's, you know, you either start with the product and you try to get it to. Here's the thing, let's think about, AR, right? There are all already outsourced collections agencies that some of these companies might be using or might have thought to use or whatever. That's a known thing. You could just max their service and do it all manually, and then backfill, and automate yourself. Which is what you did, or you can just start with, well, it has to be tech only and then try and get your way to realize the same service. But it's harder. It seems, feels harder that way. I don't know. George Kurdin (00:18:55) : We're still early, and I think it also depends on who you're selling to. And, our product has evolved since then. But man, if you look at, our seed slides. I even branded it as such, I was proud of it. We called it RAS, results as a service and I was very proud of it. And then, I think the VCs felt maybe, but the customers actually didn't like it. They did not, at least the customers that we're selling into at the time. Pablo Srugo (00:19:19) : Tell me more about that, it's unintuitive. George Kurdin (00:19:21) : What I've realized is that if you've got a job, at a big enough company to own this function, you kind of want to log into somewhere to see what's happening. It's not enough for it to just happen behind the scenes. You want a dashboard, and then I lost one deal to a competitor. Because we didn't have a dashboard and didn't seem like we're serious. And that was kind of a punch to the face. And so we built the front end. Pablo Srugo (00:19:43) : And they wanted to see, I think this is interesting and generalizable. They wanted to see what? How many tickets, this and that, or what you were actually doing? Like, hey, what are you saying to these customers? These are my customers that you're talking to, collecting from. Do they want to see that level of visibility? George Kurdin (00:19:57) : Both, plus without dragging you through the world of AR. They're basic reports and basic functions that you would expect. I think people wanted to see and wanted to tinker. Now it feels like this whole results as a service thing and selling services, and software is, again in vogue. Also, my conclusions are based on a pretty small sample. We're visual design partners last spring but yeah, we built the front end. So to answer your earlier question, we started with just the back end service only, and we built the front end. It became quite easy for us to build a front end because of Cursor, but it's also easy to get carried away building crazy front ends that impress customers, but then it's hard to build the back end service. Now we obviously have the full app. Pablo Srugo (00:20:39) : Walk me more through that process. So we're talking, what? March, April 2025-ish. How did you structure it? Because this is another big piece of getting the product right, is how you work with design partners, who you choose as your early customers. Tell me more about that phase of the business. George Kurdin (00:20:57) : Unfortunately, it was not very methodical. I felt immense pressure to win. We are very late to what I think is an amazing space. We're not the first company to start this. I think we're doing something new, but we're late and I just signed everyone I could to the point where it hurt. And one of the larger mistakes that I've made is, and I made many last year. I'm still making them now, is I signed a very large customer that was just a bad customer for us and the pilot was bad, and I ended up with a word fire in this customer before they could even, like. Pablo Srugo (00:21:30) : We hear a lot about bad customers. What does that mean? How does that actually manifest itself? George Kurdin (00:21:35) : This business required a lot of custom work, which is classic. This business needed an integration that we did not have. We created a workaround with this business via an S3 bucket FTP file transfer that required people from both sides. My team and their team to handle the data. So now we're relying on, a random person at that team to give us the data. That was not working no matter how much I tried, and we had no actual way to talk to this business data. And my system doesn't work otherwise. It was a sexy company, but I made the mistake of trying to create workarounds. We should not have made a workaround. Pablo Srugo (00:22:16) : What was the final product that you liked? Obviously the product exchange, but the one that you would say was launch ready that you launched with? George Kurdin (00:22:23) : It's a system that either takes your contracts, processes your contracts, makes the invoice, sends the invoice, collects some of this invoice using agents, applies cash, gives reports, basic reports, and then pushes the data back into the ERP. And it was launched only with connectivity to a few banks and only with connectivity to one ERP called QuickBooks. So that customer that was a bad customer for us, outside of the fact that it was a very complex business. They wanted connectivity to something else entirely different that I said I have, I didn't have it, and it was a mistake. Pablo Srugo (00:22:58) : Oh, you're such a selfish person. I actually can't believe how selfish you are because, you've been listening to the show. You listened to this episode, you loved it. You've listened to a bunch of other episodes, and you haven't told anyone about it. You haven't told any of the many founder friends that you have about it. Think about how many founders have helped you out when you're building your startup. So don't be selfish. Tell your friends about this episode. Tell them about the show and help me help them. You're doing the full end to end lifecycle. Tell me a bit about the ROI and how the ROI is realized. Are you finding your customers are laying off a bunch of people and saving cost? Or you find they're just doing more with what they already have? How do they get that? Obviously, it's nice that this is doing automated, but how does that translate into getting value? George Kurdin (00:23:41) : It depends on the size of the business. So no laying off. The main metrics that we are proud of that we sort of cite is, time savings, making the team more efficient, frontloading your cash. So, Pablo is owed $100 over the next year. You expect to get $100 the next year. I'll give you $90 tomorrow. So saving time, following the cash, and, visibility slash reporting needs. And truly, the number one metric people care about is just money. I think that insights and reports are nice. It's hard to quantify these things. One of the reasons why we picked this space, and, yeah, I cited three reasons, but then we honed in on this idea besides the pain. We had other ideas that were, like, what I would call insights tools. Which is basically only doing reads from the database. We're not doing any writes. So there's no system of action. Our product gives you money, more money sooner. Yes, it's your money but everyone, the number one metric that every finance leader or CEO cares about is just more cash in hand. So these are the main metrics. No one gets fired and it's not a marketing tactic. We just, we prefer to talk about how we augment the people. But yeah, those are the main metrics. Pablo Srugo (00:24:47) : How did you launch and, what was your main go to market channel that really worked at the beginning? George Kurdin (00:24:52) : It was cold outbound email and that was our only channel all of last year. No sales team, no nothing and then finally I ate my pride and ego, and I started to post on LinkedIn. Again, learning from other founders, I found it to be very cringed. I cared a lot about my reputation, who I'm connected with, what people think of me from my past experiences. But then once I started posting on LinkedIn, and for that I had to build a bit of a different brand and cohesive identity. We started to get inbound. So now heading into this year, we had email and then some inbound, that's it. Pablo Srugo (00:25:27) : Tell me more about, I mean, cold outbound is compelling because, well, a few things. First of all, I think people assume that it's dead. Just because it gets so much spam. I certainly thought it, but I met a founder recently on the show, and he told me he got his entire first million of ARR through cold outbound. But he walked me through, he said half a million emails, one percent reply rate. So five thousand replies, two hundred and fifty meetings booked, forty sales at, $20k ACV, million dollars ARR. Is that similar? I'm curious, how many outbound emails more or less did you send? What kind of conversion rates? It doesn't have to be exact, but more or less do you think you got? George Kurdin (00:26:03) : I will mess up the stats. They were higher conversion rate, lower volume, but still mass volume and I don't know about this person. But we have a horizontal solution, so we're industry agnostic. Pablo Srugo (00:26:15) : That was a key thing. That was one of my takeaways was, if you're going to do cold email. You can't have ten thousand customers because you're going to blow through millions. George Kurdin (00:26:25) : Yeah, that's precisely right and you have to be thoughtful about your aliases, and warming, and domains, and rotating things, and kind of infra. A mistake that I made in that QA company is, never trust the floor and the ceiling in these larger tools. Like, Apollo is a big tool that people use, myself included, to fetch emails and do outbound. Apollo told me, yeah, just do fifty a day. It burned my main.com domain. I ran roughly fifteen to twenty emails per alias, no more than two aliases per domain, and, vigilantly watching all of this every day. Pablo Srugo (00:27:04) : What would you say, to somebody that's thinking of doing this? Let's say they've got a horizontal market. They've got enough market size that they could do cold outbound, and you're kind of telling them, some of the big learnings or maybe even for yourself. If you were to start over your cold email campaign, knowing what you know, what would you do different? There's the technical piece, you know, use Apollo, use Lemlist, warm it up, OK. I think people, either they do it right or not. They know that high level, but what are some of the learnings? I don't know if the copy matter, the number of follow ups, the personalization. Wherever you've learned something, what are some top things that come to mind? George Kurdin (00:27:35) : Yep, I'm making a list so that I don't ramble because in my head it's like a big Rubik's Cube. So what are the inputs? OK, I made a list of four things. So we have material piece, we have copy, we have email strength, I'll come back to this, and then we have experiments. So technical piece, I'm not going to go into, but there's a bunch of solutions you could use. Let me know if this is helpful. Copy and subject. I think not a rocket science insight. I think that it's one of those things where everyone says the same thing is probably true. So more personalized, the better subject lines. I try to do things like dash, dash or no subject. Yeah, I would also do Pablo and George, but I would also just do random subject lines to try to get people to open, because it's an equation. If they can't open, it doesn't really matter how good my copy is, and then for copy, plain text, no links, no images. Doing things like send from iPhone, lowercase. They cannot know that it is AI or spam, especially today. There's so much email. There's like fifty guys that are smarter than me that are doing outbound. So the more plain text, average copy it is, the better. As far as sequence length, I've tried everything. I've tried, like, I was inspired by RAMP in many ways. I've tried, nine-step sequences and I've tried three-step sequences. I haven't really found a huge delta between them. But whatever the sequence is, just keep it as if it's a casual email assigned to someone else. Email strength is important. So, it's not necessarily part of the tooling, but you have to make sure that you're outbounding to the right aliases and whatever source you're buying them from. Just because you got a bunch of emails from Paul, it doesn't mean they're real and you can actually burn your domains or have bad examples. And then your experiments need to be not complacent. So what I think I did wrong in the beginning is I spent a weekend obsessively building all this stuff and I loaded it, and I didn't get a result. And then I just kind of said, yeah, this is broken. But I think a better version is to keep trying. Pablo Srugo (00:29:33) : That's kind of my take, is the copy is, you know, because you see these things on LinkedIn and it's like, oh, look at this insane rage bait stuff. I was like, you know, just anything for them to click on it and, go viral on LinkedIn. I don't think it gets results. What my learning seems to be like, frankly, pretty simple. You try a few things in the subject line, but it's not, you know, rocket science stuff. Like I said, you know, find a way to make the thing just personalized enough that maybe that person at least somewhat thinks, did they write this to me? That's it that's good enough sort of thing and then volume. I mean, it just feels like it's volume, you know? George Kurdin (00:30:06) : I was in all the Slack channels trying to absorb any sort of alpha, Discord groups trying to learn. I'm seeing all these crazy campaigns. Oh my God, five percent response rate. I feel super dumb. I don't know if these are real, and if they are, like, good for them. I think it's volume and then you didn't ask, but one thing that I did not do, and I'm still not doing, but I have a lot of sources that say this is a killer way to do it. I should probably be doing this now, is LinkedIn. People are showing, founders that I respect are sharing how LinkedIn is working for them better than email. They're leaving voice notes on LinkedIn. They're sending photos on LinkedIn. Pablo Srugo (00:30:42) : This is cold outbound through LinkedIn? George Kurdin (00:30:44) : Cold outbound LinkedIn. I wish I did it last year, we're still not really doing it. But that's a miss and not the sources tell me it works. Pablo Srugo (00:30:53) : How fast did you hit a million in ARR? George Kurdin (00:30:55) : We actually started selling last Fall and we hit a million in roughly around six months. Pablo Srugo (00:31:02) : Let's walk into some of the kind of more tactical areas that we're going to go kind of deeper on. The first one, everybody's talking about being AI native, being an agentic company. Obviously creating agents, selling agents, but you told me that you're designing your company for agents. Which, to be honest, sounds amazing but I don't really know what that means. Tell me more about that. George Kurdin (00:31:23) : More disclaimers, only because I really feel like I'm figuring this out as I'm doing this. I don't want to come off as someone that figured this out. You know, we're not Legora, we're not Arby. A few things that we're trying or that we believe in. Number one, write a lot. Write a lot and write cleanly. One of our values is clarity. I like to call it ambient signaling. You write in Slack cleanly and precisely in a way that if I write something, you can immediately act on it, and it has all the context. This is something that I took from my last company, and it was good during the pandemic. When people were remote, and now it's incredible for agents. So the more context there is and reason for the decisions, the better. It's also just polite to the rest of the team, like why have a ten step Slack thread if you can just act. If you just spent, five seconds more writing the message to Pablo, maybe I would act faster. So good written culture and no public managers. I was always bearish on the role and now more so. I don't think you need a conduit of information anymore. And, you know, I think engineers should work with customers. And yeah, if someone has a good design style, it's just code. Pablo Srugo (00:32:25) : On the writing side, do you use like WhisperFlow or something like that to just get the stuff out? Does that help or hinder? George Kurdin (00:32:31) : Whisper, if people want to use Whisper, use Whisper. If not, just, write in Slack as much as possible in the open. Pretty much outside of deeply personal issues, every single DM that my co founder and I get, we politely ask and turn around to share this in the open with the team. And I track as a Slack admin, I don't have a way to see detailed stats, but I see macro things. And I track how many DMs versus how much is in the open, and I want the open to be a much higher ratio than DMs. Pablo Srugo (00:33:02) : Are you remote by the way or are you guys in person? George Kurdin (00:33:04) : In person. Pablo Srugo (00:33:04) : And even still you use Slack that much? George Kurdin (00:33:07) : Yes, we're in person, we're no meetings. We do three meetings a week, all on Monday, and then there's zero meetings. We just work. We don't even do stand ups. We do all hands every morning, 9 a.m. We discuss everything, like what I see in the market, customers, what we're going to build, what we're going to sell, et cetera. All hands, customer meeting, sales meeting. Three meetings and then just flow state. Pablo Srugo (00:33:29) : How long is each meeting? George Kurdin (00:33:31) : Half an hour. Pablo Srugo (00:33:32) : OK, that's it. So maybe two hours worth of meetings a week. George Kurdin (00:33:35) : Yeah. Pablo Srugo (00:33:35) : How many people are you? George Kurdin (00:33:36) : Fourteen. Pablo Srugo (00:33:37) : You think this scales? I mean, or are you just leaning into. There's an aspect of it doesn't really matter if it scales. Because you're a startup, right? You have pros and cons. The con is you don't have that much money compared to a big company. You know, go to market, all these sort of things suffer. The pro is you actually can do these things, right? With a big company. So maybe there's an element of it just, it doesn't matter that it doesn't scale. But I'm wondering if you've thought about when you're a hundred people, you know, can you still operate this way? George Kurdin (00:34:00) : I've done something similar in a previous company. We're doing $58 million ARR, forty two percent EBITDA business, roughly one hundred people. But I don't think it's going to scale, but I'm going to hold on to this with my dear life for as long as I can. Because I think that I really believe in flow state, and I want to give the builders the time to do it. Just so you know, we do have meetings. We'll meet, but they're ad hoc. I just hate recurring meetings. If we need to burn down a problem, like there's a visceral issue with a customer or I made a big mistake that we need to fix, then we'll have a recurring meeting maybe until it ends, but no recurring meetings otherwise and slowly back to product managers, I typically find that product managers are actually the creators of many meetings, which is not good for engineering. Pablo Srugo (00:34:48) : What's the split? Fourteen people, how many are engineers? George Kurdin (00:34:50) : Half and half. Pablo Srugo (00:34:51) : Half sales marketing, half engineers? George Kurdin (00:34:53) : I mean, most of the team is a few months old. Everyone's sort of new, but it's eng and then post sales marketing. Sales team is just blowing up right now. Pablo Srugo (00:35:03) : And do you have agents running inside? Tell me a little bit more about that? On the agentic side, internally, what are you using agents for? What are agents doing for you guys as a company? George Kurdin (00:35:13) : So we're actively trying to kind of AI-build a company. I think Ram, again, has done a nice job there. Quickly, you know, we tried Terminal for everyone. It doesn't really work. So I think Claude Desktop with connectors and everyone has a connector set up and a prompt that I set up is good. As far as agents, there's two things. There's team wide things, and individually people are encouraged to build their stuff. So I can speak to mine, for example. I have email digest, I have a thing that looks at security. So I have a thing that polls every single one of my sub processors and sees that there's an issue and brings me in thread. I have another agent that looks at all the sales calls and grades them and spits out a rubric in common Slack. This is my main ones, we have a nice one for spend, but I think it's pretty basic. Call RAM and spit out all the deltas and where the variances are, just so we don't get caught with a big recurring expense report. And then people have their own agents, but I don't really know what their setup is. Pablo Srugo (00:36:11) : The other thing I want to talk about kind of as a bit of a segment. We talked about, you know, management and organization and just writing things a lot. Building this culture where things are written so that you can have more context, not just for people, but for the agents. The other thing is people, especially these days. I would say, I mean, execution was always obviously super important in the world of startups. But, you know, the argument today is if everybody can build anything, then the people you have matters even more. Because they're going to decide what to build and they're going to get you that go to market what you need, right? So getting great people is just critical. You told me about one actually mistake that you made on recruiting. We talked about that kind of mediocre hire and how that happened. And then, how you think about recruiting today? How do you, as a small startup? Yeah, you're doing well, but you're small. How do you get the best people on board? George Kurdin (00:36:52) : Tier zero question. All of our time right now is spent on this, just to harp on this. Everyone is using the exact same endpoint from Anthropic. It's just, what you do, this endpoint. How hard you work? What's your judgment on the product. I mean, that's the reality, right? So I think it's all about the people. The question is, how we think about building the team and what we look for? Pablo Srugo (00:37:13) : Yes, how do you attract? What do you look for and then, how do you get and attract those types of people? George Kurdin (00:37:18) : The main things that we look for is, incredible judgment, raw smarts and judgment. Because we want to trust the person, treat them as a founder, give them a ton of equity, and give them chunks of the company to run. Especially with LLMs, I think that the person with great judgment that is hardworking is unstoppable. Judgment, slope, slash the rate of learning. How quickly do they learn, and we look at this throughout their career, but also throughout the interview process. Basic things, you know, can we be with this person, five, six, seven days a week. We are making a bet on folks that are early in their career. This is a very calculated bet that requires a big leap of faith, but also a technical investment. Because you have to prepare the code base for folks that are junior in their career and there's a lot of work that goes into this. But I think it's going to pay off for us because the competition for talent is insane. I lose people to the labs, which is a no brainer. I can never compete with the labs and then some of the best people want to start companies. And so, I think that the supply of engineers is constrained, but the demand is quite high. There's ten guys like me looking for engineers. So the other thing that we do is we place bets on folks that are coming out of school and so I think that, at least the way that we're going to build this company, is going to be a barbell. We're going to have folks that are possibly going to be brilliant, but they're early. Pablo Srugo (00:38:37) : Tell me a bit about attracting both. What's your pitch? I mean, the pitch to junior, we can start, that's probably the easier one. Which is, probably just, "Hey, you want to come somewhere and, learn incredibly fast and just be tasked with way more responsibility than anyone else? Come here, I would assume that that's your pitch. But you tell me, that's the senior one. That's the harder one. George Kurdin (00:38:54) : The pitch is I have a fancy story about how we're going to improve global GDP, and we're not pitching that. We're not pitching the mission at all. What we pitch is come and do your life's work with a very talent dense, ambitious group of people for meaningful relationships, work on tough problems, have maximum autonomy. That's what we pitch. We pitch the team, we pitch our DNA. I pitch a bit of my scar tissue and my experience that we're probably going to avoid some common mistakes if I don't do anything stupid. Half of the team is second time founders. People get along with each other. When someone visits us, they see in people's eyes. People are very passionate about the work. We do accounts receivables. This isn't Twitter or SpaceX. Pablo Srugo (00:39:39) : But, you know, what you're mentioning there, talk a lot about network effects. You used to talk more about it because it used to be marketplace or the thing. But maybe talk about it less these days. But network effects are obviously a core moat and I think the most powerful virtuous loop or network effect. Whatever you want to call it, is the people you hire. Because if you get that right versus wrong, the delta on what you end up with is massive, right? Even if you just think about it, you're hiring your fiftieth person and you finally got somebody rock solid. They're amazing, and you convince them and you can pay them or whatever, and they come on board and they meet five to ten people. They start working and they realize these are B-level people. That person is not retaining, that person will not last, they will leave, right? And then you think about the other side of it is you're hiring the fifteen person and everybody's rock solid. Not only is that person going to retain, but your inbound is going to change. Because your word of mouth from the people you have is going to be their peers and so it's one of these loops that you have to work so hard to get right at the beginning, and it pays dividends for. Frankly, years and years to come. George Kurdin (00:40:40) : It's so well said. It's spot on. It's the number one network effect. People look up people on the team, and they think they're impressive. It's not about the founders after the first few hires. Also, one thing that I deeply believe in is that, a seven out of ten is actually one of the most dangerous hires you can make. Because this person will have enough redeeming qualities to shine, and we will be very slow about letting them go. Maybe we won't and over time, they will shift the gravitational pull of the company to just a bunch of sevens. Pablo Srugo (00:41:12) : Did you make that mistake once? George Kurdin (00:41:13) : Yeah, so many times. Because I was really desperate for help, and/or I misjudged, or I didn't have the right process, or it's just not a fit. Pablo Srugo (00:41:21) : And the outcome is what? Obviously, if there are three, you get rid of them in two weeks, right? But with the seven, I guess your point is, they just stay for a lot longer than they should. George Kurdin (00:41:29) : I'll just speak for myself. I'd like to think that I'm hardcore, all these things. The reality is I'm not that good letting people go. Pablo Srugo (00:41:35) : No one is, or very, very few people are. George Kurdin (00:41:38) : It's just, it's hard, it's hard. At least to me, it's very hard. I want to look for a way to give you a chance. I like to think that all the mistakes have lessons. OK, we made this mistake. That's actually a good thing. Can we just, remember this for future? It's a scar tissue, let's learn from this. A someone will have enough redeeming qualities where outside of mistakes, they're like, oh, George is not that excellent, but actually this was a good day for him. This was a decent thing that he said in this meeting and this line of code is pretty good. Let's see what next week brings and so enough redeeming qualities where they'll just stay forever. Versus a five, we're gonna just fuck it up, and then it's easy to fire, right? Pablo Srugo (00:42:15) : Tell me just a little bit before we wrap up here. The Series A bar has only gone up and up, right? I think the median Series A is like $3.5 million of ARR and $15 million Series A. You raised a $25 million Series A, which is probably 90th percentile, just in terms of size. Was that inbound preempted? Did you run a process? How did that happen? George Kurdin (00:42:33) : We ran a process, I made slides and we just did it. I think that the number is large and we can discuss why it's so large. And that wasn't the intention, but it ended up being large. I think this typically happens. Pablo Srugo (00:42:47) : That wasn't the intention? That was going to be my question. Did you go out and be like, we need twenty five or did you go out and be like, we need fifteen or something more closer to the median? George Kurdin (00:42:54) : Yeah, more closer to the median. I'm not a venture capitalist, but my take on this is that if you come out for the A, and if anyone is listening, you should take this as an insult. If you come out for the A and you say, like, low teens or not even below a ten. It doesn't seem like you are ambitious, and it just doesn't make sense for VC math. I'm not the spendiest person. We're actually, like. Pablo Srugo (00:43:18) : I don't disagree, but just to be clear. Does that mean you go for twenty or do you go for fifteen? What's your mindset? George Kurdin (00:43:24) : We went for fifteen. Pablo Srugo (00:43:25) : Yeah, I mean, what you're saying makes sense to me. I always wonder how the companies that are getting these twenty five or thirty As. How do they go? If it's preempted, it's different because then you're just kind of like, well, it just happened. But if you go out, what do you do? Do you go out with? Fifteen is the median, so nobody can say anything about that. It's like, listen, this is the market. It's fifteen, so I'm going for fifteen. I think you're right. If you go for ten, then this nuance is, well, if fifty percent or more are raising fifteen or more, why do you not think you can do it, right? So it's like, but you go for fifteen, nobody can blame you, and then maybe with momentum and FOMO, you kind of get to 2025. George Kurdin (00:44:00) : If you want, but my take is that it means absolutely nothing. In my heart of hearts, you know, how much you raised or what you're valued at means very little. Pablo Srugo (00:44:09) : I agree. George Kurdin (00:44:10) : I wouldn't optimize for a large number. I mean, I feel a tremendous amount of pressure to deliver based on the numbers that were given and we were given this money to deploy it effectively. And so, like, having to just sit there is not it. Pablo Srugo (00:44:21) : I think the only counter to that today, especially with something like what you're doing. But I've seen a lot of companies like this. I'm finding, especially if you have partner market fit today, you're also in a very competitive dynamic. You're rarely the only one, especially if you're at the app layer and so, you know, I don't know that if you have twenty five and they have twenty, it means you win, it doesn't. But frankly, if you have twenty five and they've got ten, it does give you an extra edge, more events, more go to market, more everything, right? George Kurdin (00:44:45) : Yes, agreed. Spot on, agreed. It helps with everything. Also, we talked about this earlier but great people are expensive because of the labs. Because there's so much money and so there's a lot of money. There's a big amount of money chasing a finite pool of people and so salary is a bit up. You need the cash. Pablo Srugo (00:45:01) : So did you run a full process? Did you meet fifty, a hundred VCs or how fast was that? George Kurdin (00:45:06) : Yeah, fifty VCs in, like, two weeks. Try to compress it, stop coding, stop selling, just super aggressive. Try to do as much as I can in as little time as I can. So I can get back to work and I found that if you compress it, it helps. Pablo Srugo (00:45:24) : Listen, George, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. This has been great. I think we covered a lot. I think we delivered a lot of value for founders. So thanks for sharing all that with us. George Kurdin (00:45:33) : Of course, no, thanks for having me. Thank you, Pablo. Pablo Srugo (00:45:35) : You remember, 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. Send 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.