Lindy: Pivoting a $50M Startup to Build AI Agents – with Flo Crivello [450]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Hey Flo, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Flo: Hey, yeah, thanks for having me. Omer.

[00:00:03] Omer: My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you?

[00:00:06] Flo: It's going to sound cheesy, but I really like recent chill chills. If you're going through, hell keep going.

[00:00:13] Omer: A great one for any startup founder.

[00:00:17] Omer: For people who aren't familiar with Lindy, can you tell us what does the product do? Who is it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:24] Flo: We are a no-code platform helping you build AI agents to automate workflows. The problem it solves, think of an AI agent as like an AI intern.

[00:00:33] Flo: Like soon it'll be an AI employee that can do anything for you. For now, it's an AI intern that can do like simple things for you, some of the things that people find it the most useful for or sales. So like prospecting, outreaching, qualifying leads, support. Like you can deploy like a chat bot on your website.

[00:00:51] Flo: You can respond automatically to your support emails, check all your statuses and so forth. And personal assistance like meeting, scheduling, meeting recording, meeting prepping, and so forth. What we're typically used by SMBs? Startups, call it like five to 100 people, mostly in tech.

[00:01:09] Omer: Cool.

[00:01:09] Omer: And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team?

[00:01:15] Flo: Yeah like high seven figures of revenue. We are 35 employees, plus five or eight contractors.

[00:01:23] Omer: And you have raised, you're just telling me 52 million, right?

[00:01:27] Flo: That's correct.

[00:01:28] Omer: Okay, great.

[00:01:28] Omer: We'll talk about like where the idea came from for Lindy, but maybe let's just talk a little bit about your background before then. At some, at one point you were working as, product guy at Uber and then you initially launched a product called TeamFlow.

[00:01:45] Flo: TeamFlow. That's right.

[00:01:46] Omer: Yeah. So tell us about that. What did the product do and what led you to starting that business?

[00:01:52] Flo: So after Uber, I took a break for six months, the pandemic broke out, so I was like stuck at home like everybody else. And I'm in new and so what I do when I'm stuck at home is I code and build stuff.

[00:02:02] Flo: And I started building this thing and at first it was not even because of the pandemic, it was just a cool idea. I was like, oh, imagine like a spatial Zoom. So it's like you can see your video in like a bubble, in a circle on a two dimensional canvas. Think almost like Figma, like the Sims.

[00:02:16] Flo: 'cause you could build like the canvas yourself. And you can move around on that canvas like in a video game and you can hear and be heard by people around you. So then people can dial, dial in to this space. It's like a virtual space where you can hang out with people and all of that stuff. And so I was just hacking that initially.

[00:02:33] Flo: It wasn't even as a business idea. I was like, oh, this is so cool and they're gonna hang out in this space for with my friends. And then I dawned on me. I was like, wait, like the pandemic is a thing. I was like, wait a minute. I haven't thought that, and every team was a remote.

[00:02:45] Flo: And I knew that remote work was awful. It was just like really hard to collaborate with remote work. So that's when I saw the angle, I was like, ah, like remote work, like this is like a virtual office. And things were going really well at first 'cause of the pandemic. So everybody was going remote, everybody was.

[00:03:01] Flo: Looking for a solution. So we took off really rapidly and then people returned to the office and you could literally see the waves of COVID. This graph, like there were like multiple waves of COVID. You could literally see the waves of COVID on our growth chart. It was just like, you could overlap 'em, it was the same, it was the same curve.

[00:03:18] Flo: And then when COVID went down and people basically returned to the office the growth. Slowed down massively slash like we were basically flat. And so that's when we realized that there was no market there and we pivoted to Lindy.

[00:03:30] Omer: So tell me about where the idea came from. So Lindy initially.

[00:03:35] Flo: So I was always super into AI.

[00:03:36] Flo: Like before even GPT-2. When GPT-2 came out, I was super excited about it. And then GPT-3 and then the GPT-3 API came out and because we had this effectively, it was a video conferencing tool. We built a meeting recorder and we used GPT-3 to summarize the meetings that were recorded. And then the sales team came to me and they were like, Flo.

[00:03:56] Flo: I would love if this thing could not just summarize my meetings, but also update Salesforce on me. I hate updating my Salesforce every day. It takes me so much time. And we were like, sure, I can't see why not. And so we used the GPT-3 API to just extract stuff to update the Salesforce entity with.

[00:04:12] Flo: And then little by little, we just built it in a more and more generalizable fashion. So at first it's okay, it's Salesforce now it can be any field on Salesforce. Oh. But there we're gonna release it to customers. And some of them don't use Salesforce, they use HubSpot. So that can be any field on Salesforce or HubSpot.

[00:04:27] Flo: And that can be any field on any CRM. What if it could also create tasks on linear, and so we just keep climbing up this ladder of abstraction until we're like, wait a minute, and we built this framework and it was default GPT. We built this framework and we realized wait a minute, like LMS can actually do stuff, not just extract text or summarize textile generate stuff.

[00:04:50] Flo: They can do stuff. And so that's when this vision of the AI employee. Came together, and then JG PT came out, L Chain came out. We were actually in very early touch with Harrison Chase from L Chain when it was just him and like a GI library. He still had a job. And so early 2023, we decided to Hal pivot to Lindy.

[00:05:06] Flo: And man, I look, we were like a team of 50 plus at the time. I had to let go of two thirds of the team. I had to fire the entire go to market team, which was ridiculously painful and. One of the most painful parts of my career as a founder. And, we went down and started to build this new vision.

[00:05:25] Omer: What was the landscape like at that point? Today you go online if you can, like when the internet is locked down like we were talking about today. And it seems like overnight everybody is talking about. They build AI agents, right? It's this term that you just can't.

[00:05:42] Omer: Gonna get away from what was the landscape like when you initially pivoted and started Lindy?

[00:05:49] Flo: So people weren't really talking of AI agents back then. People were talking, if you remember, of generative ai. It was like, it was generating text, it was generating images. People were not talking yet about video.

[00:06:00] Flo: It was not generating videos yet. And so I was like, look, this is all good. But the GDP is not made of copywriters or illustrators. It's made of work and actions. So I wanted to build agent ai, not generative ai. And the landscape was adept, which since then has been acquired by Amazon and Link Chain.

[00:06:20] Flo: That's basically it. And then I was like, LAMA index a little bit, but that was basically it.

[00:06:24] Omer: Okay, great. Te tell me a little bit about, so you, you've built this product. You talk mostly about doing sort of meeting summarization, updating some of tools like CRM like how did you go about launching the product and finding those initial customers?

[00:06:44] Flo: We put out a demo, which at first was almost more like a vision statement. So it's Hey, Lindy, we're working on this new cool thing. Here's what it's looking and we had prototypes. Some of that was like Figma prototypes, some of that was working prototypes. And we released a video on Twitter, and I think that was March, 2023, and we acquired a wait list of 70,000 people.

[00:07:09] Flo: That's how we started in, in the very beginning.

[00:07:11] Omer: So let's talk about a little bit about that, because you've built quite a following on Twitter or X and a lot of that was before you, you started Lindy, right?

[00:07:19] Flo: Yes, I've got I've got like a little bit of a following now, like nothing crazy, but I always tell people two things.

[00:07:25] Flo: Like one, if you're not on Twitter, you are missing out on like the biggest party in human history. Like you have to be on Twitter. It is my biggest career asset, apart from like my company, but like before my company. It was like my biggest, I would've if you'd asked me, you have a choice between quitting your job and wiping your LinkedIn.

[00:07:42] Flo: It's like you never were at your job, which was Uber. It was also like a good company or like destroying your Twitter account, I would've picked to destroy my job experience. No doubt, no question. Easy. And then the second question, and the second thing I always tell people is they ask me, how do you go about building the Twitter following?

[00:07:58] Flo: And I always say it's a little bit like enlightenment. It's like if you seek it, you cannot get it. It's you. Don't overthink it. Just tweet all day. Go it go after volume, go after quantity more than quality. There is no such thing as a tweet with negative views. So by, by definition, every tweet gets you more attention and just tweet all day, tweet about anything that crosses your mind anytime you are.

[00:08:20] Flo: In a meeting, anytime you hear something interesting or something funny, just tweet about it and embrace the fact that you are going to get it wrong and it's gonna take you six or 12 months to find your voice. You're gonna be cringe and bad for the first six or 12 months, and it does not matter.

[00:08:35] Flo: Nobody gives a shit. Nobody cares about you. The worst thing that can hap that can happen is that you get no visibility. It's not even that people will forget about the bad stuff that they saw about you. It's that they literally won't even see it. They literally won't even be aware of it. So the only world where people are aware of you is a world where you're good.

[00:08:52] Omer: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to think about it. So when you say po tweet or day, what are we talking about? Like how frequently were you or how many times a day were you posting.

[00:09:02] Flo: I actually once had a script that was running on my server that would every day send me a notification, like an email saying, Hey, you've tweeted X times today, and my objective was 20 times a day.

[00:09:13] Flo: So that gives you a feel and it sounds like a lot, but like some of these tweets are like brain farts, like my most successful tweets. So that's another thing I've learned is like there is this quote I love that's like nobody knows anything. It's like a very famous movie star or director who spent his career making movies, and it's no one knows anything.

[00:09:28] Flo: You've spent 30 years of your life making movies, you'd still don't know whether our movie is going to work out or not. So it's just optimized for number of swings of the bat is what Mark Andris calls it. And some of my most successful tweets, like there was one of them in particular, I was literally on vacation with my girlfriend.

[00:09:45] Flo: I was on a beach in Hawaii. We were like wrapping up. It was like there was like a towel on the beach. She was like, all right, let's go home. Okay, sounds good. Oh, I just had an idea for a funny tweet, and literally she was like, wrapping up the towel. I like, pick up my phone. I tweet the tweet. It took me 30 seconds.

[00:09:57] Flo: It was a brain fog, like ahaha. This is funny. All right, let me finish wrapping up. That tweet went crazy viral was one of the members most successful tweets ever. It's just, it just it. Brain farts. Just tweet anything that's on your mind.

[00:10:09] Omer: I and do you think for somebody who is on Twitter or X today?

[00:10:13] Omer: And doesn't have a lot of followers, hasn't tweeted a lot and maybe they've been on the platform for a few years, but they haven't done much with it. Is it still worth them investing time to do that?

[00:10:27] Flo: Absolutely. Does new accounts coming out all the time that, like in, in the span of six months pick up.

[00:10:31] Flo: To like hundreds of thousands of followers. I will say that the Cold Start problem is real. I honestly, I've been on Twitter like 17 plus years at this point, so I don't really remember how I cold started my account. I think the typical piece of advice that people give is be like the reply guy, and you wanna be like mindful about it and stuff, but yeah, if you bring value to people and people's replies.

[00:10:55] Flo: And I think the best way to bring value is to be funny, honestly. Just be funny. Then you can call, start your account.

[00:11:00] Omer: Yeah. Cool. Okay, great. So you've obviously invested years building this audience. What was the, it was just like a, like a video you posted of the kind of what.

[00:11:11] Omer: Lindy was about, or the vision of the, this business?

[00:11:14] Flo: It was just a video. It was like me talking to a camera again. I think one thing that you have to be on Twitter is authentic. Is authentic. It's just very authentically me talking to a camera, I was like, Hey, I'm Flo Building, I'm following Lindy. This is the product.

[00:11:27] Flo: It's pretty sweet. Sign up to the wait list.

[00:11:30] Omer: Okay, great. So that sounds like a super promising start. And then were you charging for the product like from day one? And did you, did, I forgot to ask you, did you raise any money? Like at what point did you raise the first. First, your first round?

[00:11:46] Flo: It's complicated because Lindy is a pivot from TeamFlow, so it's the same legal entity.

[00:11:50] Flo: So we raised a lot of that money for TeamFlow.

[00:11:52] Omer: How much did you raised for TeamFlow?

[00:11:54] Flo: About 50 plus million.

[00:11:55] Omer: Oh, wow. Okay. So you raised most of that at that point? Yes. Got it. Okay. Cool. All right, so well great, but there's also a lot of pressure comes with raising that kind of money.

[00:12:06] Flo: But look, the pressure comes from within.

[00:12:08] Flo: It's not like the investors are calling me every day. It's like, where's my money? It's look, if you've raised money, you've got a obligation to your shareholders. And I think frankly, your first obligation is to not spend it until you've got a good use for the capital, until you, that you can deploy it effectively, don't spend it.

[00:12:21] Flo: And so that's what I did for tfl. We raised a lot of money and I didn't spend it to this day. We've got the vast majority in of the money in the bank. And the investors were grateful. They were like, yeah, thanks for the spending the money until you could put it to good news.

[00:12:31] Omer: So what happened next?

[00:12:32] Omer: So you've got these people on the wait list. You launch the product, what happens?

[00:12:38] Flo: We build, we start taking people off the wait list. We invite them to the product. It goes wrong. The product doesn't work. It start is the end of the use. It doesn't retain. And so from there, it's just iteration.

[00:12:50] Flo: Look the YC ad age is really good and true. It's just build something people want. And the way you do that is. You talk to your users and you do what they tell you to do basically. And it's that simple. And I think the trap not to fall into here is by the way, it's not even a trap.

[00:13:08] Flo: Sometimes it works. It's like I do still think you should have a vision, so you should have a weak inductive bias towards a certain direction. I call it like climbing the Everest. So like you wanna go to the top of the Everest. You are looking for Basecamp along the way. You can't go straight to the top.

[00:13:24] Flo: If you find a base camp that's like on some other mountain, you don't go there. It's not where you wanna go. Some people do and it works out for them. It's like the whole like lean startup thing. Say, ah, fuck the vision. Just do the whatever the market wants. I think that's a miserable existence.

[00:13:39] Flo: I think as a founder, you need to find meaning in what you do. And so I think you do need that vision. And just talk to your users and build what they need.

[00:13:47] Omer: I talk to a lot of founders who are when they're at that stage, they're reluctant to ship the product. And the argument that I hear is I'm gonna get one shot at building credibility with my market, and so I need to make sure that this is right.

[00:14:04] Omer: And what happens inevitably is like this thing drags on. For months and months. So just to reassure, maybe somebody who's in that situation who maybe thinks the world is gonna end, if their first version of the product is shit. Why is that not something a big deal, as it may seem?

[00:14:23] Flo: I really love what's his name?

[00:14:25] Flo: Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder. Like that quote on him that goes if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you don't too late, you wanna confront your idea to reality is app. I don't know anything about your idea. All I know about it is that it's wrong and that's all you can know about it is wrong.

[00:14:43] Flo: And so the only way you wanna find out how wrong is in what way is app. And the way you do that is by shipping it and confronting it to reality. That's it. If you look at the V one, which you can find, you look at the V1 of Uber online or Airbnb or Facebook or Reddit or any of these websites. It was embarrassingly bad.

[00:15:01] Flo: It was barely working. And nobody remembers. Nobody gives, I think people greatly overestimate how much of a shit a lot people give about that. I forgot who it is. Who said I, I think it's Naval Ravikant who said the. Difference between the first time founder and the second time founder is the first time founder.

[00:15:18] Flo: Is, has got that mindset. He basically operates under the assumption that people care about them and so they're like hush about their idea. That's one thing that, like my pet peeve is like founder who are like in stealth mode. Also, by the way, I think it's ridiculous to be in stealth mode in public, but it's ridiculous.

[00:15:32] Flo: Let alone at a dinner table. He's bro, there's six of us. We're not gonna steal your idea. We're very busy. Just tell us and probably your idea is wrong anyway, so just tell us about your ideas. We can give you feedback. It's I can't tell you. My idea is like this precious little stuff.

[00:15:43] Flo: You have no idea how genius it is. It's if your idea is what protect you, then it's, you are you bigger trouble anyway. So anyway yeah just look at the startup. Assume that nobody cares about you. And B is the second time father who basically. Appreciates that nobody cares about them.

[00:15:58] Flo: Startups die by not making noise. No startup has died by making too much noise. Just make as much noise as possible. Cry your idea off the rooftops and hook that someone gives somewhere.

[00:16:07] Omer: When you said the product was not very good, can you gimme an example of what kind of problems users experiencing?

[00:16:13] Flo: Oh, it was embarrassing. It was like, like the agent would. Like we, we gave this demo that was like, look, I can recruit my, with my AI agent, so I'm gonna ask my AI agent like. Find me 50 software engineers in San Francisco, and then it finds the software engineers, and then you're like, cool.

[00:16:29] Flo: Now send them an email to tell them to join my startup. So then it, it sends them an email and people will try that and it, it would send an email to 50 software engineers too. It's a lot. With your, from you. And it would say something like the email buddy would say something, the user wants me to send an email to 50 software engineers.

[00:16:45] Flo: That's the email that people received.

[00:16:47] Omer: And so what, what was happening? Were you, were these, those initial customers? Were there people you knew, there were just random people who saw the post on Twitter and like how forgiving were they when things like that happened with the product?

[00:17:00] Flo: Surprisingly forgiving, very forgiving. Look, I think people self-select, they know they're signing up to a random demo that they saw on Twitter. So the majority, the vast majority of these customers were not people I knew. Almost disappointingly. So actually, like I, I could barely get by old price to s up to this thing.

[00:17:16] Flo: Like, why would you use my product? And, yeah, like when these things would happen, look, yeah. Sometimes not pissed, but my biggest fear was actually perhaps selfishly that they would post about it on Twitter. And as far as I know, no one ever did ever, like we've got many users, like many figures of many users.

[00:17:33] Flo: And to my knowledge, that's never happened. There's been one guy who posted on Twitter that he was mad that we've cost money. So you're gonna get those guys. Yeah. But, no, not surprisingly, forgiving. It's like I was mortified. I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry.

[00:17:45] Flo: Let me refund you. And they were like, nah, don't worry. It's fine. Ha. It's funny. Yeah.

[00:17:49] Omer: When we were talking earlier, you said, you also said there was a vision gap that when people would come to Lindy ai, they would have a certain idea in their mind of what they were going to get. And when they actually signed up for the product, it was very different.

[00:18:12] Omer: So aside from. The problems. What was the gap between the vision and the reality of the product at that time?

[00:18:19] Flo: The vision's always been to build an AI employee, and that's compelling in and of itself. Like even for investors. It's duh. Yeah if you can do it, which that's the, if people will want it, there's no if of will people want it.

[00:18:30] Flo: It's just pure execution risk. And it's funny, the extent to which. People buy the vision, not just investors. People sometimes also buy the vision, meaning they literally buy it. They give you money for the vision. They're like, ah, this is the vision, this is the product. And then they're like, here take a couple hundred bucks a month.

[00:18:47] Flo: And I wanna see what happens. I wanna experience the early stages of this vision, which I think is also my point about why are people so forgiving? Because they know whether they're signing up, fool again, and they self-selected deals. Very early cohort of very early adopters. They're really pioneers, and that's the cohort that you want, and that's the cohort you're going to get.

[00:19:07] Flo: Naturally. You don't need to worry about it. That's the cohort that if you're like a mechanic, you can give it like a new piece of a new engine that you've designed and it's already, it's disgusting. It's half broken, but that's the code that can get the heads do. Touch your piece of that engine and be like, oh yeah, I can see it, I can see it through the slime and this guessing grossness and brokenness of it all.

[00:19:28] Flo: And I can see what you're going for here. Yeah. So there was this gap and I think the fact that people, but that vision gave us the rope that we needed to carry through and took us a year and a half or two years.

[00:19:39] Omer: How did you position the product? Two years ago? It doesn't sound like a long time, but in the world of ai, it probably.

[00:19:47] Omer: And when you describe it in terms of workflow people, what do people know? They might know, like Zapier and so some people might assume it's like that. Other people may hear the vision and, think it's something much more than it actually is today.

[00:20:07] Omer: So how easy or hard was the. The positioning and having clear messaging for people in terms of what Lindy was and where it fit in the market.

[00:20:18] Flo: It, I wouldn't call it hard because once you understand the framework, it's not that hard. So basically the framework, there's a book that this, that's called the positioning, the Battle for Your Mind.

[00:20:28] Flo: I believe the author's name is Al Ries, and the analogy he uses for positioning is. You want to position against what all the exists in the prospect's mind. So here's this analogy of Velcro. It's like Velcro. The way it looks and works if you zoom in is you've got hooks and loops. You've got hooks that just grab onto the loops and that's how it sticks.

[00:20:49] Flo: And so it's does these two sides and the hooks exist in the prospect's minds? There are things that are already there. You cannot, I position in the vacuum, you've gotta be mindful of what all exists there. And you've gotta design your loops around these hooks. You can't just be this new thing.

[00:21:03] Flo: And what we did and from a positioning standpoint, what started working is you, we started to position actually ourselves against Zapier. There's this other framework from April Dunfield that's also called positioning that I really recommend. And she does recommend basically picking your positioning in a way that puts you the best light.

[00:21:24] Flo: So our first positioning was AI employee. Why does it put us in the best light? Employee already exists. You know what an employee is and it puts you in the best light because it's so obvious in which way and AI is better than the human employee. It's like a hundred index, faster, better, and all of that stuff.

[00:21:38] Flo: The reason why that was a bad positioning is because the product was just falling too short of that. So the second positioning that ended up really working was. Zapier of ai. We had the tagline that was like, if Zapier and Chat GPT had a baby. And then we ended up retiring that tagline because we learned, to my surprise, I thought Zapier was like a household brand name.

[00:22:01] Flo: But no, actually, like a lot of people would join our website and be like, what the is Zapier oh, actually we actually Advertis our biggest competitor on the, so again, never mind, but. I call, it's the notion head fake, like Ivan, I think he calls it like a chocolate covert broccoli, where notion, obviously immensely successful company, but it took them a while to be successful.

[00:22:21] Flo: And Notion 1.0 was not successful 'cause it was really putting front and center, that vision they had of these Lego bricks, this building blocks that you can use to build whatever software you want. So it was this weird, alien new thing that's hard to understand. Notion 2.0 was a note taker. It was a wiki.

[00:22:41] Flo: You sang up you see a blinking cursor you can take notes like, oh my god, this, it's, you know what it is? It's a note taker notion is not a note taker. Ivan never set out, that was not his vision to build a note taker, right? He only to build a no-code app platform. But by pretending it was a notetaker, it made it so much more accessible.

[00:22:56] Flo: And he told me he was like, many founders resist the comparison to things that exist. Because their startup is this one beautiful, unique snowflake. But no, he says, you should embrace the comparison. Like Familiar is good, it's alien. That's bad. It's confusing. That's bad. And being familiar, does let you tap into these hooks that exist in people's minds.

[00:23:18] Flo: So Lindy 2.0, Zapier of AI, and even the product looked very similar to Zapier. All of a sudden, the 1.0 was more of an alien product, like a new type of thing. Like this agent builder. The 2.0 is the current incarnation of the product is this thing where you have these like boxes and arrows under the hood.

[00:23:34] Flo: It's a very different thing actually. It's not a workflow dimension platform, it's an agent builder, but it looks very similar.

[00:23:41] Omer: You've got the 30 users, it's not working quite like it's supposed to. You're having these conversations, you're improving the product, you're iterating all that stuff.

[00:23:53] Omer: And I wanna talk about what happened last year, when sort of growth really took off, but just describe to me what was going on up until that point, up until about May last year. How, how much growth were you seeing? What did churn look like?

[00:24:11] Flo: Until the 2.0 until things started working?

[00:24:14] Flo: It was like middling growth. It was really just like chugging along, like painfully and like you could tell things weren't working. I really love this quote. I think it's from market reason. I forgot who said it. It's until you have product market fit. It's like pushing a boulder uphill and after you have it, it's like chasing the boulder downhill.

[00:24:32] Flo: And at first I misunderstood the quotes because until you have product market fit you think it's like product market fit is the holy grail. Actually it's a pretty mundane thing. It's like every successful business out there has product market fit, and there's a lot of successful businesses out there.

[00:24:44] Flo: So it's ah, the holy grail. And once you have it, you're chasing the boulder downhill. And then it's forever after everything is perfect. It's no, actually chasing the boulder downhill is also hard. It's a different type of hard, it's a much better type of hard, but it is hard. It's really hard.

[00:24:56] Flo: And we felt it almost overnight once we had it. And it felt like chasing the boulder downhill, it was like, oh my God. It's overwhelming. Like everything is breaking. Like we have more customers than we can handle. The servers are breaking, like Google with exactly, with exact we're not gonna do bed tonight.

[00:25:09] Flo: It's it's crazy. It's overwhelming. And so for us, that happened once we released TeamFlow sorry, Lindy 2.0.

[00:25:16] Omer: And that, that was triggered by like somebody who came to you back about five, six months earlier asking you how they wanted to use or at least telling you. How they wanted to use Lindy.

[00:25:30] Flo: Yeah, so we had this moment at some point where we the idea of Lindy 2.0 and of Zapier of AI started blooming in our minds. So we started deciding to rebuild the product. We rebuilt it, we released it, and at first we decided not to announce it, which was a mistake. Again, you should make as much noise as possible.

[00:25:48] Flo: You should announce everything possible. We decided not to announce it. We decided to first quietly put it in the hands of users, which. Even when you say it like this, it's like such weak cheeks. Oh, let's just quietly. It's no, let's just make a splash all the time. So quietly put it in the hands of users and five days after we quietly put it in the hands of users.

[00:26:07] Flo: MattVidPro, he's this YouTube influencer whom I am so very grateful for. Picked it up. He was one of these customers was paying more for the vision than for the actual product. 'cause he could see it. And he was like, he tried Lindy 2.0 and he was like, oh my God, this is awesome. He really liked the new version and he made the video about it where he was he who was extolling the new product, it was like, oh my God, this is I've tried all of them. This is by far the best these guys have been cooking. And then things really started ticking off. And at first we started just be like a one time spike. But actually it wasn't, it's just inflected and forever continued on this trajectory and it's actually kept accelerating since.

[00:26:45] Omer: But what would drove you to rebuild the product?

[00:26:48] Flo: It wasn't working, so there was one time in particular where we had a big prospective customer that, that we were talking to, we were talking to customers all day, all the time. And there was this one that gave us a list of exact use cases that they wanted.

[00:27:03] Flo: And it clicked at that moment because that's when we realized okay. This is actually pretty similar to what we, from what to what we've heard from this and that. And that is our customer. And the product today cannot do it. And most importantly, the product, the current plan will not allow the current product to do it well, very far from that, I think for a very long time we were like overly caval or ah, the model will get better.

[00:27:29] Flo: And we were like no. This guy needs this to work every single time and the current paradigm is broken. We need to rethink the paradigm that the product is built over. So that's when it clicked.

[00:27:38] Omer: And the 2.0 took you about five or six months to build. Yeah. That's a big investment to make.

[00:27:45] Omer: It's, you said nothing was working, but you still had revenue. You were still doing what, over like a 100K MRR around that time.

[00:27:52] Flo: Yeah, little about.

[00:27:54] Omer: So it's not you have no customers and you can do whatever you like. There's still some level of risk and a pretty long time to, to spend building something, not knowing whether it's going to.

[00:28:06] Flo: I think that's something, I guess I'm like doing a bit different. And I've received positive feedback about it from investors, perhaps surprisingly. They've at first I thought they were joking in a bad way. They were like, ah, Flo I guess you'll, you're never afraid of rap just destroying your entire existing business.

[00:28:20] Flo: Are you? And I was I'm like, I'm sorry. They're like, no, it's good. ‘Cause look like nobody's in this game to make a million bucks a year. I'm not in this game. Investors are not in this game. Maybe some funders who are listening to us on this game, you shouldn't be in this game in a world where billion dollars a year, businesses exist. Why would you build a 1 million bucks a year of business? You should go after the billion bucks a year business like Absolutely. And I always knew that like it's a 99.9% of our revenue existed in our future, not our present. And so I eyes on the price.

[00:28:50] Flo: So yeah we had this existing customer base. We, you could, first of all, you can look at the metric, but most importantly you can fit it in your guts. You just know it's not working and. I was like, yeah, like this is not working and this new vision and Belgium is so much more exciting to all of us.

[00:29:04] Flo: And we felt a lot more optimistic about it. So yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna do that.

[00:29:08] Omer: And so that was around I think you said October time and then growth just took off. In large part in thanks to your YouTuber friend Matt, who you don't do you even know him? He was just like some random dude.

[00:29:23] Omer: Who created that video?

[00:29:25] Flo: I don't know him. I don't even know if I've met him. I think I should I think we sent that email like, Hey, thanks that, but we should have done a podcast with him or something. We should have said like a box of chocolates at least or something.

[00:29:33] Flo: Yeah.

[00:29:34] Omer: And then okay, so things take off and now you are feeling like you're chasing that boulder downhill. It's growing and now, it's, in many ways I've had to find, to describe it to me like. The train is now really moving fast, but it still feels like the wheels could come off at any minute.

[00:29:53] Flo: Oh yeah. Big time. And they do come off. They do come off. Yeah. We just yesterday morning we had one of these moments where we're like, the wheels are coming off and actually it was a false alert, but 8:00 AM some member of the team sends a message like, Hey guys, there's this like really bad business situation.

[00:30:08] Flo: Like this metric is way down. Like a business metric is way down week over week. Like we need to jump on it right now. And so war room, everybody jumps in the room together and says it's okay, step one, like there's basically understand and do, there's are two buckets, so understands jack is his name.

[00:30:22] Flo: Go look at the data. I wanna understand the funnel. I wanna understand how the conversion has been training over time, like A, B, C, D, E, right? In the meantime, we don't have time to, to wait for Jack to come back, but do come back to us in half an hour or one hour, and you like, go and do we're gonna change this and that, and the funnel, like right there, and it turns out it was a full sail, like Jack got back to a studio six.

[00:30:41] Flo: He's like, all guys, everything's fine. But anyway it does feel like that the wheels are gonna come off cove all the time.

[00:30:47] Omer: The other thing that happened was suddenly you had a lot of competitors come out, into that space. So you, there've been products out there who are doing very some similar things to Lindy.

[00:30:59] Omer: But then also like even people who aren't building a product similar to Lindy are using messaging about AI agents. The ability, and so suddenly things get very confusing, I think in the market, at least for, for the end user who's like trying to decide what the hell do I use?

[00:31:18] Flo: Yeah. I think it's surprising because I compare it to the universe, you know how there's like literally tens of trillions of stars in the universe, and yet the universe is 99.99% empty space.

[00:31:30] Flo: I think it's the same thing here. It's like there's a lot of AI agents platform out there. Yet when we talk to customers and when we talk to the market and to our users, we don't see them. I, again, I think here the cliche answer is also true. It's focus on your business, on focus on your customers.

[00:31:45] Omer: Yeah. I think that's great. Alright. We should wrap up. Let's get into the lightning round. I've got seven quick five questions for you. Ready? What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:31:55] Flo: Build something people want.

[00:31:57] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:32:00] Flo: Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand.

[00:32:03] Flo: Every human should read. Atlas Shrugged. It's been the most foundational book for me and my personal philosophy. I wouldn't be here in life or even geographically. I wouldn't be in the US if it wasn't for this book. Why do I recommend it? I recommend it because it puts forth this vision of man as and men's mind as a creative force and it depicts in, in, in visceral.

[00:32:23] Flo: Detail, the forces that stand in the way of that force, that creative force.

[00:32:28] Omer: Wow. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:32:33] Flo: Unstoppability.

[00:32:34] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit things?

[00:32:39] Flo: The app is I've been using it for 20 years now. And the habit for me is don't confuse goals and tasks. People are always like, there's this todo list. I don't care about the todo list, like the two goal list I almost wanna call it. So I make it a point to have my goals in my todo list and I try to look at my goals more than I look at my tasks.

[00:32:57] Omer: That's nice. I love things as well. I use it. What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:33:03] Flo: I would love, I, I really love the whole Charter City movement. I Balaji, who's a friend of mine, had this crazy idea that I keep thinking about. It's let's buy some cruise ships or lease or some cruise ships and put them in international waters and let's build a city on the water.

[00:33:18] Flo: I, I, to this day don't understand why that would not be possible.

[00:33:22] Omer: What's a, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people dunno?

[00:33:26] Flo: I am from a quite poor background. I moved here to the US 12 years ago after reading Atlas Shrugged with basically no money, no plan, no job, no network. And I spoke actually very poor English back then, so I had to also ramp that up.

[00:33:42] Omer: And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:33:46] Flo: Outside of what? What do you mean? What do you mean? Outside of my work? No, seriously though I don't I basically work. That's all I do. I think there's, you have time enough in your life for two things just to, and you've gotta pick between work.

[00:33:59] Flo: Family fun health, I'm sorry to say learning friends. That's it. And so I, me, it's my work and my family. My family is basically my girlfriend and my cats. And I read, and I try to exercise.

[00:34:15] Omer: Awesome. Thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for unwrapping the story and sharing some of your experiences along the way.

[00:34:22] Omer: If people wanna check out Lindy, they can go to lindy.ai. And if folks wanna get in touch with you,

[00:34:29] Flo: flo[at]lindy.ai, hit me up and x, A-L-T-I-M-O-R on X.

[00:34:35] Omer: Awesome. Thanks man. It's a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[00:34:39] Flo: Thank you so much, Omer.

[00:34:40] Omer: My pleasure. Cheers.