11. Product Market Fit

What’s new, reader?! How are you doing?? I hope you’re doing great. In the previous column, I told you all about our pilot test. This time, I’ll tell you about the first days of Resuelve, and the Product Market Fit.

Quick recap: we were initially asking for 2 million dollars to start, and our partners offered 2 million Mexican pesos. It really wasn’t what we were expecting, but we had angry wives because we hadn’t moved to New York; worried mothers because “we were throwing our lives away”, and they couldn’t tell their friends what exactly it was we did for a living; we had more than 100,000 USD in debt, each, and half-empty checkbooks; we had no choice but to start. Life or death, and the water was cold!

As you remember, we performed better than expected during our pilot test. We planned on getting 112 clients from September through December, and we ended up with 343. In summary, we proved that there was a demand for our service.

If you read, or at least listen to (like the cheaters Roberto Sanchez, and Fer Velasco, do), books or articles about Start Ups, one of the most recurrent topics is the famous Product Market Fit. This pretentious term essentially means: how easily would a consumer accept your service or product.

In Zorro’s words: “if people are willing to buy your product or service, regardless of how shitty you are in sales;” or said by someone a little more elegant and sophisticated, like Marc Andreessen:”to be in a good market, with a product that satisfies the market.”

Andy Rachleff, one of our Stanford professors (Yes, I’m again bragging about studying at Stanford), would say: “Often, you stumble upon your Product Market Fit. Serendipity or coincidence play their part in finding that Product Market Fit, but the process is incredibly consistent” In essence, “coincidence” comes as a result of being consistent during your entrepreneurial process.

In our case, the process was far from perfect since there were many events involved in reaching our Product Market Fit. But before answering how we convinced people to enroll in our program in Resuelve tu Deuda, let me give you some context.

You’ll remember that our first office was in, what the BSVs called, Torre Menor. The building had tenants only in 3, out of its 12, stories: us, “Frisbie” (an awesome dude whom Zorro knew from childhood, and who did all types of business existing out there), and the “BSVs” in their 50’s mobster office.

The building was practically empty, and we felt it could collapse at any given minute. Our office was on the 7th floor, in a 500 meter (1640 feet) space, of which we only used 150 meters. The rest was off limits, and some dude had built the restroom, right where the toilet had a direct view of Chapultepec’s Castle. Those were the good times, hahaha!

The lobby on our floor had a lightbulb which constantly turned on, and off, adding a “scary movie” feeling to the floor. Whenever people entered the office, they would first come across Zorro’s desk. Each time he introduced himself and mentioned he was one of the company’s founders, our potential clients would stare at him as if thinking “For sure, dude. More like the receptionist!”

One of our main challenges was to set the office. If you remember, “Fail Fast and Cheap” (emphasis on “cheap”) is one of the main reasons behind making a pilot test. So, we had to invest as little as possible, and we ended up renting phones, headsets, and telephone switches, from a guy called Fernando Trejo; with this, we were able to put together a sort of call center with 9 seats.

I was introduced to Fer, the most informal guy I’ve ever met, and therefore with debt all over the place; by my friend Andoni Belausteguigoitia “TonyB,” my oldest, worst behaved, and funniest friend.

His family are tough people from Vascoland, and his father always overworked him. When we were in elementary school, Andoni told us that his grandfather had once killed a bull with a single punch, and, also, that he had once scored a goal by making the ball, and the goalie, hit the net together. We obviously never believed him, but later, as grown-ups, we read the story in Google (Jose Maria Belausteguigoitia). Nowadays, he keeps a fish tank in his office that, according to my friends, is full of piranha. We always joke saying that he forces the hand, of those who fail him, into that fish tank.

Debt between them came to happen because Fernando tried to start a medical assistance business, and he rented an office from TonyB’s father. The building was on Chapultepec Avenue; Zorro, and I called it “Hell.” Try to picture being in a secret ETA hideout.

To enter the place, they had to open around 20 locks of a door that looked as if it were semi-armored. The air was terribly dense, and there was a sort of permanent fog generated by TonyB’s father, who constantly smoked cigars.

We had to walk down a long dark hall, and from far away, we could hear the voice of TonyB’s father shouting in a “Soviet dictator” tone: “How is it going, Javiersitooooooo? Let’s see if that asshole finally pays up!” We would then get to a second floor, and to a sort of warehouse/cavern, filled with mold and humidity, were Fernando was “trapped,” together with his call center equipment, until he could repay his debt.

TonyB helped with the negotiation with Fernando, and we reached a deal to get most of our first office’s infrastructure.

Besides what we rented from Fer, the table in our meeting room was my old gran’s dining table. It had an uneven leg and, if you leaned in, it tilted badly. So, whenever a client was about to sign a contract, the salesperson had to stand on the other side and, discretely, hold the table from underneath without the client noticing. Furthermore, we’ve bought some chairs for 10 USD; they didn’t last for long; by the end of the pilot test, we had people sitting on upside-down trash cans. In spite of all of these…. we managed to get clients.

Nowadays, having had more experience selling different products, and working with other startups, I realize that Resuelve’s Product Market Fit was crystal clear: People wanted the product. But a new question surfaced here: could we be able to negotiate with banks and clear off debt?

The answer came one day when a friend of ours (I won’t say his name, but here’s a hint: his secret nickname rhymes with Kardashian) called us because his girlfriend had spent a lot of money in Sears, and she “forgot” to pay. So, he decided to try our product and called to say: “Let’s see if your debt business works.”

Unlike with our traditional clients, we had some money to pay the debt in this case, so we called the collection department to tell them we wanted to negotiate the debt. In the beginning, we went through days of yelling, telling each other off, and directly hanging up. Yes, sometimes this happens with collection departments. What’s worse, one of them made Chaparro cry on the phone, hahaha.

Finally, we managed to schedule a meeting, in a neutral place, with one of the debt collectors. To be honest, we were afraid of visiting their offices because we didn’t know if they’d want to fight us, haha. That day, we agreed on sending Zorro to negotiate: Chaparro looked like a 15-year-old, and my pretentious accent couldn’t negotiate anything out of those people.

Oh, yes, Zorro grew a beard to look like he had “street cred’, according to Dr. Amat. After a tough back and forward, and more than one “walk-outs,” Zorro reached an agreement with the debt collector, and then and there, we had our first debt settlement. That was the first moment in which we tied a need with a solution.

You can realize that this was far from being perfect. Even worse, the steps didn’t happen in order.

• We offered a service without certainty of being able to provide it.
• We didn’t wait until having the perfect product to start.
• We dived right into it, without knowing how to “swim,” working hard, and, luckily, we came afloat.

To this date, we’ve negotiated more than 150,000 debts in 4 different countries. This amounts to, more or less, 5,5 billions of Mexican pesos in clients’ debt. Most likely, banks wouldn’t have been able to get that money back, but thanks to our clients’ will to save, and the work we do in Resuelve tu Deuda, this money is back in the financial system. Additionally, people who have entered our program, and had wanted to, have been able to, little by little, reincorporate into the credit system, restructuring their credit history,

The moral of the story is, as I’ve said before, you must go on with things by any means. Not everything will be pretty, and as they say in Resuelve’s engineering area: a lot of it will be “Fast and Dirty.” One of TonyB’s childhood heroes, Wayne Gretzky, had a beautiful quote: “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take” (excuse my pretentious English, but the translation to Spanish sounded miserable, haha).

See you! If you have any comments, questions, complains, or suggestions, nag me on Twitter. Find me as @Javivelop.

P.S. Never in your freaking difficult and bitchy life surrender!