YouSaid · the spoken record

Dmitry Gurski

lines on the record: 102
first: 2024-09-23
most recent: 2024-09-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I will do that much earlier because start of monetization unlocked for us flywheel of value creation and it's very simple. When you start monetization you're getting revenue and you may use this revenue to build product or to raise big around and then you create better product and flywheel starts to work with and you invest more and more and more and distance between you and competitors is getting bigger and bigger and when you don't have monetization you should be very scrappy and development is very frugal and development is very slow.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four years We had the substantial audience when we started monetization because we started monetization in 2018 and product existed for three years up to this moment.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You because your model works just when users stay and continue to pay for yours, or it would be just a trade meal and you would exhaust gross very, very fast.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of subscription monetization the most significant is retention because if you are very good in selling you may convince people to pay for almost anything but much more tricky is that you provide so good service then they would continue paying retention should be good and it's the main sign of success of this business model but this business model I believe is the best model to create good product because your incentives are aligned with user because user pay just when you create long-term value and it motivates you to create long-term value because if for example you monetize your product I don't know by one-time payment then you would optimize for conversion if you mainize your product by advertising probably you would try to increase engagement as possible what we see in media but in case of subscription you really optimize for work”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just experimentation. Usually we decided that based on experiments when we are creating something and we are deciding to make it free or put behind paywall, we are testing to see how it would influence revenue, but also how it would influence retention. And for us, it always balance of two metrics. And we would never accept experiment, which would increase revenue a lot, but also which would just drove. And it's a combination of these g metrics. The best is when retention is the same, but revenue is growing.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest lesson from pricing that you should not make your decision just based on price. You should understand the full funnel because you may increase your price, but you would decrease retention or activation or you would destroy your user acquisition and then your ultimate revenue would be smaller. It means that ultimately you should decide based on top line and bottom line in your P&L and optimized for that and then all this internal parameters you should look on them together because you should optimize the function of many variables if you talk about mathematics because it's not just about optimizing of price, it's about optimizing of five, six variables simultaneously and you should optimize them to find like the best combination when you're getting the most revenue from your product.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really changed what we didn't understand when we started monetization seven years ago, that having to pay people for subscription is changing because when we started monetization, our dream was maybe we would monetize 5% of American audience because that time it was quite a bar. Now we monetized maybe if we exclude teenagers 25, 30% of our American audience and we don't see that our monetization is slowing down but it's not just because the product is becoming better what's true it's not just because our experimentation was true it's also because people accepted idea to pay for subscriptions and it was huge cultural change and without that it would be impossible cultural shift”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely the same. I would even say that I'm getting more anxiety because now my responsibilities are even bigger. For me this round was kind of, you may imagine that it's like a sport when you're jumping through the bar. And when you're progressing, you put your bar high and higher. And one moment my bar became one meter high and I look on this bar and worrying. Could I jump so high? Couldn't I? At least I will make the best attempt.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question about this comment that I can't sell myself. I think it's pretty natural because of my imposter syndrome and inferiority complex and I'm not even playing with my natural state but also I think it's my superpower because I'm always so insecure about my position position of the company that I am always trying to do my job the best because I never feel comfortable and it's my pretty natural state and I believe that a big part of my success is just because of my imposter syndrome and it's like strange way you get your superpower but what is true”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should buy even Apple spend much resources to explain that you're not like arriving to shop and you're getting your iPhone in gray box. It should be beautiful, it should be very attractive and the same with monetization. It's a balance between value and how you sell this value and you should find proper balance between that you may be too focused on selling like over promise or you may be like us we did at the beginning you may create value but you may undersell and everything should be right it should be right balance”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is interesting because, and I'm coming back to our discussion about Brandon PR, our big mistake at the very beginning was belief that it's enough to create value and people would buy. But then we started to understand that also we need to sell. We need to explain product, we need to experiment. We started to do that and just one number. Conversion to premium on unboarding increased in several years eight times 800% because of optimization because of hundreds of AB tests and because of this approach that we should not just create value, we need to explain value we need to sell and it was huge shift in mindset in the company because before that kind of it's significant it's just to create the best product and people will see and buy no you also should explain why they”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course, of course, of course. And it's easier nowadays when we have proven that our product is monetizable and we may achieve success, but it was really difficult at the beginning when I had combination of my weird personality and all the combination of disbelief in our model, in our product because we didn't have benchmarks to show that I look like this success and we will make the same success because it was first product of such kind and nobody believed that it's possible to build something magnetizable or successful.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much easier, much easier because investors, especially in big funds, you usually start your conversation not with partners or mentioned partners, but with analysts or with principals. And these people usually have profile kind of graduated in Harvard and be in Stepford or graduated in Stanford and being Harvard. And they believe in people like them. And they don't believe in people like me. And it's really difficult to bridge this barrier of this elite because they really kind of sort you out. And I understand like Zergaza many tokens about this problem that it's so difficult minorities of any kind race. And I may say that It's true, it's true because you just sort it out at this level of right people.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had moments when I doubted that maybe we are doing something wrong and maybe I'm not the right person. And for me, fundraising was also much more difficult because of my origins, my accent, and because I'm kind of not a kind of right profile and I was pretty weird type for investors. It made my job of fundraising much more difficult.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because venture capital investment is default now game. And you may be very good, but in any case, you will get 100 nodes to get one yes. And what's the most difficult for founders is that he in this mindset, when every day you're getting no, no, no, no, no. And it's soul breaking. It's really difficult. Even layoffs are simpler because layoffs are computation, cut and you are just in two or three weeks and you continue your work. But fundraising is like just like it's each day you are getting no and you're starting to lose a belief in yourself and you starting to feel that maybe”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think times have come back. It means it was a period of time between approximately 2019 to 2022 when it was true, but nowadays it's quite difficult to raise capital, it's quite difficult. Again, the same.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's to the question what is the most required trait of the founder? And my personal opinion is that founder must be crazy. Because if you are smart and you may understand your odds, why would you decide to start something with chances of success like one, two, three, four, five percent? It's better to play lottery. Smart people, they work in McKinsey. And founders, they're crazy. Because it's not rational, you're just crazy. You can't justify that by any rational thinking. Why would you do something with lots of success in one person?”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was more kind of they just decided to invest to us because we had success before with apps and it was not like a big belief in our idea but more belief that these guys will figure out something because they had success before. And I think they had arguments because it was so contrary. But probably it was the best or one of the best investment for the fund in history of this fund. You are like a seed round investor, real estate investors. You just need one investment like that in your life and you're done. You can see you will be rich.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“300,000 valuation was 3 million, but remember company was in Belarus and it was 10 years ago. Everything was much cheaper. But you may believe that it's extremely good.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say that the most significant early days is not to die too early because usually you need to iterate several times to find something that works. And if you increase speed but you waste your resources on the way, probably it's a bad advice. If you combine your speed with right spending of resources and you just you have your 1 million and it's enough to make three for five iterations rather than one then speed is the right word. But I would not say that it's about speed. It's about right distribution of resources to have several chances for success.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, but many ways to be successful. It's a very simplistic way of thinking that this manual how to run a company, like in page 100, do that. Page 110, do that. If you look on history of any company or any CO, you would see that everything is so nuanced, everything is so unique, every journey is so unique. Nothing you may say you should do that and you shouldn't do that. You just should understand your strengths. You should understand your way. You should not do something what is natural for you. But then there are thousands of ways to be successful and you just should choose your way to be successful and make your company successful.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It means I'm very generous in spending money for product and I'm very frugal, very greedy to spend money not for product. And when I see budget for something like several hundred thousand and I don't understand the impact, I bet I would spend this money for product and I take this money and move this money to product. Sometimes even up to extremes. For example, I never use business class because all the time, and I am running company with 200 million in revenue, probably it's the time to start using business class for the CO. But I never use business class even in my trips to United States, even Seattle or San Francisco, because all the time I'm thinking, okay, 5, 10,000, I would better to pay one month of salary to developer in Lithuania than to waste this money for my comfort. And I was like, take this money and put this money into your product. It's my philosophy.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just don't feel that I understand why this topic and very often people, there are few words people use for everything and for any situation and they're often without any meaning to placeholders. Brand and culture. You may describe everything by brand and you may describe everything by culture, but usually doesn't have any sense and you need to ask clarifying questions because you always may say Our situation is bad because we have bad brand or our situation is bad because we have bad culture. Yeah, it describes everything and nothing. And talking about PR, I think it's slightly different. It's mostly about my internal belief that product defines everything and I always very frugal in spending money out of product.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't understand what is brand, and once I try to understand maybe years ago, I was in process of hiring of Chief Marketing Officer and I had maybe 30 different candidates to meet. I was asking the same question, what is the brand by your opinion to 30 different CMUs? And I got 30 different answers.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we started monetization and when we got monetization, it was just like kind of you put money and you get money back, you put money, you get money back.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, yes, because up to the very recent times we didn't spend money for pay to the acquisition. It was organic growth, and it was organic growth because users liked our products and metrics of our product were so good that App Store on Google Play were promoting it. But we started to spend more or less significant money for paid user acquisition maybe in 2020-2021. Before that it was rather minuscule volume.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't think that we would get a big share of the market so fast because market was formed and competitive and I didn't have hope to get a big share of this market with hundreds of competitors easily but it happened.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Andrew from Flum Capital. In this deck, you know, you're always saturating your future in decks for venture capitals. We didn't believe in these numbers. And we probably shouldn't when you're presenting that investors. And we said, in 2020 or 2022, we will have 3 or 4 million month selective users and 3 million in revenue and company will cost 20 million. Probably real numbers like 10 times bigger at least.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably. But also, I remember again from this first deck for C round. And as I understood you met with our first investor of Lint Capital.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much more difficult nowadays than it used to be 10 years ago. Much more difficult. Sometimes it happens and more often because of virality. But in most of cases, you need to start this process by paid user acquisition. But if your product is shitsy, it will not be helpful.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The single predictable way how to get organic traffic. Because if you have a big MO, then people would advise your product and then you would start to get organic traffic. And now we have mostly organic traffic because of volt of mouse rather than because of such generous generalistic searches like Pyrrho Tracker. But again, if you ask me what's prerequisite of organic traffic, I would say retention is prerequisite of organic traffic because first you need to get active audience. Users should get happy. They will start to advise your product and then you will get organic traffic. And probably the biggest question is how to get Initial audience organically.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most significant was to create the best product. And the best product means that users were happy and they providing good ratings and then system of promotion of app store and Google Play started to work because they have algorithms which promotes good apps and they usually look on retention, average rates and other parameters and if your app is really good it's like algorithm promoting your app at the top of the same as this website and because the product was good we got our first traffic just organically but it was general traffic based on kind of searches like Peru Tracker. But then when because of retention we started to get bigger and bigger and bigger audience then vault of mouse started to work and volt of mouse is”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we concluded that very, very early and significantly because of our deep analysis of the market. I recently reviewed my first deck for our seed round in 2016 and this idea of BLAC super app based on PureTracker was already in this document. It means that it was a very early idea. It just took like 90 gears and 150 million of just product investment he created and probably that moment we didn't anticipate that it would take so long and so much money.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tracker would become driver requisition and most significant retention, but all these features around would create value. It's something similar on Gmail ecosystem, like Gmail itself drives acquisition and retention, but these apps for documents editing for calls, etc., drives value. But if you take out email, it would not work. And the same with PeruTracker. But if you don't have the system, it's not monetizable because the value is just too tiny.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, retention is user case, like you may improve retention by good product, or you may destroy retention by bad product, but the essence of retention is a natural user case. A natural user case based on natural nasty for women, you organize live round cycle. You can't skip that. You may skip Jim, but you can't skip period. And because of that, retention is very good. But then our big idea was, okay, if it's so unique and retention is so high, could we build something more than period tracker based on that? And the ultimate reason why flow became so successful was this idea of kind of super app. Let's take PRTR tracker as a core product and let's run this Puritra by DPA movable health features and content.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like a gym business model to sell 1,000 membership for gym with capacity in 100 people because Jims knows that like 900 people would never visit. And why apps would work better than Gyms? Of course it's about nature of people. They wouldn't. It's so rare to see good retention and health and fitness. And when I saw that, I understood that it will be very huge.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that moment when we launched Flo, maybe one month ago, I immediately understood that it had chanced to become really big because of retention. I saw like a retention I had never seen before, and we had many apps. I just combined few numbers, like total response bar market, women, and retention. And I understood that potential is tremendous. By combination of this g matrix. And retention is really rare in health and fitness, pretty naturally, because retention is not about product. Retention is about user case, what many people don't understand. Retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. It means that you may create the perfect app for gym, fitness app, and perfect app for gym will have terrible retention Y, because Jim is themselves have terrible retention.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good to have good competitors because you have much opportunity to learn from them and good competition speed up your own company because you just feel this competition, your team feels this competition team is not getting complacent. Pretty much like a fixed pie mentality that I should have a monopoly to take this pie. No, when you have good competition, pi is getting bigger because products are better, customers are more educated and the total market is getting bigger. Of course, nobody wants to be in this kind of red blood, like red blood ocean market when you have tiny margin and a ton of competition. But in case if it's normal competition, it's good. It's good.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“product adjust the product up to this moment 150 million we mostly had engineers in eastern europe like to understand that in standards of uk or united states you should multiply that on two and then we created this big flaw this super app because of this investment and this product became so good so much better than competitors then it won naturally but at the beginning all our products were almost the same and difference was very tiny”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that it's very similar at the beginning with a race. All cars starts approximately at the same point or the same point and all cars are the same. And then you need like a little advantage. But then when you're making many, many, many rounds, you're getting more and more and more distance. It means that it's almost kind of bifurcation point. You are getting a little advantage at beginning and then in years your advantage is becoming huge. And ultimate reason behind that, that it's a flywheel. Like it's just a cumulative effect of many things. And at the beginning, our apps were honestly pretty much similar. But then probably we did some good product decisions. We got additional resources and we started to invest your product much more than our competitors. We invested”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it may be right about absolutely new category of something. But when we started our product, our market was enough big and already formed. We had hundreds of competitors and some of them big and some of them raised a significant capital. And for example, let's imagine one of our competitors glow. It was started by Max Levschin, a key member of PyPalMafia. They raised from Anderson Horowitz and Founders Fund 30 million almost immediately. They started three years before flow. And we had such competitors and it was rather formed market. It was not empty market, but it was also opportunity to learn from them. It was good opportunity to not to be a newcomer, but have advantage to learn from other products.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In each product team, and we are talking with users all the time. Then we combine that with data from the web, and we are making decisions subjectively. And it was our way to make a good product for users without any own knowledge about this field, to listen users and doctors very, very carefully and be very humble about all knowledge.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Health apps. I have never had any motivation, for example, to work in gambling. If you propose me one billion, I would not take your position in gambling companies, just like I just don't want. It's against my values and I don't have any interest to that. We understood very well the size of problem because we had the experience with health and fitness apps before. But question about knowledge. We didn't have knowledge. But also we had humility to understand that we didn't have knowledge. And because of that, we started to analyze and we started to listen users and doctors. And I remember that before starting flow, our document about this market and potential product had 700 pages. And still, we are making still all decisions based on data and based on user research. We have done in flow more than one thousand of user researchers. We have user researchers.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say that any general advice is bad, any general advice is bullshit. Every time when you say something like any sentence with every general advice is bad. This advice is bad as well because this advice is just like it assumes that each situation is the same but no, no, no, life is very nuanced and each situation is very different and usually when people ask this question they assumed two different questions. One question is if it's not about your own pain how did you find motivation and if it's not your pain how did you find knowledge and motivation I always wanted to do something meaningful it was about books it was about our other”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These apps that he complicated, and what we definitely learn from experience with consumer-facing products that for consumers, simplicity is the most significant, it's much more significant than number of features, it's much more significant than anything. Simplicity is the key of success in consumer facing products. Probably we created this first apps being beautiful sophisticated but too complicated for people it's my theory but honestly nobody knows it's always very irrational at the beginning”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would create successful Pure Tracker and we just started and it was immediate success. But even with our experience, good success with flow from the short attempt. The first period tracker failed. The second period tracker failed and just a certain failed.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, we had much more than two. We had two attempts to create successful period tracker. But before floor, me and my brother and Pertnus, we started two dozen different apps, some of them successful, some of them less successfully. Overall, my brother and me participated in different projects for different extent We had success with these apps. We had six exits up to this moment we had exit to Google, exit to Facebook, we started several companies has revenue in 100 million, 50 million. It means that it was quite a journey before floor, like it was five, six years of work before floor. It was not so simple, then we just”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mushroom gathering and founding of floor. 20 years That it was a long professional journey before we found it. I Half of my professional life in book publishing. I wrote books by myself, computer books, and then we worked with my brother for publishing house, and then we started our own publishing house. And I spent approximately 10 years in this world of books, and I was responsible for approximately 2,000 titles of educational books. And once I had a big pleasure from this work because it was so much working with something and you're getting material result, it's almost like you're getting your baby and you may touch it. It was very physical pleasure with these books. And then very big change happened when App Store was opened in 2008, 2009. And that moment we decided to work with mobile apps and idea was very simple to start from”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First job for money was gathering of mushrooms. We had two types of kids in our village, gatherers of berries. Gazrius And it was two different types of businesses. Because in case of berries, Like just sits in the same place in the wood and approximately you may gather the same volume of berries per day and stable income. In case of mushrooms you should walk around the wood and if you like you may get much mushrooms and a lot of money. But another day you will get nothing. Psychologically all kids were divided into two categories. Prefers fixed income or who preferred a martial gathering. And I'm in my brother. We always were mushroom gatherers. We always preferred to take a chance for bigger gains and to have this journey around the wood rather than to sit on the place for fixed income.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Garden because, like, if it's like bad harvest of potatoes and vegetables or apples or something, and something you will have to eat, but you can't fake that.”
2024-09-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health: Scaling to $1BN Valuation, 75M Users & Getting 100s of No's From Investors Along the Way with Dmitry Gurski · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source