YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthieu Rouif

lines on the record: 63
first: 2023-10-23
most recent: 2023-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, I think we are in the dictionary. You function something. You know, our vision is I talked about Nike, but really what we want to give is every entrepreneur, every professional, the poor to create Nike level visuals. This kind of visual agency that's poured by AI that does the job and automates that iterates. And design is a reaction from, so it's evolving fast. It will increase the quality of the content that's generated, segmented for all the, if you're a small entrepreneur, like the trend is there are more and more small businesses, very small businesses selling on Shopify, on Amazon, on marketplaces. So we're going towards a more diverse world in terms of e-commerce. We just helping people to thrive in that, to be proud of what they do, like good visual. I mean, good visual for your show or like your proud of yourself when you have the show, like the TikTok content is amazing. So we want them to be proud of what they do. They start a chef. You start a restaurant. It's great to be proud of what you do.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a product builder, you come with a lot of insights, a lot of things you want to build, and you're not like, I made a lot of progress on, for instance, storytelling and really being efficient at scaling. And I mean, that's kind of a bias. Like, you don't do YC if you don't want to scale and do like $1 billion in revenue. So I think it's like a nurturing bias phenomenon. And we still talk to them. We still talk to our partners all the time and they're really helpful. Where we”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's something you want to challenge someone towards it should be public especially. So we try as much as possible to do that. And it's a good way to start from. The default should be DM. I don't know. You don't want to take some kind of screen estate in the channel and don't say something you think people don't care, but brings this transparency, this openness to just speak in the open.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. I think if you do, especially we have a very transparent culture, we have a no DMs culture. So you don't write DMs.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better is it's more diverse. I had like kind of the glass ceiling of AboPro of being like 30 French dudes and you don't account for all the needs of everyone. And now we have a more inclusive, diverse way of developing product and it's like, and you learn so much from people from different fields and different countries. The worst part is there are a few like fine details on building crafting products that are not always as easy to get. I think tools will come for that, but that would be the worst part.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing, most amazing time. Like, we did a Barvey team day about that. Yeah, we were very creative. I think creativity is a muscle. So we just find new activities all the time. And this is kind of the home of the team.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We meet once a month in Paris. We have a beautiful HQ, but the team is all over Europe, and that brings so much diversity to the team and to the product we build that. And it's such a pleasure to work with different nationalities from all over the world.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a very strong belief that you can only innovate and be creative in person. And while we started PhotoMove with Elliot and COVID hit and we just like, okay, it's time to build a remote company and be hybrid and while we're thriving, we are very international. So it really changed my mind on that.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was going to say Nike, it enables people, like this idea of pushing people to do more, like just do it entrepreneurs. And I love that part.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's just people judge the result, but it's moving so fast. It's like people don't understand how a five people team came up with an algorithm or like a ten people team. And so now there is optimization, there's product building. So it's just the beginning of building super useful, exceptional product on top of it.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not too much. I think I like to do things 100%, but I do have the kids that I see them, but there is some balance to finding that.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to think how you make them grow. You have to be an example for them. And I believe strongly that the best way to lead is like showing a strong example of the way you should do it, like being very hardworking, transparent about you do, like being an example. And I think that's the best way to lead and teach.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think Jan is a good responsible for that. They are the best PhD talents that are in the big tech labs and that are still in Paris. There's a very good undergrad system for engineering. We do a lot of math, which is good for AI. Plus, the labs create a very good environment. People did stay after that. And then amazing companies, amazing startups that are now building from Paris. You have the pool side team that moved from California to Paris. You have the Dust team, the Mistwall team. So I think the ecosystem on AI reached Escape Velocity and it's been in the building for the past 10 years and now it's like it's the best AI ecosystem in Europe. So it's escape velocity. So people just are attracted to it now.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I agree on the trend. Every three, four years, like software efficiency makes it possible for a 3x small team to make the same amount of revenue than a bigger team. And that's actually a big opportunity for entrepreneurs and investment. So I think this will definitely happen, like a 10 people team doing a billion dollar in revenue. And we're like pushing for that on impact. We actually measure how much revenue per teammate we have at FoodRoms. How do you measure the impact of teammate? And that's the good way of looking at it. You don't want not to hire someone you need because of that, obviously. And we are like, we doubled the team in the past six months. So we are growing very fast.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For product development, it's always been super interesting to see a good app is an app that a five years old can use it. We actually use that internally. We have this Mayoni model of ideal customer. And one part of that is a five years old should be able to use Photorum in terms of accessibility. And you see them, like, it's amazing how quickly they understand the UX.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We use a feedback from the users to tune, learn with the model. And what we do is we learn from how they use the product I told you about not writing problems, but we really develop the app for the user not to write prompts in the app. We realize on a mobile phone, people don't want to wait. So we make image generation less than one second. And that's like a killer feature because no one does it. And so that's kind of you make architectural choice of your model that are based on the user feedback and learning them fail in McDonald's using your app, kind of.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are very ambitious. A lot of companies are doing research based AI. I think that's quite unique about Photorum is we're really doing like user-centric AI. And when you do research, I think the failure is higher than when you're building a product.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there's a reaction, like it's kind of amplified too much. I do think it's one of the biggest opportunities of the decade at least for entrepreneurs. So starting from that, but maybe they override that part even more than it is.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So indeed, GPUs are a bit more expensive. It's more Gen AI, I think. So the margin, I mean, the cost of GPUs, but I think it will go”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the more in the business model you can align for it with your customers, the better. Going back to first principle, you want to have a system of alignment of interest and the best business model like success in that.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“UI will change dramatically. The basic inputs are going to be different. I don't think the keyboard, for instance, if you can dictate, it's such a pain on a smartphone to pull out of the screen with a keyboard. So this should go away. Voice is going to be more affordable. So a lot of instructor data from today, like images, voice are going to be much more understandable by people and by software. And I think it does change, like mobile change a lot, like with touchscreen. Well, I do think AI is going to change a lot of that.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's like we say for a human an image is worth a thousand words. Well, it's true for machines too. Like from one photo, you get more than 10,000 words of 1,000 words of things you can build on top of. So I think the input will depend on what's the job you want to get done. And we'll have a lot of changes in the way kind of the atomic part of UX, like maybe keyboard doesn't make as much sense on a smartphone in six months or stuff like that.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things. The first one, it's only the beginning, like product, so not optimized. There's so much thing people are going to build on top of what's happening right now. So just one person done. It's opening so much thing you can build on top of. It's easier to build new ways to build new ways to consume content. So that's like people that kind of judge like this is not quality enough. People have spent like a few months on that. Photom is three years old. So it's only the beginning. A more practical thing, I think, is a second misconception is people don't like to write prompts. It's kind of a common line interface and for other things it doesn't make sense to input text.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Autopilot where they come up with their restaurant where it is and we just serve that to them like we serve the visual, we automate that part.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm quite aligned with that. It's quite brutal for them, and I'm sure some will survive. But I think the problem is where I see that being very true is if you have an audience today, you have programmers, you have designers, you don't want to alienate them. You want to give them extra value. So you're kind of thinking, what can I build for them that makes their life easier? But you don't want to like have something that's kind of autopilot to replace them. It's very difficult for the incubant to say like, okay, we're going to kill the product you've been using, make it totally different, and make you useless. So that's very difficult where I think what's very interesting for the autopilot analogy is you address people that couldn't afford that before. That's what Photom is doing. And you have a small business. You can't afford a freelancer to help you. You don't have the skills. You don't have the time. Yeah, if you take the compiler. The compiler just tells you where to go, but you still need a driver, right? So what we give them is more like a”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think both benefits from it. Like it's a reshuffling, but I mean, I told you the exception story. But another part of it is like I had been working on AI. So we were the first to ship like a before Carmel exist to the iPhone framework, an app with AI to do video editing at GoPro. And one of the frustration for me is like, it's very difficult when you have an existing audience and an existing user base, an existing product to just kill it or destroy it and build something new. So I think long term, UBEF is the most are the entrepreneurs. And what I'm paranoia about is more like, what is this new team of, well, Matt and Elliott are going to build in the 2023 that is going to be something we haven't seen in the space?”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For what we are not specializing, like text, that's what we do all the time. We start from something that's open source, commoditized to understand the product value. But if you want to build a mode, you have to understand what to train and iterate for your own model. So I do think commoditization brings value to the innovation for open source, but then the best player will be able to retrain something on top of it and start really commoditizing. There is value in having the tech and understanding the training on that side.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Wu benefits the most from first the leader in the space own the full stack. So when you look at ChatGPT, they do like the product and the API. And so I do think you need to own the full stack if you want to deliver high quality product. The tech informs a product and the product informs the tech and you build this feedback loop.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On data, what matters is quality more than size, and on the model size, it's a trade-off. So it depends on what you want to do. Like bigger is higher quality, but it's also a lot slower. And what Photrom does is being 10x faster than everything on market because we are focusing on what use case. So you can take smaller model because you have a specific use case, and that's very key. So it's kind of a product trade-off when you talk to your customer. And again, that's one thing we do is we talk a lot to the users and understand what are the trade-offs they want to have with the AI part.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what's happening with AI is you have all past products that are building tech to serve their existing customers. So if you take an example, like this is the idea of the co-pilot, right? If you're an incumbent, you're a car maker, you're going to build the navigation part, you're going to build some security features. But it's just on top of what's already existing. If you're the newcomer, if you're the founder, you're building the Tesla, you're building the autopilot part where the input is like, I want to go to this place. I want it to be a scenic drive and it gets it done.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they did like a big part of the marketing was using PhotorOom to create a Barbie poster for anyone in the audience. So they use RTEC and anyone, like could create pro-quality posters. I mean, the Cartesian, Rihanna, they use that tens of millions of users. And that's like the API is taking off with that. And that's one example. So that's what we've been doing for the fast year. We're just delivering to more people with the enterprise part and the API.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All customers are like small businesses or B2B. Enterprise were already like that was our, we started with the Photrom API. So we have iOS, Android, web API. We can render the same thing, which is quite unique. And we were very successful with the API. As you sense a strong pool, and so last May, you get the Barbie movie. Love a bit of it.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we really try for is making studio quality photo accessible to any professional, any entrepreneur in the world. And I think for that, we focus on a different use case than Canva, which is more for design on your desktop, or Adobe, which is for the experts. Adobe is for the tens of millions of people that are spending the day in front of their computer and their experts. We are providing the service for people that can't afford that. So we are making it more accessible. Stenx more people because they're on their phone and it's a wider audience. But I actually don't think it's the same product that you can develop. You need to choose the one and we'll all make more than a billion in revenue. I mean, Adobe is already doing it and Canva close to that.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the dynamic is, I think you need to live with the idea of mobile software is 10x bigger than anything you'll do on desktop anyway. We're addressing 5 billion people. I mean, my kids, the first app they use is photography. They use Photorum. You know, it's like one of the first software you lose in your life is photo editing and probably the last one you'll use to. So, I mean, you're addressing 5 billion people. It's much bigger than anyone else. And for sure, any SaaS business. But it's really the top of funnel is huge and you should embrace that for a mobile subscription.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't give you the exact number, but that's the thing I would love to know from all competition. If there's one number.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in mobile subscription, there is always 10x, at least more people that are never going to pay for it. And there are always at least 10x more people that are going to be on the free plan. So the numbers, it makes sense. And actually, we have a lot of people that do screenshot of the image in the editor and just remove the watermark this way. And we actually measure that it's big if they use it a lot at some point they'll pay.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The early days, I mean, it's the word of mouth. So it's a story and it's kind of our own DNA of Fodrom is we got product market fit in the early 2020. Gary V mentioned us, we got a few eBay influencers that talked about us and we got viral, like very fast growth. And one month later, there was COVID. From one day to another, everyone can't sell offline, so you all need to go online with your products. And you can't access a photographer because you can't meet with other people. So to be honest, looking back, I didn't realize back then, but we got product market fit and like one month later COVID hit. It just like doubled down on our growth. And there was the photo and watermark. So if you go to any marketplace, you'll see Photo Watermark on a lot of listing and that got the viral growth.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can combine both. So we have 100 million downloads, like obviously not all of them are sellers, but I think it's really important in your product development roadmap when you focus to say, okay, we're going to focus on this persona. It's going to be beneficial to others, but to really the way we build it is for this person.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. We love our sellers and people doing e commerce. That's one of the best persona and kind of our early metric. People do list like on a weekly basis. So for us now, it's more of a weekly pattern we see with the app.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. In terms of metrics, I think it's really always better to talk about people. So it's like number of people doing that, like one export every week. So weekly active user is like an amazing signal for us and the signal of someone who's active. But I really love when people think of not numbers, but people are in the numbers. So I always have this number of people doing something, not like number of exports per week.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for us, it's quite simple. A user who's successful is a user exploring X number of photos every week. Someone who is engaged and who's successful”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we were very focused and driven by growth. People don't improve something they don't look at, like numbers they don't look at. So we talk about growth every week. And so people are happier when there is growth. So you have to be careful with that. But the company is growing amazing. Well, we are profitable. So it's just like, take a step back and understand what are the kind of adjacent needs of your user and go even deeper with that. I mean, it happens all the time. So you don't want to hire people that are here just for growth. You want to hire people that are here for the mission you're solving.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, yeah, exceptional growth. Actually, I think YC say they never saw a company going that fast, like with this low capital. So indeed, it's quite uncommon. Growth happens with, it's a step function. So you kind of unlock new things and you just need to be patient and talk a lot to your user, like getting back to talking to them, understanding what are their pain points and exploring that.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the first one is a challenge toward progress, you know, candid feedback. You should be able to challenge anything in the company if you think it's not going great. Even if it's not your field, second one is instant learning. So really this idea of shipping and learning from that and how really we're all learners. The last part is be an artisan. We are all makers and we really love people that master their craft and making and are the best at their craft, sharing that part with others, learning from others. So yeah, be an artisan. And that's the name of the entity in France.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spent a lot of time. I remember sitting with Elliot, like working even for our first hire thing, what are going to be the three pillars of our culture? What matters to us? So I think we did the process quite early on.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they ask for, I mean, usually people are super happy to do that. Like they love to try and have so much demand and they don't want to commit to a job. And sometimes they have already their status. They might be working with other companies at the same time. So we're very successful working with freelancer. A big part of the team has been freelancing at some point. I've been freelancing, you know.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like if the person is willing to, I think you learn a lot from working one week together. We love this model. People come to the office. It's amazing. It's actually less risk for them because the culture is such an important part when you're going to put two years after life.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing we do is we work a lot with freelancers, and that's a great way because we have so many opportunities, so they're willing to try and give them a lot of freedom and autonomy, you should be able to know in a few months if it's the right person or not.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to be efficient and you want to be able to scale fast like us, I think jumping on the yearly by default is the best option. And it's actually how you create retain users. So most of people, I kept going on yearly is a really good way to scale.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I won't give the exact numbers on that, but you can see how much people pay on a yearly subscription and you just get the money back in one month.”
2023-10-23 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scaling to $50M ARR in 3 Years, Scaling to $20M ARR with Just $2M Invested; The Story of PhotoRoom, Is This YC's Most Capital Efficient Company with Matthieu Rouif, Co-Founder & CEO @ PhotoRoom · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source