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Matthieu Rouif

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2023-10-23
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2023-10-23
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  1. “We like the idea of being lean, but we always pay for the best tools. So we're not lean on the best tool for the team. I think we really like to hire individual contributors, and that's part of our culture. We just want to move fast and we know small team move faster. I think that's one of the reasons why we were very efficient. And then there is thinking like macro. I think there is the app store story, which is a big part of it. So Apple and Google, like the app store on mobile, they're giving you distribution. Yes, they take a cut of it, but basically it means they offer like a worldwide distribution to five billion people and you don't need like a big marketing sales team to do that. So it's very capital efficient, like a very small team product team can go a very long way. And then in terms of capital efficiency, like one of the secrets of mobile apps is people are willing to pay upfront. You have a payback of one month, so you don't need that much capital on the ad 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

  2. “I mean, I see capital as a mean, like a tool, and you can deploy it, but we never came with the idea of not spend money and we reinvest everything we can in the 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

  3. “Yeah, I think it happens to a lot of entrepreneurs. Yeah, great question. I think what's important is to see the depth in the future. And I think you become like a product and not a feature the moment you understand this feature is giving depth to what you can do. To give you an example, okay, you can say background removal. Well, it's like a feature like you do a white background. Well, first it's useful for some use cases, but being in the industry for 10 years before that, I knew, yes, but it's not only that. First, as a product, you can remove background, but you can also blur, you can focus on what's important. You can do templates, YouTube thumbnail. It's like actually it opens up a lot of opportunities for other features you can build on top of that. So I think seeing the depth that in a product that's coming from it is really important. Features that are minimal, lovable product that you execute extremely well are the beginning of a lot of successful products. I do believe like focusing and making people extremely”

    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

  4. “Yeah, first, I think you get a lot of insight from what they expect. To give you an idea, we ask people to take a selfie, like to show them out the app is working. One of the user testing, we realized, well, some people, if you ask them to take a selfie, first, they think to create an account with you. So they're going to spend like actually minutes, like a lot of time in the onboarding finding the right picture for them because they want to look good. Maybe it's a social network. Maybe it's something like this. I would have never guessed that if I hadn't seen someone doing it. Well, in the early days, it's also about the blockers, like what people understand, what people see, like what they understand from the product itself. So what we would do if Elliot is really, well, going back to the office, like changing the feature a bit, changing the wording and getting back to McDonald and testing it again. You shouldn't wait longer than like one hour to test again. That's how you iterate fast and learn faster.”

    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

  5. “Things first, you want to understand how they approach your vertical. So for us, it's great. Everyone does photo and it's a big asset. And so I would ask, how do you capture your photo? Which app do you use? What do you use them for? Are using them for fun, for selling for other stuff and give you kind of an insight. People get comfortable. And then, well, it's really show down tell, like you show them the app, they download the app, and it's very difficult because you get frustrated because you know what you want them to tap. all the value of it is like them telling you how they feel what do they understand from the app what they wish was happening now and it's user testing like really understanding what's the process for them when they see that as a first experience”

    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

  6. “In the early days, and we still do it like in the street, we would go with Elliot and we would go to McDonald and literally we would go in the line and offer people like ordering things, ordering food. Like, can we pay for it? And you just test.”

    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

  7. “You have to know what you're trying to learn, and that's how you reduce and condense what you want to ship. We always say, What's the B0 of what you want and what do you want to learn from that? Before shipping, try to know what you want to learn from. Otherwise, while you manipulate the results. To say, like, you've learned something, it's better to start from hypothesis and validate 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

  8. “Yeah, definitely. Actually, it's so we have three cultural values at Futrom. One of them is like instant learning, speed of execution, like ship learning iterate is one of them. You have a finite time in life and the number of things you can learn really depends on how many loops you can get in that. And I really want everyone working with us to think about it. How can you learn faster from what you do from what you ship? So for us, it's critical. I think Elliot Michael Fonder is like, it's like the fastest builder I ever met. He ships so fast, it's amazing.”

    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

  9. “I think starting companies, especially for curious people, you learn it's an acceleration of learnings. You get ship faster. So every time you ship, you learn. And well, I think after like 15, I mean 12 to 15 years in a field, like you know it by heart. You're an expert. So I know like mobile apps, I know photo apps. It's the third time I wanted to start subscription, third company, you know. So all these things, like you go so much faster in the beginning.”

    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

  10. “First one is focus. So really my second startup, like we were doing too many things, we tried to do two products. We were not focused. And one thing that worked amazingly well for PhotoM is with Eliot, like from the beginning, every six months we would focus more. So we started with video and photo and they say, okay, let's just do photo. And then we started to say, okay, let's focus on people selling online. And every time we focus with 10x a number of people like signing in and being happy, being very engaged with the product. When it works, you can feel the traction, you feel the pool. So I don't think you should expand or be wider as long as you don't have product market fit. You shouldn't expand anything. And so, for instance, we just focus on the iPhone app in the beginning and really create an amazing experience for these users.”

    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

  11. “Trading and I, and at the same time, on the other part of the office at the ITM, and it kind of clicked for me like, okay, we need something easier. Programming got easier, but editing didn't. And let's build something. There is an opportunity here.”

    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

  12. “Yeah, that's a great question. Well, first, I've been working on photo video apps for the past 15 years. I started that on Compass at Stanford doing my master. So it's been a long, long journey. That's why I got in iPhone development was photography. And the ha moment for Photoroom is I was at GoPro that has acquired, the startup I was working at as a head of product. And well, we were doing an iPhone app quick for video editing. And we were being featured by Apple. And I don't know if you know these things, but they ask you, like, can you provide the artwork for tomorrow or yesterday or very fast? And while we were this small startup being acquired by the US, they were sleeping. Our designer was off. And tell myself, well, I'm good with Photoshop. I'm good with computers. Let's do it. I opened my computer. And well, I ended up spending the afternoon, literally like trying to get what I wanted. I had a clear vision in mind. And it just didn't work. Like too many options, I didn't manage to do something I wanted. It was frustrating.”

    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

  13. “Three, four years, like software efficiency makes it possible for a 3x small regime to make the same amount of revenue than a bigger team. 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. We actually measure how much revenue per teammate we have at Fodroms. Actually, I think YC say they never saw a company going that fast with this low capital.”

    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