Paulo, what is the feeling of being ahead of your time? When did you realize that what you were doing was way ahead of its time and that you still had to cross a great desert whose size you didn't know?
It's exactly when you're in a desert. You don't know exactly where the desert starts and where the trees begin. You just keep walking, one step at a time.
How many times did you think about giving up?
I never thought about giving up. Never. For me, it was enough to have a single point of motivation. In startups, for every ten 'no's, there isn't one 'yes'. So we have to take advantage of the small victories. But the truth is, the product really worked.
One thing is for it to work. We have an example of a startup we've followed from the beginning that was also way ahead of its time in digital advertising, and it still is because the technology hasn't appeared yet. It had to stop.
Yes, we were ahead of our time. We introduced many concepts that were adopted in the last 20 years, for example, DevOps, continuous integration, continuous delivery, which joins developers with the operators who run the software in the cloud. That integration was at OutSystems in 2002. The platform brought that together because it was one of the great levers to lower the cost of change. We needed to do that. So we did reverse engineering, we took the problem and concluded we wanted to implement six things that were later adopted by the industry. It wasn't that we were very smart. We just had a process of thinking about the problem and how to solve it. And when you think that way, everyone seems smart.
But the question is, you were observing some market signals that were in the right direction, right? Is that what you're saying? And did that give you hope that you would get there?
Yes, because in practice we were ahead of the market in how we operated. Our big problem was... I once wrote a paper six or seven years ago because the conversation I had with IT departments, which we tried to sell to, was that it was too good to be true. 'Where's the catch?' was what they asked me. 'This is like a miracle. Where's the catch?' And I couldn't write it down for them. Because we had solved the basic things, we solved the problem completely.
The problem is in the adoption.
Yes, it's in the adoption, in the marketing, and in the timing. If we had been in Silicon Valley, the company probably would have had a different path and reached billions in revenue much earlier. But since we were starting from Portugal, it was very difficult. We knew nothing about marketing. This product-market fit concept, you learn it through field experimentation. If the customer doesn't want to buy something, it's bad. But our product solved a customer's problem. It solved a problem. You just had to do a small proof of concept and it was suddenly miraculous. So they believed in it, but I had to make it happen. I always worked with initial disbelief. That's the big problem of being ahead: you're not navigating a category that is suddenly hot, that everyone is buying.
If you solve the problem, what's the difference? What is the technology or the way you solve it?
Because there is distrust of the future. In a transaction, a sale, especially in B2B, customers fall into four main categories. Those willing to take a chance on a company with a completely crazy idea that no one has heard of, with seven people, who don't know how to dress for a meeting, can't explain things, have no marketing, and so on. This percentage is very small; they are the technologists or visionaries in that product introduction model. I don't know if you've heard of the Chasm crossing model. But the majority of customers we sold to, especially in Portugal, were in the second group, what's called the early majority, the pragmatists. Pragmatists have certain characteristics: they buy if someone else has already bought, they act in herds, they follow what's called...
And you weren't able to break through that?
No, you need to find... the first ones are very difficult to sell to. You have to go to the first segment that isn't early adopters.
Huh, they are the early adopters, visionaries, technologists, it's more or less the same. That little group that takes more risks, that doesn't mind buying something different.
But you can get those. The big problem is... no, no, no. Those, there are very few of them. In Portugal, we were very lucky with the people at Optimus. Tourism in Portugal at the time also... no, tourism came later. Brisa, and then we got Ana. But little by little, I had managed to get special people from a vision standpoint.
So your big change was the Pentagon?
In terms of global adoption.
No, no, no, it wasn't, actually. It wasn't.
