[Raised $18.8 million] Ep.106 - The First 100 with Artem Harutyunyan, the Co-founder of Bardeen.ai | Product Hunt

My guest today is Artem Harutyunyan the cofounder of Bardeen.ai, an AI workflow automation startup. Bardeen has raised to date $ 18.8 million from notable investors such as Insight Partners, 468 Capital, and FirstMark Capital.

According to recent public data, Bardeen has close to 200k installations.

Where to find Artem Harutyunyan:

• Website: https://www.bardeen.ai/

• LinkedIn: Artem Harutyunyan | LinkedIn

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack

• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Artem, good to have you on the show. How are you doing today? Great, thanks, and thanks for having me. Amazing, thank you for joining the show. Let me just start with a quick introduction for our listeners. My guest today is Artem Harout-Yunyan, the co-founder of Bardeen.ai, which is an artificial intelligence workflow automation startup, that has raised today around 19 million from notable investors like Insight Partners and FirstMark Capital. Artem, you have so far more than 200,000 installations. Before we go into the numbers, tell us what was your founding a-ha moment to get Bardeen to fruition? Yeah, it was basically solving a personal pain for me. In my previous role, I was responsible for product and engineering at a company which was formerly called Mesosphere. And I had about 60 people. that I was managing as part of my organization. And I realized at some point that 70% of what I do that a modly sophisticated Python script can do. And so I started writing that script. I basically started writing this bot that was supposed to be a Slack bot pretending to be me that would just like go and poke people and remind them to do stuff and whatnot. And that was kind of the seed that led to Bardin. My co-founder, Pascal Weinberger, who is the CEO of Bardin, was in a very similar situation and he also had the same realization and he also kind of, again, independently started to go down that route. We met and we decided that we should do this together and that's how we started. If you were to explain your company to an eight-year-old, what is Bardin exactly? What pain point are you solving? Yeah, so it's hard to explain it to eight-year-olds because eight-year-olds typically don't use a lot of productivity software. But I would explain them the same way pretty much. The idea of Bardin is that you have someone who kind of watches what you do and then learns the things that you do repetitively and then does it for you. So for example, for an eight-year-old, I would say... you are probably in second grade and you probably have like an arts class and then it means that like every Tuesday you get an art class and you draw like a dog, a cat, a rabbit, whatever. So like if you do it for a few weeks in a row like the third week before your class, Bardeen would suggest to like, hey, I drew an animal for you, you might be, you know, would you want to use it for your art class? You know, for like... someone who is slightly older than that and uses a lot of software tools in their day to day, the pitch is basically the same. So if you're a knowledge worker, if you're in sales, a lot of the things that you do is repetitive, right? So like you go, you generate the leads, you copy your leads to your CRM, which might be like HubSpot, Salesforce, or just a simple sheet. And then from there, you go and you research. your leads, you understand what they do, and then you try to craft a personalized outreach message. So that's a workflow and that's the thing that we automate. So we have a platform that can kind of reduce that entire flow, which typically would take you many minutes to a single click. And the vision is to be able to do that automatically. So basically automate the part of detecting the repeatable workflows and then also automating them. And you can imagine that there are a lot of workflows like Precruiters have repeating birth flow support people, same deal. You receive an email, you analyze it, maybe a bug report or maybe a feature request. And then depending on what it is, you kind of copy paste the data to a ticketing system or to your support system. And so, in the early days, we used to joke that we're disrupting copy paste because like, you know, startups these days have to disrupt something. So... That's the thing that we're trying to eliminate. And we want to do this automatically so that we kind of learn the things that are repetitive and then suggest them to users proactively as improvement of their day to day. Amazing. If I look at the workflow automation space, you're not the first in the market. There's, I can recall 10 or 12 top of my head, like Zapier and UI path. which are specifically doing workflow automation, but you also have other companies that are also using workflow automation as a feature. So I see it in HubSpot as a CRM. To walk me through how did you identify that there's a gap in the market and how did you decide where to position yourself? I'm very interested not in the answer, more of the way you think, because this is where listeners here could learn how did you go through a process where... The market has competition and you need to find that opportunity in that space. Definitely. I think the kind of the gap, the opportunity that we identified is that out of the plethora of tools that exist even today, I think all of them focus on like a certain kind of vertical. So for instance, Zapier or a lot of other tools like, you know, Workout or Trade.io, you know, Make.com. they focus on kind of trigger-based automations where something happens in some system, like you receive an email or a user fields in a form and there is like a trigger-based response to that. There's like an other kind of end of a spectrum there where like you have things that do things in a browser, kind of shortcut type applications. But if you think about it, the work happens across those modalities, right? And so in order to accomplish something, just doing... like server-side automation or just doing client-side automation is not enough. So you need something that brings things together. Our kind of central thesis was that you have browser is becoming like an operating system or like operating system for work. Obviously, very kind of mega trend of moving to the cloud, the desktop software is kind of dying and so on. So... And then there is nothing that focuses on just automating, like this browser operating system automation, right? Again, there are just kind of like point solutions, but there is nothing that kind of looks at this thing holistically. And so that was kind of the product gap that we identified that like for a lot of people, existing tools solve only part of their workflow, but not all of their workflow, right? And then the way, for instance, big companies are solving this is... They would hire a consultant that would come, like look over your shoulder for like three weeks, four months. They would run specialized tool to do what's called like process mining, identify what the repeating processes are. And then they would use like expensive tools like UiPath to automate parts of those processes. But the problem with that approach is that pretty much the moment you identify the process, it's already obsolete. Because processes change, people move on. And so it's a very dynamic, which is an amazing deal for those consulting companies because they charge by the hour. It's like an evergreen opportunity. So the way we kind of, our thinking was it like how we can kind of democratize that process and kind of turn it around like instead of focusing on processes like across, like for instance if you take onboarding of a person in a very big company, there's a lot of different departments and like... teams and so on that are involved in all like IT HR and so on and so forth. And so the way kind of big companies approach this is like they would bring someone who would look across it will be like a very involved complicated process looking across like all these different kind of particles. In our case, we're like, okay, what is something that could help an individual become more productive and like how would you do this? And if you think about it, like most of the work happens in the browser. And browser is a walled garden. It's like one of the most secure pieces of software in existence by design. It's very hard to kind of penetrate the browser from outside basically, again by design. And so we thought like, okay, there should be something that is focusing on that. But like do it in a way that's like scalable, reliable, that doesn't involve people just like sitting in front of the computer and like fiddling their thumbs while the mouse moves on their screen because that's not the best way to do it. So... Basically, it was like the confluence of factors. But I think for us, the gap in the market and the kind of why now was obvious. And then all the recent advancements, AI made it even more apparent and kind of accelerated our roadmap for like three to five years. So amazing. Thank you for sharing these insights. If we go to your early days, so you have today 200,000 installed. But if we go to the early days, how did you acquire your first early clients? What non-scalable strategies did you use? What scalable strategies did you use? Yeah. That's an amazing question. I was thinking about this, preparing for this call. I was thinking like how it went and I realized that we had several first hundred users, if that makes sense, right? So there was like the actual first 100 users that were a Chrome extension right now. When we first uploaded our extension to Chrome Store, it was private, it was a private beta. So the first 100 users were basically friends and family, pretty much our investors, people that we knew. And it was like very wide glove, very like you had to get on a call with, there were like three or four people in the company at a time and like you would have to get on a call with one of us and we would like walk you through it. and it was like ridiculous, you know, ridiculously unusable product. So that was basically us kind of asking our friends and relatives and investors to kind of give us like an hour or so to show them the idea. And like surprisingly enough, like some of them have become our first users and some of them are using it to this day and through all the evolutions of the product. Then kind of... The second first 100 users came after we did a product launch. So basically, with this very unscalable approach, where you have to talk to every user, you know all your users by name and so on, we got to roughly 700, 800 users overall. And then at that point, we were ready to do a public launch. And the public launch we did on Product Hunt, and we were very successful. We were definitely. We were overwhelmed by it and it went much better than we ever expected. And so we basically kind of 10xed, I mean, not overnight, but like we went from like less than a thousand to more than 10,000 in a very short period of time. And so those were the first 100 users that we didn't know, we didn't do this, like we didn't know who they are. They were on their own when it came to kind of onboarding and like figuring out stuff. And for those, we were very data driven, so we kind of invested a lot in analytics. We tried to kind of reconstruct their journey, but now kind of do it more kind of statistically, right, to kind of understand and separate the users into cohorts and so on. And at that point, we started developing our go-to-market motion. And we did a lot of things with it, like social listening, we did YouTube, because we are on Chrome Store, like Chrome itself is a great channel. because people just come to Chrome Store and search for stuff. We started producing a lot of content. So all our, we never did like active, like outbound, kind of B2B, it was always inbound. We built a great content engine, we built a great team to kind of onboard people when they land on our, you know, one of our pages. And then the next first 100 users was when we started to monetize, because all throughout this journey that was like a free product and then at some point, we figured out that okay, these are the set of features that it makes sense to start monetizing. And then for monetization, which we started doing, I guess like just it's haven't even been like two full months, but we're back to this point where like, at least in the beginning, we're like, again, we don't know the users by name, but like, we know the emails by name and we're like very closely looking. So it almost feels like we... kind of like the third time we're launching the company. Of course, you're not starting from scratch, it's like a level up every time, but that's where we are right now. I mean, and we're like well past, we have like much more than 100 paying customers at this point, but that's kind of, that was the third iteration of doing that. So I feel like there are this like pivotal moments in company that like you just have to be good at recognizing them and. kind of doing and I'm sure they're like more in the future right like once we start so we're now working on like team offering and like more enterprise focused offering sure it's going to be the same thing like once we get out like our first 10 enterprise users we're I'm sure we're going to know their names we'll probably go meet them take them out for dinner do all the enterprise kind of b2b kinds of things It's very interesting. Every time you almost have to reinvent and relearn and that's the most fascinating part of, at least for me, of what we do. Can you share with us a story or an anecdote of a challenging time that you had early on as you were acquiring these customers? Yeah, I mean, in the beginning, we had this idea that we wanted to, like I said, the idea was that I wanted to create a bot in chat that I could kind of talk to. And this was before OpenAI released GPT-3. So like long, long before like ChatGPT. And so naturally the first few people that you hire are the people that you know very well or have worked with and so on. And so when we got to this, like the first five people, kind of the founding team, we had almost no discussion at all that everyone would be like super excited about like typing. And we kind of obsessed about these things. We're like, oh, how we can do this so that we have like nice keyboard shortcuts that like, you don't have to take your hand off of a keyboard to do something. And then we launched this product, which was essentially like a command line interface to the web. And the idea was that like, you could type whatever you wanted to do. And then to our surprise, the people who were interested in this kind of things were like, you know, the marketers and sales people and so on. That was like completely foreign to them. Not touching a mouse is not a thing. They don't care about that. And then kind of after talking to the first few tens of users when this thing like kept coming up and up and like, yeah, the concept is amazing, but like your UI sucks, it's so bad. And I was like, like it's such an obvious in hindsight thing, like how could we miss that? And then it turned out if like. You get five people in the room, all of them are programmers, they type for a living. If you ask them like, hey, what do you think people enjoy doing? Their answer would be like typing on their keyboard. And so the first kind of non-engineering person who joined our team, I did not, who like you can see in all our videos and so on. So like he was kind of screaming out of his lung. It's just like, guys, this is, it's amazing. I love the concept, but it's not working. I don't want to type. No one wants to type. This was kind of the first thing where like we got this wrong, we have to go back to the drawing board and like think of like a more visual interface of doing this. And then now it's almost we kind of made a full circle in only two or three years because Chad GPT made typing cool again and there's like a lot of companies that like come out and they're like, oh, we have a bot that like you can do by typing and they're like companies that raise like hundreds of millions of dollars for the... It's interesting to see because it's like kind of the next incarnation of the same idea. But you know, in the beginning, I think we basically did this like detour where we just like started with the wrong user interface. Like luckily, we had the engine, we had it engineered in a way that like engine was well separated from the user interface. So when we kind of added a UI on top, we could reuse most of the code that we had. So like adding UI was a very kind of additive. process, but that was definitely something that became painfully apparent after actually having gone through this like first end number of users and getting feedback and iterating. Is there an event or events that caused the spike in adoption? Because currently you're at 200,000, you started three years ago, so it's an impressive growth. Yeah. I mean, look, I think... We had a big spike when we launched on Product Hunt, because we got product of the day, week, month. But I think now we're adding per day probably as... We're at a point right now where we're probably adding as many users per day as we did during our Product Hunt launch, right? So I think, yes, there are things that contribute to those spikes, but like with many spikes, you basically see the drop after the spike. So... I think like chasing spikes is not, you have to kind of do it, but at the end of the day, what you want to do is to kind of not only just like chase the spikes, but to find a way to kind of raise your baseline in a consistent way so that your growth compounds. And again, I mean, spikes are important for certain things, right? So for instance, if you're fundraising, it's good to be kind of in the news and it's good to create this buzz and so on. It's a very important tool that... every founder should have in their arsenal, but it's not something that you can kind of bank on like long-term. Thank you for sharing this. If you were to share with our listeners three lessons you've learned in launching a startup and things that you were surprised between what you did previously and what you are currently doing as a founder. It's like one thing to read about it in the books and the blogs and talk to founders and so on and you should like definitely educate yourself for as much as you can. But like doing it is a completely different thing. So for me, the thing is that, you know, if you're working at a company like before you start your own, there's always an escalation path, right? Like you can always escalate to your boss, to your boss's boss. There's like, like when you're a founder, it's like there is no such thing as escalating. And so this is something that there are some things that you have to deal with it and you don't get to pick and choose. It's obviously super important to have and that's kind of like, you know, the second learning is like how important is it to have a co-founder and I'm so grateful for having Pascal together with me that like it would be very, very hard to kind of do alone. And like before you have done it, you're always like, why does everyone say... you should have a co-founder. We're like, no, I know why. Like it's very important who do you do this with. And it's really important to find someone who's not similar to you. And I'll kind of leave the exact definition of that, you know, as an exercise to the listener to figure out. But, you know, I think if you can find someone who is not like you, but you can go along with really well, then like it's the superposition of the two or three of you is like can achieve great things. And then the third one is probably like that you have to learn to kind of distrust yourself, especially if you're doing something that's new to you. But even if you're doing something that you've done as an employee. And what I mean here is that a lot of the times like your instincts, what you believe in, especially if you're doing kind of consumer facing product, if you know, in enterprise B2B, it's slightly different because it's... more well understood, although even there it's like, but like there's a lot of things where like your intuition fails you. So you basically it's the same thing that like your pilots, when normal pilot training, part of the training is like you have to learn to fly by instrument. So it's like when you're learning to become a pilot, they would like put an airplane into like spinning mode and like in a weird mode to kind of trick your internal kind of... devices so you don't know where you're falling or you're kind of climbing, you don't know what's happening and then they would close it so you cannot see around you and you just have to look at the instruments. And I think that's a very important skill as a founder that you should have for a lot of things, for conflict resolution, product decisions, a lot of things. But it's also like you cannot do just that. You have to have... your kind of instincts, your beliefs, whatever, you know, your own biases that in some cases you have to cherish and like kind of cultivate and whatnot. But at the same time, you also have to kind of learn to fly by instruments. That's kind of something that you know, important to learn. Thank you for this great advice, Artem. What's next for Bardin? Well, growing more, serving our customers better. kind of understanding our customers better, understanding what's important, what's more important, and kind of increasing the surface of the use cases, increasing the demographic of users that we can serve. I think that's another thing that's kind of a big thing for me, a surprise, that myself included, to have never ran a company, never done a startup, I think for everyone, like raising money. from like investors is a pivotal. So like everyone thinks that like, you know, it's like I figure out my fundraise, the rest will be easy, but it's not. So first of all, that's the easiest part. So like that's not hard to figure out at all compared to everything else that you need to figure out. That's like very easy, very, very easy. And then the thing is that like, it's never ending. The goalposts are always moving. There's always another zero to add. through your growth, to your revenue, to whatever. And that's really fascinating. There is no end goal. Artem, thank you very much for stopping by. This has been an amazing episode. How can people reach you? Artem at Bardin AI, easy. I encourage everyone to go to Bardin AI, follow us on Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn. Reach out to me personally, download and try Bardin out. Here in San Francisco, drop me a line. Let's grab a coffee. Amazing. We wish you the best of luck. Have a great day. Thank you. You too. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google play, or Spotify, and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five-star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.