Case Study: Sophya's Vishal Punwani Optimized Tight Learning Loops To Guide Their Journey To Product-Market Fit

You've got to listen closely to both your superfans and skeptics in a short feedback loop if you want to reach product-market fit quickly.

Sep 07, 2021

Introduction:

Sophya is building the world’s first MMO workplace - the 'World of Workcraft' where forward-looking teammates and companies connect, build culture, form communities, and get work done.

Problem: For every single company on the planet, remote work is ruining their greatest asset: their culture. Companies just don’t have the tools to thrive as a team while distributed - Zoom and Slack help people work in a start-stop, urgent way, but they don’t help you build a strong team.
Market: Remote work revealed a massive business tool market with a combined market cap in the high hundreds of billions (Zoom alone is $110bn). Tech startups in the US alone spend an estimated $3bn on communication tools per year.
Solution: We built an ‘MMO’ for work - what we internally call the ‘World of Workcraft’. Sophya enables genuine team connection (not just video and text chat though we’ve got all that, too), real self-expression via high-quality avatars, and a real community where you can roam around and go visit all your friends on their own offices. Oh yeah, games are built-in too. Of course.
Team: In addition to Punwani, Emma Giles is also a co-founder and the COO of Sophya. Sophya has nineteen team employees in total.

Executive Summary:

Problem: Pivoting Is Easy. Pivoting Successfully Is Hard.

Vish and his team had built a good product for the EdTech industry but realized a greater need to be met in the workplace communication tool space and took a risk to pivot that has paid off so far.
Market: People Sought An Alternative To Zoom And Slack

The pandemic forced offices to close, leaving firms of all sizes to rely on Zoom, Slack, and other tools, which are helpful but couldn’t fully recreate the feeling of interacting with your teammates. Vish saw an opportunity to apply the concept of massively multiplier online (MMO) gaming augment workplace communication software.
Solution: Surround Yourself With Both Superfans And Skeptics

It’s easy to pay attention to those who love you, but you can miss out on critical feedback from those who doubt you to truly nail product-market fit.
Team: Build Out Your Ideal Teammate Profile Like An Ideal Customer Persona

The more you rigorously define what type of person you want to hire, similar to defining the ideal type of person you want using your product or service, the more successful you’ll be in finding the right teammates in less time.
Takeaway: Develop The Tightest Learning Loops Possible To Achieve PMF

The quicker you can gather feedback from users and interact with your solution, the sooner you will hit product-market fit. Focus on your process for incorporating user feedback, and the rest will follow.

Case Study: Sophya

Sophya co-founder and CEO Vishal Punwani.

Problem: Pivoting Is Easy. Pivoting Successfully Is Hard.

Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.

Oh man. So many to choose from. Instead of talking about the product, I’m gonna go full maverick here and say that the most salient problem was pulling off a massive pivot once we had sufficient conviction that we were onto something big. We were building a machine-learning-for-education software mid-2020 when we implemented our ‘social feature’ - which turned into present-day SoWork.

The ‘social feature’ was a virtual world with a video overlay that students on our platform could use to engage with their teachers and peers for teaching, learning, and peer study. It was kind of inspired by me and my teammates’ earlier days playing World of Warcraft together and becoming really close friends. We knew we could solve the problems that schools were having with their students hating Zoom-school, and we knew it would be a much more fun environment for us to work out of as a new remote team, too (I’ll get into this more a little later), so it made sense to build and launch for both our student users and us.

When we first launched the virtual world and saw how well it was being adopted and engaged with, it was really hard to look away from it and go back to building the core learning software we were previously building. Granted, pivoting led to many (many, many) more problems needing to be solved, but so far, it’s been well worth it.

We built an iterative process using the standard build-measure-learn system. Of course, we can dive deeper into each segment of the loop, but this was the high level. We made sure that ‘build’ was backed by either customer insight, or vision insight (where ‘vision’ typically comes from a synthesis of many streams of data in any case - just not all directly from the customer). We made sure that measure was done both qualitatively and quantitatively, and that we paid the most attention to our ideal customer. And finally, we made sure that ‘learning’ was appropriately interpreted before being funneled back into ‘build’.

Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?

The market moment was happening immediately, and we had to adapt and turn on a dime to pivot everyone on the team and everything we were doing, or else we knew we’d be in trouble. If you chart a course and set sail for the North Pole and then decide to change direction 180 degrees, it’s not going to work out well for you if half your crew keeps moving in the original direction. So immediate re-alignment of the team was our top priority.

We kind of had to start from scratch. We had to re-set the Vision, and re-cement our Mission. We had to rethink our brand, value prop, messaging - everything. We had to evaluate each teammate for fit and get blessings from each of our investors - one of which absolutely didn’t give us their blessing. Their exact quote at the time was, “Vish...we invested in a shoe, and you’re giving us a slipper.” It was tough to hear. They’re pretty happy with us now, though.

I also had to remain credible in the eyes of my team - immediately after a pivot in a developing market, how do you maintain that you know the most about this area and that you’ll be the best CEO? In our case, I was lucky - I’d been thinking deeply about this particular vertical and approach for about a decade. Which, in hindsight, probably subconsciously played a part in determining to pivot in the first place. So it worked out for us because I happen to be an ultra-nerd.

When we first launched the virtual world and saw how well it was being adopted and engaged with, it was really hard to look away from it and go back to building the core learning software we were previously building.

Market: People Sought An Alternative To Zoom And Slack

Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?

Well, we built SoWork to solve a particular set of problems - issues with culture, productivity, and ‘team’ in our new remote, distributed, WFA world. Fortunately, we didn’t just build something and cross our fingers that we could find customers for it. This was a bona fide problem that plagued every team that we knew and us. And as we’re all seeing in the news, it is a pain for virtually every company in the world, no pun intended.

Partway through 2020, my team and I were so sick of using Zoom and Slack as our HQ. We were so tight-knit in Boston - I kept asking myself, is this really how we’re going to end up?’ We didn’t like that there was no differentiation - no culture creation aspect when using Zoom and Slack. And we wanted to create and maintain a really special culture like we built when we were growing up at Harvard.

From our strong gaming backgrounds, we had a good sense of how to build a social game-like world focused on culture and productivity, and given that it would satisfy the social needs of the students we were serving at the time, we built a hacky MVP of it. And fortunately, it took off.

In terms of understanding customer pain: we used ourselves as the model team - remote/distributed but caring about culture and productivity - and we built tools to solve our problems. It turns out that many teams have these problems.

In order to qualify customers - we just try to be as clear as possible all the way through. On our website, inside the World - we want people to easily filter themselves in or out of our solution zone based on the problems they have. It all kind of comes down to having an ideal customer in mind and then having relentless clarity top to bottom. We’re not perfect (yet), but we’re kind of always just putting one foot in front of the other.

I mean, this is what the entire world is talking about, and has been for months. ‘How do we do remote work’? So we just listened extremely carefully to get a sense of the problems plaguing companies worldwide. Of course we kept our closest ear to our ideal customer.

Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?

That employees were willing to leave their companies - no questions asked - if this remote culture and WFA problem wasn’t solved in a way that they were happy with. People will literally leave their jobs and find other jobs if forced to go back to the office against their will. They will leave their jobs if remote policies aren’t to their liking and will find other companies with better policies (hint: they exist!). So since ‘the people’ spoke loud and clear that this was more important than pay (one survey even concluded that some folks were willing to give up their ability to vote in federal elections before giving up remote flexibility - it’s that important to them), it becomes a competitive advantage for companies to offer this. Knowing this was important because we can solve this for companies and give them the best competitive advantage against other companies.

How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?

We wanted to start with the demographic most acutely feeling our pain. That’s knowledge-work companies at Series A-level and above. They move quickly, and they give great feedback.

On our website, inside the World - we want people to easily filter themselves in or out of our solution zone based on the problems they have. It all kind of comes down to having an ideal customer in mind and then having relentless clarity top to bottom.

Solution: Surround Yourself With Both Superfans And Skeptics

How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?

Again, it comes down to listening to the customer. Who are they? What do they care about? What are they trying to build? We’re extra fortunate that they kind of want the same thing that we do as a team-building and maintaining great culture, getting great work done, and the like.

We’ve surrounded ourselves with superfans but also skeptics because we think that listening to both keeps you honest. And as long as you can stand back and look ‘up and out’ to ensure that you’re not getting mired in the details, that you’re interpreting your customer correctly, and that you’re building only what is aligned with your (validated) vision, you’re going to make the right decisions for the company and customer more often than not.

Again it comes back to the BML (build-measure-learn) system. We iterated in bite-sized chunks and tested features with customers frequently so that we had some degree of certainty that we were going down the right path.

What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?

There is no one who will teach you lessons like your customer. So I talked to every single customer in our earlier days. Every one of them. It’s helpful in so many ways. Especially when the team is so small - you can kind of quickly test hypotheses, validate opinions, pre-sell benefits and features, and get a sense of how to prioritize building when you talk to enough customers.

We don’t have the bandwidth to talk to every customer today, but it’s still probably the most important thing that we spend time on.

What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?

Again, we were really lucky. We’re the textbook definition of eating your own dog food. We live and work out of our office in SoWork, taking all of our internal and external meetings there. So we discover problems and user experience issues immediately and can work to fix them expediently. From time to time, customers drop by to yell at us or praise us for something, which is nice - we maintain that open door for our customers so they know we’re listening.

In the earliest days, we maintained a small group of power-user customers - and still do - so we can tap them for feedback often. We then take swift action when it makes sense.

Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.

We’re fortunate to have something that fits the ‘product-led growth’ definition very cleanly. So, as we use the software and bring people in as part of our workdays, it gets them excited about having their own office in SoWork, and it kind of spreads that way. That’s how we got our first few customers, and it continues to be a channel we really appreciate.

We’ve surrounded ourselves with superfans but also skeptics because we think that listening to both keeps you honest.

Team: Build Out Your Ideal Teammate Profile Like An Ideal Customer Persona

If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?

I have two co-founders, Emma and Mark, and I’m fortunate to have worked with them in several working relationships prior to SoWork, so most of our conflict nowadays uses reasonably battle-tested frameworks and principles.
- Emma is one of the chief stewards of our culture. And when we were pivoting, we had about a zillion decisions (including cultural ones) to make in order to pull it off in the ‘right’ way. And that’s hard because you first have to convince people to let go of things they are incredibly fond of in a company that was doing well in order to pivot them immediately. And given we were all about our culture, one of the things we didn’t want to be left behind was our ‘lore.’
- So while we both wanted to move as fast as we could, I was more optimizing for speed, and Emma was optimizing for culture preservation.
- After various disagreements on how to proceed, we decided not to swing the pendulum too far in either direction. We ultimately figured out the things that were important to bring forward now (e.g., our modus operandi, our bonding activities, our principles around teamwork and communication) and what to come back to later (pretty much everything else).
- It reinforced that Emma and I often see a fairly complete picture, but we see different parts of it and think of solving problems in quite different ways.
Mark:
- Mark and I are very aligned in our work ethic but differ in our approach to problems. I like to be big and visionary without necessarily articulating all of the little details (even though, of course, I have to be thinking of them). By contrast, Mark loves the details, but only because he wants to understand how to implement ideas on a practical level. He is an engineer, after all. So in our early days, before I understood this critical difference between us, we used to always have ‘disagreements’ of various levels of spice. But once I understood where he was coming from - he didn’t disagree to shut down my ideas; he was merely poking to ensure he understood extremely well so that he could implement our ideas.
- With this new lens on, our ‘problem’ effectively vanished overnight. It was pretty eye-opening for me in terms of how important it is to understand your squadmates on a personality or, more broadly, a psychological level in order to do your best work together.

What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first? of hires you needed to make first?

From a qualities POV, we looked for people who were relentless and disciplined. People who would run through walls to accomplish their goals. Discipline is a key factor in why we’ll be successful, and so we select for it. Startups are not comfortable environments for most people, and so you have to have a fair amount of resilience and the expectation of a somewhat difficult road in order to do well in a startup.

From a prioritization perspective, I read somewhere that being a founder is like playing musical chairs in the early days - you basically rotate from position to position doing what needs to be done until you can hire someone who can do it better than you when the timing is right. This is totally true. In our case, it was a lot of engineering and then designed that we prioritized hires for.

If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?

We have an ITP (ideal teammate profile) just like we have an ICP (ideal customer profile). On our team, we prioritize both personal and professional growth - and I’m truly throwing down the gauntlet. There is no better team on the planet where you will develop more as an autonomous human who gets to make an impact both on yourself and the market. If someone is interested in doing great work, honing their craft, and learning about themselves - we’re here. We think of ourselves as the ‘SEAL’ team of startups because of how we endeavor to work together and conduct ourselves.

We have a couple of rituals that we use in order to ensure we’re constantly leveling up as individuals and as a team. All of it is underpinned by our focus on discipline as a virtue. For example, every two weeks for the past ~2 years we run a ‘Growth Club’, where we read an article or listen to a podcast or the like, about one of the core virtues we need to all improve at in order to be successful - e.g. non-violent communication, managing oneself, leading others, etc. We then have an open and vulnerable team discussion about instances in our lives where we did well or could have done better in these areas, and set intentions to be better going forward. Every two weeks.

We have an ITP (ideal teammate profile) just like we have an ICP (ideal customer profile).

Takeaway: Develop The Tightest Learning Loops Possible To Achieve PMF

What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?

You reach it by having the tightest learning loops possible. Can you iterate over a short period of time? Does that iteration include talking to the customer? If yes, good.
Start building your culture from day 1. You don’t want this going the wrong way.
Get into a cadence, a rhythm of how you work. It helps to build discipline. Think of the New Zealand All-Blacks - they embody discipline, which is no doubt responsible for their unprecedented success.

What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?

Showing the world that there’s a better way. In other words - growth!

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Punwani: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Daniel Ramirez, Founder ofConjure: Conjure’s curated furniture rentals make it easy and affordable to build a home that evolves with you.
Khaled Kteily, Founder of Legacy: Legacy is the fatherhood company that is building a full suite of solutions and services for future, expecting, and new fathers.
Mike Sheeley, Founder of Nurse1-1: Nurse-1-1 is a HIPAA-compliant platform that actively reaches patients early in their illness journey as they decide where to seek care.

Click To See Sophya's Founder File

Previous F2F Case Studies:

Previous Startup Spotlights:

Startup Spotlight #155: Coco - Coco is dedicated to perfecting the last-mile delivery experience.
Startup Spotlight #154: Alo Home - Alo Home partners with developers building the great homes of the future to maximize their success by accelerating direct home-to-homebuyer matches and closings.
Startup Spotlight #153: Go Off! - Go Off! is a Gen Z-made social platform for meaningful conversations.
Startup Spotlight #152: wherEX - wherEX is an e-sourcing SaaS for LatAm.
Startup Spotlight #151: Jestor - Jestor enables businesses to create scalable processes.
Startup Spotlight #150: Intros.ai - Intros makes personalized introductions between members of your community over Email, Text, or Discord.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.

Founder to Founder

Discussion about this post