Market beats Team beats Product - Peter Mühlmann, 3 of 3

Peter Mühlmann: It takes 10 years. it takes two years or three years usually just even to know if you’re right about it and if it actually works.

Stephen Cummins:  Yeah.

Peter Muhlmann: Like you’re not going to figure out if it worked or not in five or six months. If you think you do, then… then that’s usually not enough time. And then you’re just failing by default. And so, so you need to mentally prepare yourself for that. And then, I will say that… the market beats the team, beats the product. In the sense that picking the right market is often more important than anything else. But then getting the right team in place is… is more important than you having a good idea or not because it’s the initial idea you have is very long. Well, it’s going to evolve. It’s not like you’re sitting in the bathtub with the rubber duck and saying this is what the company is and what it’s going to do. It is rather the sum of a 1,000 ideas. And then 990 of them are not yours.

Stephen Cummins: Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS! The show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world’s most remarkable SaaS scale-ups!

This is episode 122 of 14 Minutes of SaaS, the last of 3 episodes where I chat with Peter Muhlmann, CEO & Founder of Trustpilot

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Peter Muhlmann: But what we do see for software in general…. is that if they have thousands or tens of thousands of customers,

Stephen Cummins: Yeah.

Peter Muhlmann: We are generally a great tool for them to invite their customers to tell them what they think about us.

Stephen Cummins: Okay?

Peter Muhlmann: And… and we also see that it’s a growing market for us… because they have relied on case studies and they have relied on their own websites to sell their product.

Stephen Cummins: Yeah.

Peter Muhlmann: But I definitely think the evolution of this is going to be to rely on your customers to sell your product.

Stephen Cummins:  Absolutely. That’s a big part of the buying decision. So, yeah, reviews. So how… tell us a little bit more about how Trustpilot makes money?

Peter Muhlmann:  So we’re a freemium SaaS service. So, that means that for free, you can invite your customers to tell them what they think about you.

Stephen Cummins:  Okay.

Peter Muhlmann: You can respond to reviews. You can flag them to our team that will look at the reviews

Stephen Cummins:  Yep.

Peter Muhlmann: And add a little bit about your company. So is there anything I can just get started and use the platform? So then we have various pay services. Where you pay for example, for insights into your business. So we have some rather sophisticated… software that can actually read all the reviews. And what’s… what’s fantastic about that is that you find out what’s good and bad about your business in real time.

Stephen Cummins: Okay,

Peter Muhlmann: So for example, we’ve had some great examples where we were able to tell an online car rental company that you are now beginning to get bad reviews. It’s an Italy and it’s because when people return their cars, their staff is rude,

Stephen Cummins: Okay.

Peter Muhlmann: that goes directly to the CEO..and… and automatically.

Stephen Cummins: Yes,

Peter Muhlmann:  And two weeks later, we can now tell them; whatever you told them that worked. The staff is no longer rud