From mushroom-picking in Belarus to $200M/year. How he built Flo Health into a $1B health app. | Dmitry Gurski, Founder of Flo Health

So I spoke with Demetri, the founder of Flow, for about two hours. And we've cut it back, obviously, and really put forth the best 50% of that discussion. And I'll tell you something. Demetri is truly unique, exceptional. Just an absolute monster. I mean, this guy started in Belarus in a potato farm. He was growing mushrooms when he was 15. And somehow he goes from there to running a period tracker app that is doing $200 million in top line revenue. That's worth $1 billion that is 35% market share and is competing for the number one spot in the health and fitness category globally. Imagine this. When Demetri started Flow in 2015, there were hundreds of period trackers on the app store. One of them was this company called Glow, started by Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal. That company was already in market for three years. They'd already raised $30 million by A16. Today, Flow is a hundred times bigger than Glow. Here's the story of how that happened. That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the Product Market Fit question. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. Listen, if you don't want the show to move up the rankings, you don't want it to get better guests, totally get it. You know what? Don't leave reviews. Just don't do it. Why would you? But if you want to help out, if you want better and better guests, if you want to help the show move up the rankings, then take literally five seconds and hit five stars. Thank you. Like my main advice for a list of founders, or rather never, or rather never. See, you know what the between the problem is? Like, when you say that as someone who succeeded as much as you have, it's just like, what's the point? I'm quite sure that if I have known how difficult it would be, I would never have had enough energy to start that. You think so? Like just random tangent. But like, if you knew that you would get to as big as successful as you have become, but you had to go and eat all the shit that I'm sure you ate throughout, would you do it? Or would you actually really maybe choose something else? I'm not sure, because it was really difficult and really painful from 10 years of our existence eight years, like just years of emisorian calamities. I'm not sure that I would agree for any success or any volume of money. For me, the first question honestly, because as I was thinking of you get many of the other guests we've had, like typically it's frankly Americans who went to maybe Stanford or Harvard or, you know, investment bank and turn founders and you started on a potato farm in Belarus and then you ended up building like a billion dollar period tracker that then became a lot more other things. But it's just such a crazy journey when you describe it that way. Take us back to that. How does all of this start? I might be even before I will share my miserable beginning. And I quite ironic about that. Really, I do participate Stanford Business School, but I was five years back, Stanford Executive Program. And I mean, that I have this book, so Stanford, in my city. But you also have potato farm, which most people don't have. But, well, what was my main learning from Stanford? I was in Stanford Executive Program and it was a very, very selective program just for executive C.O.S. It's much more selective than M.B.Mashmore selective. It's like just 200 places, one. Because this is when you were already in flow, like you're running flow. Very selective program for much more executives and C.O.S. And what was my main learning from this program? I didn't meet geniuses at this program and I have never met any geniuses in my life. I know that it's of billionaires, hundreds of others, maybe thousands already. I have never seen any geniuses and what was very evident about this people, especially in comparison with my university, normal university. They were really disciplined and really committed and I believe that discipline is much more significant than anything else. Like discipline and stubbornness, in pursuit of your goals and vision, but discipline is the first. And I would say that coming back to my story, yeah, it's right that I had very humble beginning, Belarus, Soviet Union, we were growing our own potato, our own food. What I definitely got from this experience is discipline and ability not to anticipate like fast immediate results. Because when you work in farming, like when you're like growing potato, you just, you can't fake your job the same way as you may fake your job in the corporation. Because if you fake your job, then you will be hungry because they're like, and this is when, by the way, like how young are you when you're working at the potato farm? It's like I was fast, kind of how small like family farm and most of people in Belarus at that time added because shops were empty, no money, no jobs and people had to grow food by themselves. It was not something unique for that time. What was really significant is to learn this discipline approach that yeah, you should make your job, you should put seeds to the ground, then you should white and nothing is guaranteed because sometimes it's hail, sometimes it's rows, sometimes like potato may be spilled. But what is really mandatory? What's really the single element in your must put your seeds to the ground? And the same is the companies, these startups, nothing is guaranteed, like everything may happen, but you must start and like knowing like all this hundreds of founders, like dozens of billionaires, I see just one common trait among them. For any reason, at some moment they started and then like as rest as a history, but it's really significant to start and then usually it's much longer than people anticipate. Most of the startup stories, in startups, really stories about David's and Golavs because like logically you shouldn't spend innovations from Golavs, like from big corporations or at least from like people with resources or well connected people or people with previous experience, but really it's much more complicate and our story was all the pretty complicated if you're unpredictable because like let's imagine like 2015 and you are sitting west and you have opportunity to invest to two startups in the field of female health, one startup, founder is Max Levchin. I already received from almost from the very beginning 30 millions from Anderson Horowitz and Founders Fund. I started three years before like the second startup, in Silicon Valley, got all possible attention from press and another startup started three years after in Belarus by bunch of weird guys like me, with terrible accent and the time probably even more terrible. Without significant resources, almost bootstrapping and who have never been, had never been at that moment in the United States or even like in any like follow longer time in any western countries, like maybe just a tourist, who would win this market, what company should be invested and it's evident our answer was that the first company should be investable and then the company should not be invested. But now like 10 years after, it's a story about flow and glow and now flow is I don't know 100 times bigger than glow maybe from the soil and I have like my theory why but it's always this theory is kind of it's inside rationalization. It's all hindsight but still how do you how do you explain like that's the burning question is just like how how does that end up happening? I think ultimately it was about several good product decisions. I think a big mistake of glow of Max Levchin was to focus too much on narrow segment of trying to conceive rather than to have like a focus on wide audience and although I think product was not simple enough and if I have learned something from 15 years of building apps is that simplicity just trump everything for consumer facing products or not like number of features, just simplicity if you anticipate that your users would be proactive and do something you anticipate them to do no it must be very simple and we had several significant [BLANK_AUDIO] Дисижній теж власне власне, це така фокусу на власне. Але власне, це така продукту дуже власне. Але я не знаме, якщо це дитернімний дисижній дитернімний сакцесов, це є нічого продукту. І все ось кінця, що вони додавалися на саме бідно, якщо власне, це така фокусу на власне, це така фокусу на власне, це фокусу на власне, це фокусу на власне. І ось кінця, це дуже важна. Звісно, моя власна, це така фокусу не було фокусу на власне. Фокусу не було фокусу, це така фокусу на власне, це дуже власне, це дуже власне, це дуже власне. Мене фокусу на власне, це дуже власне, це дуже власне, це дуже власне. Спод та мало тому робік clones, дуже algunas. Веж вow cleansing. Імо булаftig зі в Patchісу. І surveys只是 не cust shrinking, bay HE, 종 Cupі новост earn. Почина informs, 팬увалися, за açıkчіichtet не забулить ця і до años. І tone printed sauce are finanbone за услични crédок з цією експеренту. Небо не може прийти для емель. Але всі люди use емель, релучився, така історія. І ця емельній селуті був за релучити. Почині емельній емельній функційній, або ціше документів, які клянали компоненту, які документів, які мають ці чатів, які мають зі короткою, які мають ці касистем. І ці касистем, вон вон в вас був. І так, як це, вони не був за ці чатів, а зі короткою, але зі люди був за релучити. Але якщо ти може зі чатів, ці емельній не може прийти, ці емельній емельній, релучився, релучився, але це може прийти. І це, якщо, і для нас, пірутрекер пірутрекер was kind of gymell, і це, якщо, а зі люди був за релучити і це, якщо, якщо, якщо, якщо, hablarмо trabajar,ядс pests, чатбет, око всіг così莫че в Aut yellow. llenу вот Xiao-D да Б consegue одинити а Audrey Bovina, за це так розмі CDC plusieurs Україних бреш Miller, Де autonomousні м compte одного живوцій nella на shrine ось кіон undergo tenim dog кінця Сусору, як як в bindи stan зак enriched Лук Disick р хоті -- та так який лежätter тому�도 викл civilian tho b4 то можн жестourse yang standing >> в США у навальня фіс entrepreneurial ніяка, як це вирішує. >> >> >> вирішує, воно, вирішує. Взяває праганці мот, і на сьогодні праганці мот, вирішує, як 20% -- маємо, вирішує, якщо, якщо, в американці мот. Але ми не маємо, якщо маємо, все-таки, якщо 2%. А це просто свитюй, свитюй, свитюй, отримаємо, праганці мот, або також свитюй, або мот, але, якщо ми маємо, ми воно вирішуємо, а то, що це пролонна ретенцію. Ретенцію в Луи, вирішуємо, вирішуємо, вирішуємо, Морозоюalalишься вп HQ а cylindersни He Sally -airs представ worsening Ми неумєте « Скораяная acontecета». Ми craven해�ого ново circ Quem сп texto про кр hatch Морозу Pete – міênczenia Морозу халфа фау мау, міна, хто гаджував на 1 року, я не вирішив, як люди, хто гаджував, якщо вирішив на ритенцію. Мене вийшов, який це тряфіка зберував, який вийшив у Ластєві, який гаджував 7-8 мільанів, який має. Мене на 90 мільанів, який має 30% в 2023. йому, іidan для сортист Zuалсkee kiddingbre, Has 就 дозі, зай shell. Зайгляд з soortи чими мЮкрігPrежцемов. Ми зацем не додир Progress Mod. arity що ц другой мотива, ми зugen utilization. Д профزор leafy. Г 몰� ladder на анукогоrzy Xiao Keating scars. Експім'час мед letter, якщо б в спортсあっолі пройудởк про України. Я зігані зігані зігані, якщо б в спортсанні, а що це не якщо, а що це не не якщо б в спортсанні, що це така генерик. Мені це був і випад, така був і цим речень, якщо був історонний, випад, але я надідає, що ці зігані зігані, що був історонний, що це така був історонний, і це така був історонний, і це якщо був історонний, і це це така був історонний, що був історонний, що був історонний, що був історонний, що був історонний, що був історонний, відфіча з Лово. At that moment, it shows a good impact. But then your team works really hard and creates like 20 more features. And the competition and cannibalization between features intensifies. And because of that, this feature, which was useful one year back in this, like a new big combine, is becoming like additional complexity, additional destruction. And now you have like better features, but it just distract users from your better features. And at that moment, it's necessary to make this cleanup and delete such features. But I have seen many companies, but I would say it's very rare to see that companies are deleting old features. It's really painful. It's really painful. It's like almost like to kill my darling. It's like to kill like my, like for a product person, believe me, like to kill old features, it's almost as sad to bring your old dog to a vet. You know the like, "Ah, my old dog." It's time, but you don't want to do it. That's tough. My dog like to visit it's painful for my dog. It's painful for me, but I just can't bring my old dog to a vet and the same for a product person to kill old features, the same pattern. First of all, I totally agree. I mean, like the natural cycle is you just add, you just keep adding and adding. And you know, it reminds me this whole, the paradox that you mentioned, there's, you know, here in Canada, the biggest tech startup is, I shouldn't even call it a startup tech company, Shopify. And Toby, the CEO has the thing that he does every so often. I remember because I had a friend who worked at Shopify told me this happened in one day where he will just click a button and delete everybody's meetings. And his kind of idea is, you know, at first you add a meeting because it is a good idea, then maybe you make it recurring because it kind of makes sense. But you never think to just kind of clean slate it all. And so he just forcefully does it. And he kind of says, listen, if you have an important meeting, I'm sure you'll remember it and I'm sure you're gonna set it again. But the ones that you don't remember used to exist, like now they're gone, they're gone for good. And it's, it really has to be this top down effort with features, you know, it's kind of the same idea. You have to go in and almost say like, okay, you know, every X time or whenever you notice that things are getting clunky, like, let's just, let's go into this delete mode. And see what happens. And if users aren't begging for it back, then maybe it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place. But all this is really necessary to distinguish vocal minority and like a real sadness of your user base. Because, for example, we had a feature of Bazaar temperature. And because it was this feature, I don't know, but all temperatures maybe used to have to predict the elasticity, but it's very like a cumbersome process of mastery to measure temperature each morning. Then like I checked in there and usually really maybe 0.1% of users used it. And like, it is now pushed to clunaf, we decided to do it. And then it was a few shell tracing reviews and the email of our support. And if we hadn't known that it's just 0.1% of users who use it, you would conclude that it's huge. But really, it was just 0.1% of users. But like when it's like, when you have like a dozen stuff, you'll answer them. Then 0.1% and they start complaining, it may be huge. But really, it's necessary to ignore that because you should consider it to focus on to make like a good features for like your mass audience not like for some niche. But you have like a title of your podcast, Product Market Feed. And I've even made it to come back like to the beginning of the story and to talk about. I was just going to say, yeah, we've got until your 15 at the potato farm that we jumped to Stanford, but there's a whole middle. So it was a good experience. Like, nothing is difficult after that. But talking about Product Market Feed, and the question like when I understood that we have a Product Market Feed and that this product may become big. And I would say almost immediately. And I have my way how I measure Product Market Feed. And it's rather in case of consumer-facing products. I'm always looking at retention, but we're often, especially investors, making mistakes, they're trying to steal like absolute number of retention. Like 15% in one month or one year, they're like 40%, 50%. By my opinion, at the beginning, it's not adequate. It really doesn't matter. It's 10%, 15%, 50%, like after one month. What's the really significant is shape of curve? And I always not trying to analyze absolute numbers, because it's irrelevant at the yearly stage. What's relevant is shape of curve. And specifically, I'm trying to see is that wateriness like plateau, always like just like falling down. Because if it's like just falling down to zero, it means that there is no Product Market Feed. Like there are no people who would, even like a small cohort of people, who would use it repeatedly. But if there is like a plateau, and this plateau is, even maybe it's even like five, maybe even three percent, but there is a plateau, then there is a promise. Because then it's possible to start analyzing who are these people, why they use a product repeatedly, and then you double down on that. And sometimes you may find that they use your product, not even because of a reason you create this product. Maybe even something like a sidefish, or it may be a very different audience. And in case of flow, signal was really evident. Like signal was it, like something like retention, or was like, I don't know, 40, 50 percent after, like several months of after install. And it was, and it was like a very nice flattering, with maybe like one or two percent of a child month to month. I still have never seen like a so good retention curve, so nice shape among health and fitness product. It was something much more similar to social networks, networks in the like, products of very different kind. And most of cases, health and fitness products, they have very bad retention, it's just nature of people. It's like once I got into this information that like a popular United States chain of gyms, like they sell approximate 100 times more memberships than they have capacity, and they sell annual memberships. And why is there a doing that? Because they know that approximate to one person, so people will use it. That's why it's, you know, you go to the gym right now in January and February, and it's a terrible experience. By March, April, you know, all the ones that were going to turn basically have turned and you know, the gyms are like 30 percent capacity. But the gym sells is smart, and because of that, they sell membership using annual commitment, but rather cheap monthly price. Most of them are not talking about economics or so. And it's a very smart strategy, because and it's like, I will see this paradox in case of many health and fitness products when retention of subscription is much higher than retention of usage. It's quite phenomenal. And it's not just because people forget to stop the subscription. I special nowadays when all people are so familiar with subscription mechanics. The reason that people hope that in future, they will be better. And for them, it's almost kind of like a cross out future that I'm just like, I'm just disparate. No chance. I will never be fit if I do it this app, or if I stop my membership. But tomorrow, tomorrow, I will do this out no diet or I will definitely start running. And because of that, like retention of subscription, in case of many health and fitness products may be good, or very good. But retention of usage is usually terrible in most of cases. But Floyd was an exception, exceptional case, and probably like us, most of period trackers. And the reason that women, they have a period naturally, and it's inevitable, and they must argue and they period has tremendous impact on health and life. And then it's a organized life around period. And then it's not the same as to make your choice that I would go to gym or not. It's like you always have reasons why not to go to gym, and they always may just delay that for tomorrow. And it's like a recurring tomorrow. Tomorrow means tomorrow, tomorrow means tomorrow. It's tomorrow never come. But you can't do that with the period. And because of that, retention is much higher. It's probably more comparable, I would think, to a standard calendar or even email, like in terms of retention, from a retention perspective. Yeah, maybe I would even say, I would maybe even more comparable would be to say, like a gym in school. Like you first have much better attendance of school, because you must. Right. And always, and gym, you might exist, stress and you don't hesitate. It's an interesting conclusion from the case of most companies, attention is pretty much a function of user case rather than product. It means that you make it like a perfect product with all like vessels and all engagement features and all gamifications better than the linger, but if you apply this product to user case without natural attention, you will not achieve it. Maybe you will increase like this from one person to three person, but it's impossible to move it from one person to fifty person. Like retention is the user case. And to build big business is necessary to build this business based on naturally repeating cases which happens at mass is a huge time. And it was our approach to flow, there are other examples about that. But often like products, people were often they trying for years to improve retention. And almost they kind of they're trying to find like they're making like new electricity shock to zombie and the zombie make like shake it bit. But it's similar, I mean it's similar to usage, right? Like if you have a messaging app, you know, you can expect daily usage. If you have even like flow, I don't know if it's daily or more weekly or let's say monthly usage patterns that you can expect, like you can only do so much and other sort of things, maybe they use it every quarter. Like, you know, you do have to map to what is the use case. It's not just the digital product. It's actually, you know, everything that's behind it, that's equally important to how often are people going to use it. And you know, at the other point, how long will people stay like, if you sell to SMB, you know, someone will go out of business. It whereas if you sell to enterprise, most won't and you'll get expansion revenue. So it's true, there's so many things outside. This might more things outside the product than in the product that drive things like use general tension. So take us back because we haven't actually talked much about this like before flow. You know, like I'm curious to why you decided to start a period tracker when you did. For me, before that, like you spent a decade outside of tech before, like you got into tech, right? What did you do then? Like what did you do from kind of 18 to 30 sort of thing? 15, 16. We got kind of a small business, we were gathering mushrooms and we sell them mushrooms. And we were quite intense in this job. We were spending the all day alone in the forest. This is in Belarus, is this normal? Yeah, it must be in the Russian. The time it was pretty standard for all kids to eat money or buy a gathering of mushrooms or buy berries. And maybe in two summers, you didn't enough money to buy computer. And the time internet emerged and we started making like a simple jobs in internet and the world. This is what like the early 90s sort of thing? 2000, 1989. 2000s, okay. And then it was like one interesting case. It's interesting, a lesson for life. One day, like we were writing and publishing articles about computers and the time it was very popular because people, the region were doing how to work with computer, professional and just occasionally. And one day we received a letter from publishing house, which was proposing. To write a book. And so this is like just to be clear, you were kind of like blogging at that point and they saw something. It was also kind of like an article. It was like an article. It was a time, or at least in this, that region, like we had mainly printed magazines and even newspapers, all the computers. Or we were like more realistic media, we should write about computers because it was so popular at that moment. And it was most like making like writes and articles for them. In a book on what also on that same topic, like how do you use computers or something about the internet, these sort of things. The internet programming, like my biggest book was about action script. It was like a programming language of MacRame. And I was the time quite intense, stubborn. And because I was a 20 year old, I was 20 years old. I stopped when just when this book reached 1,100 pages. I was writing this book almost for one year, like sticking daily. And then at night I was writing this book for one year. And it was quite good book. And this book had significant influence on my life than not just because of books. I will share this story later. But it was really learning for all my life. Sometimes opportunities are much bigger if you kind of naïve and stupid enough to assume that you can't do that. The publishing house was a Belarus company or was it a Russian company? It was working for a Russian speaking audience, a bigger market. And we left our publishing house and we started to companies in parallel. One was making apps, like Hassan Fitness apps. And one was making books because we had our risks. And the book publishing still exists. And we have published maybe 2,000 of education notebooks. And I consider that as a big part of my heritage. So you jumped, like I mean you got into the app world, like you saw the iPhone come out and you kind of started developing apps almost right away, right? Like the app store opens in 2009. And it was for you. It's a strategic decision because, you know, it's almost like us now, like all people jump into the time. You and you can just stand to jump and probably it was like really right. And did you personally, like I know you wrote the books about it, were you a developer or was it your brother who was actually building like coding? That time we had developers, but initially, like, early days were able to make like a project mostly for internet. But the time it was all the simple, because the time it was all the internet stack was rather simple. But the time it was we had developers, but it was almost kind of, it was very small, almost bit trapping. But at the time, I know I'm analyzing that probably it was like a mistake to sell this company to Eulie because this company was acquired mostly because we had mobile engineers and many corporations, they needed to transition products to mobile platforms at that time. And it was a huge scarcity of mobile engineers. And it was pretty much a quick high at the stage, at least this part of business. But now I think that it was quite a mistake because all our competitors at that stage and they had approximately the same popularity for their apps. They exited several years later, like by getting hundreds of millions, like my friends Paul, for example, for 150 million, like a fantastic, I got maybe 200 million and this deal was much, much more modest. What were some of your more popular apps that were within that company? So it was like a gym set, like run, running apps. It's pretty much the same setup of apps as you see now in apps where like kind of Travis of the crazy world. Yeah, it's then, at that time, like my brother was like much more engaged to this business, he was running this business and I was much more engaged to publish. But after this exit, I had like a share, I was involved, but not like a professional to this business. And I personally, like we divided kind of businesses, when we exited our publishing house. But I personally switched to mobile apps in 2012 and we started making apps based on content. And then we got a lot of different, like you're saying, you started 10 different apps or 10 different companies. And we got five exit, like from this investments and from this venture and our own projects we had exit to Facebook, exit to Google, exit to Favitch. And now in our portfolio is not just flow, for example, we have a simple app with more than 100 million in revenue we have. We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. Most people don't start one successful app. You know, they try, try, then none of them really break out. You had many. What do you attribute that success to? But also, we felt many times, like it's like because I think very significant was too close, and successful attempts fast enough to save time, like to kill zombies. As the biggest mistake people are doing there, it's a, the most difficult question business is when to persevere, when to pivot and when to close. It's the most difficult question in business because I can find like many stories when people are crazy, private, like in case of Slack and it became multi-billion door company. Like you might find like a story when people are assisted for years and then it became multi-billion dollar company. But in most cases, in 99% of cases, if you can't find product markets, let's say, in two years, then it's quite low chance that you would find it. What about marketing? Did you spend a lot on that or was it really product-focused? You never tried to create a market. It means that you didn't try to find some very small niche and the growth from this niche, or to say something like, "This product doesn't exist" because usually it means that nobody needs it. Our approach was always to take a big segment of market, like really big, and then to create a product which would be better because of our better product strategy, or we're often better at the end. For example, most of our exits happened because of implementation, very small implementation or development of machine learning. In order to have this realization or at least test it out, do you just go out and build or do you, and especially with this, because one of the questions that I'm sure you get all the time is, you know, you think about a peer tracker you assume, it's going to be a woman, frankly, that started it, because everybody talks about solving problems, these sort of things. I understand now, given that you were just building apps for spaces that had traction while you would enter here, but as you think through it, and you write that 700 kind of page document, are you having a lot of conversations with women directly to try to understand, you know, kind of how they use these apps or how they have experienced this problem, and does that help you understand the super app, or kind of like not really? Yeah, of course, and we're still doing that. Like we have, I don't know, maybe 15, like user experience researchers in our company, and we're discussing like with users about all our features, not just like design or like analysis of metrics, it's all like many conversations and with users. And I think it was for us all the quite an advantage that we were so and educated in this topic, and because of that, we were either just didn't have like our own opinion, and we were quite objective about that, and tried to understand the users and the talk with users, and not just to talk about the three reviews, and to make these decisions very objectively. And I still believe that the most significant is not to be, it's very significant not to be overconfident in your expertise and ability to predict what would work, because honestly, even after 15 years of experience with many companies, I don't feel that I may predict what would work or not, and in flow, it's always about experimentation and about communication with users, and now this is for data, but we have many experiments. In flow, now we are doing in flow, now with Motenista, I have 200 running experiments, 200 is a Motenista, and it's a huge advantage for big audience that you may and big traffic that you may do that in my runs, so many experiments. What I think is really, we did differently than what made like a kind of rate of success higher than you would expect in general, like one element was to focus on bigger markets, than to be really four-sortful around competitive advantages, and strategy around those competitive advantages. But all it was when I tried to recall our failures, like 10% of them were about wrong product strategy or wrong market, and 90% were about people, it was just like a wrong team. And some people just were burning it out like too fast, not enough stamina for this run, conflict in the team, not enough skills, like different reasons, but I don't remember too many failures, I wanted to kind of a good fail, like all Dupott is good, like all everything is done properly, and just didn't work. It was mostly about people, about wrong Dupott is a wrong approach. You mentioned something earlier which I totally agree with, like this kind of concept of persevere pivot or quake, which is such a hard decision. Do you think, and I'm just trying to put a few things together, because frankly, a lot of what you did was unconventional, or certainly like the opposite of what people suggest, one of those being most people would say, "If you want to start a startup, go all in." Like figure out what you want to do, and then put 100% of your mind to it. You had a bunch of different companies, apps, happening at the same time. Did that end up helping? And I say that because, you know, if you have one thing, you really want it to work. And if it's not working, you might just be tempted to push and push and push, and find a way to get it to work, just kind of persevere through it. When you have a bunch of things going on, you know, did that help you evaluate the ones that actually were working? Like you said, kill the zombies, kill the ones that weren't working faster, and then as a result, have more success? I'm quite sure that ultimately success is a function of number of attempts, and quite showing that. And that's why investors have part-follower. Why investors are just not put all money to a single company. But it's much more difficult for founders to have a part-follower. But it's possible. And it's possible if you just very understand it really well, when you should stop. And because in most cases, if you fail, happens fast, it's good, because you're free. And you make another attempt. The biggest problem when you're getting in state of zone, but what's the zone? It's like a product, bring some traction, bring some money, slowly growing, like five years, seven years after, still one million per year or five million per year. Maybe work, maybe not, but kind of. And people always like, they line to themselves that, the risks are all planned, and we will change something, and just like one new feature, and we will get traction almost never. It's almost never works. And at that moment, it's better to just, it's better to fail faster, to be free, to try something new, rather than to build this like a founder of zombies, and everyone kind of this, like, when you have this case, like this kind of this, like, is this situation, or like, it's like, I'm too invested to this company to close it, and it's bringing some money, maybe, and they all have this investors, but then you just have a slave of this situation for five years, for 10 years, and then we just, to all tend to try to start something new. And maybe sometimes, like a past failure is better than, like, this, zombie state, because you're just open for new opportunity, and your much more experienced, and then like, I haven't seen like, not so many people who became successful from the first attempt, but I have never seen any founder who would not become successful from five attempts. I do think they exist, but usually, like, if you have enough time, and you issue a attempt, but it's the greatest one. It's become my definition of perseverance. It's less like about persevering on one product, or even one business, but persevering at just attempts, obviously going on, like, working hard at each one, but kind of having this mindset of, if this one doesn't work, I'll try a new product. And if that doesn't work, maybe I'll try a new space. But if you keep doing that, you know, I have enough at bats, like you said, at some point, you should, hopefully, see some real success. And sometimes you just don't know what's failure, and what's fail and what's fail. Sometimes the learning from fail is a really significant four next step. And even in my managerial philosophy, like how I'm writing a flaw sometimes, like I just don't know what's the right, but I prefer to make a step, like to make decisions, because I know that, even if I'm not right, and we are implementing this feature, then, and it fails, then we will know that it's a wrong step. And we will come back. But sometimes you want to overthink your way to that certainty, right? And then the reality is just make a decision. Well, no, no, no, no. It's just an uncertainty, because if a short-sensity exists like a very, very simple case, your investor, let's hire McKinsey. Take your money, hire McKinsey, make business plan, then hire engineers and build unique cars. What's the problem with this logic? Money except for. Perfect. Blockless. What never happens. It all happens because the rich is not predictable. It's not predictable for. McKinsey is not predictable for investors, it's not predictable for Sequoia, and ultimately, it's just don't know. And if you just don't know, then it's better to accept it, if you just don't know, you just must move forward. It's very similar, what's the right strategy to be like to reach like a top of a mountain. For example, you see a mountain at Horizon and no map, and what is necessary to reach the top of the mountain. The most significant to understand like that the risk of the top of the mountain is like vision. And all that you need to start moving. But then like who would reach top of the mountain and who would not? People who would try to create like exactly. как они должны снять с мотом. Они должны быть очень стаканами, потому что они должны снять рево, и они не знали, что они должны, как я бы сказал, предоставили. И они должны увидеть какие-то ситуации, etc.,, но и это, и это, как, макинский кейс. Макинский не может, как, как, как, как, в perfе к моту, а это, как, как, как, в рево. Это просто, чтобы это было, и это, как, как, как, вы видите, рево, и, макинский, то, как, в стоне, вы работаете. И если вы просто старый, и макинский, и, как, и не understand direction, и, как, в стоне, в первый раз, вы будете на behalf of this mott. Но если вы, как, вы думаете, если вы макинский, то, как, в маши, если, как, вы понимаете, что вы делаете все, как, в perfе кем-то, нет, нет. Мы в 【Пaction覺 emotionist im St democrats} «Прохожение» - это было очень разные. Я просто в моем случае не знаю, что это было. Я просто хочу быть в этом состоянии, как вы говорили, что это было 30 миллин долларов, когда вы просто начали в флоге. Was that actually one of the reasons to start a flow? Was that a sign of demand? Or was that something you realized after you started building this app? -No, it was a much simpler way. When we started a flow, there were dozens, maybe hundreds of popular period traders, and in the top 10 of Hasn't Fitness category 5 sets were period traders. And it was the main motivation. But also the motivation was our observation that these products were very simplistic. We called them pink calendars. And our idea was that if we built a deeper product, which would get more value, it would be very competitive as a market, which was populated by pink calendars. And it was like a right approach. But if you ask me, did we see the time that the flow would become so huge? No. In my first deck for our first round, which happened in 2016, our dream was, and as an end, of course, we were over-steamating, because we were always over-steamating when we were talking with investors. Like our dream was, I'm stuck in five years, we will have like a three four million master active users, like several million in a year. -Really? -And the evolution, maybe 20 million. Really, it was dozens times bigger by any measurement. And why? We were not stupid, and we were quite experienced at that moment, but we didn't expect one two elements of story. One element of story is that time, it was impossible to have a subscription business model for apps in App Store in 2015. This opportunity was opened by Apple much later. In 2017, 2018, and really became a kind of mainstream, maybe in 2019. And based on the reason that at that moment, the voice of monetization, like chipmaps or advertising or e-commerce, it just would be impossible to build like a business with hundreds of millions in revenue. Just business models would not support such scale, and at that time, touch apps didn't exist. The time we didn't see apps with hundreds of millions in revenue. Like maybe like a maybe a Tinder, but also something like that, but not a normal apps and how to get this category. When the subscription business model was allowed for apps, it changed everything, and it became very powerful source of our growth. And second, probably we didn't expect that we would get so significant market share. And probably it's like because we probably. What kind of share do you have in that space today? If you look on market narrowly, like market of period traders, maybe 35% or so, but markets is huge, but the time market had hundreds of period traders, and it was very fragmented and it was difficult to expect that we would get so significant market share, but we got it because product is so much better, and our growth was always most organic. I've never. Maybe now we started to spend significant money for paid user acquisition, but that time now it was organic growth, like just a bolt of mouse growth and maybe some optimization in the store. Just quality of product, but so again, like your success is a function of your competition in most of cases. And I'm joking about the best joke about competition that when a line is harassing you and your friends, you should not be faster than lying. We should be faster than your friends. That's right. The same as their competition. Sometimes if your friends, like not like a faster than like a. It might not as deep safe. But so walk, you know what, that's maybe my actual burning question. You have these pink calendars. You'd mentioned before you had the sophisticated version that didn't really get much traction, and this simple version that got traction. How did that simple version compare to these other simple pink calendars that were top five at that time? I think it was pretty much the same. Maybe even simpler, but some of them were as simple as this product. But what I think was also significant that we were very focused on the quality of predictions. And it was not just like that it was simple, but it was all the much more accurate. Because you're predicting the next period, like that's one of the big values. Yeah, yeah, because if you ask now users, like what's the most significant for you in product, and still simplicity is the most significant, but the second point is accuracy of predictions. And that time we were the first pure trader which used like machine learning like just emerged, like it was 2015, '16. It was just beginning of like a modern machine learning, and we were among innovators in this field. But did the other ones, did the competitors even have predictions, but were an accurate or they didn't even predict at all? They had predictions, but they used very simple logic, like take a date at 28 days, some time, we used much more. And the cycle is not so regular. How quickly do you hit a million active MAUs or whatever, like how quick is that ramp early on? Millen probably in one year, last year, the law added to active audience more users than all our competitors, all our standalone competitors have, but one, just one single app at our market has the ASBIC audience as four ads last year, just in one year, because last year we added 17 or 18 million month's active users. And when did you decide, because at this point you're doing many different things, like when do you decide to go all in on flow and why? It was in 2013, and at that moment, you was quite a bit in, then you'd raise a couple rounds already. Yeah, but I didn't have a title of SEO, and we didn't have SEO, and I'm not sure that yearly stage start was, I really need SEOs in business sense. I should like see all like stash, SEO, SEO, stash, SEO. And this is, you know, was done because I understood that this company may become really great, and it's almost kind of this, you usually have like one shot in your life of this size, because like coming back to like statistic of unicorns, if you are successful enough in starting off unicorn or like company which may become a unicorn, then you should very safely assume that it's your single and last chance, and then double down, because I know like, it's really rare when you as a founder may have like this like twice, because this like is just 10% about your skills, and your strategy is 90% is just like 99% is just like, and at that moment I understood that it's kind of the biggest shot I got in my life, and because it's the biggest shot I got in my life, I must double down, and I must be absolutely focused on that, because I'm safely, I assume that I would, you'll never have like the chance of this size, and because of that I should continue building this company. Well Dmitry, let's stop it there, and I'll ask the two questions that we always end on. First one, you can't just on a little bit, but like when it comes to flow, when did you personally feel like you had found, you know, true product market fit? When market fit is rather like a concept, and if you have like 100 product people, what's product market fit, you would get like 100% different definitions. For me, like a product market fit means that it's a combination of two elements, two variables, users, use product, and users are happy to use product, if it says that, like, because sometimes like, I use, now a company, for example, we had like a system like to use like to organize a travel, because we have the offices that was like sub-concorp, the worst system in the world, it's the best impossible, but because like incorporating the role, what you just must use it, because like both of these sites, for it like 30 years here, yeah, we're just like actually you hate it, but it is like a product market hit. I don't know because it's cheating. And yeah, it's a combination of usage and happiness and happiness may be measured by polls, like by different misologists, like NPS, like a millimeter, but you may understand that from usage and happiness of users that you really have this product on your feet, but the most significant is the world of most. The best is when people start really advising your product and you get like a ton of growth because of that. It's the best sign of a real product market hit by my opinions. What kind of what amount does flow get? Like do you have a measure for that? Oh yeah, yeah. We measure that directly by putting questions on board, we understand exactly now most of our organic traffic is because of fault of mouse. If I have maybe 60% of organic traffic still and most of them is because fault of mouse, like my friends advised me and it's best signs that you have like a real product market fit that people use, people happen when the help is there, advise it and you may conclude that. Yeah. Does that in Ampure's, did that percent grow over time or has it been like consistently 60% of organic traffic? I ensure it was 100% like now. Okay. We go to the petitions or a position just maybe two or three years back and ensure it was 100% close to that for many years and it was just organic growth. Yeah. And what second question? And the second question is taking everything you've learned, especially running like trying so many different startups that many of them became successful and enough. Of course, the story of flow, like what would be some of the top advice you would give an early stage founder today? It's a dish called one. You've mentioned in another podcast that the general advice is kind of bullshit. So that I mean, that's fair too. I will answer this question differently. I'm like, what's the biggest mistake I have seen from EWL's page founders? The biggest mistake to be delusional. Delusional means to be so, to love your idea and your thoughts and your strategy so much that they just ignore all objective information, all objective signals and then probably then it's like at some moment when fundraising is useful because fundraising is like extremely painful experience, extremely painful experience at EWL stage. It's always painful, but EWL stage is. How was it? We didn't touch on that. How was it for flow, especially in those first few rounds, like the seed stage? My experience was very unpleasant and extremely unpleasant in most of cases and of course it's always unpleasant to get hundreds of nose and I believe that in I raised like much money, like we raised as for flow, more than 300 million, but I believe that I received like maybe 300 nose from at least 200 different films in Google didn't like the best ones. I assume those were mainly in the early days. Why like 200 films and 300 nose? Because some of these got nose in different stages. Then they got nose like at EWL, at the beer, but it's so. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, yeah, it's a it's a difficult and painful as, especially at this moment when you make like a road show and then you are sitting on your computer and each day and each moment you get like more and more and more nose and then you put this like marking your spreadsheet with like a films you met and your chances get lower, lower, lower and you can display that's like no but you would stay in this list, that's quite painful. But in our case it was even more difficult, partially because of my background, like I said, it's an European background accent and everything, but partially because of our segment. And it's the investors, they most they don't understand this segment and because of absence of successful stories, my guess they just don't have something like to use a set of benchmark for the belief in this story. But all this is a kind of a vicious cycle, pretty much, but usually it's like it's happening like almost in the same way, like a company like Floor comes to like a big few, not big like any show and initially like after like some kind of like some analysts might take a look or like some things and then they would send this like a prospector to like a partner. But after of course like his man, he would look like, I understand nothing, I will send that to like our email. But the problem is that in reality there are not so many influential female partners in venture capital issues. There are several influential women, but not so many, especially among big firms. And also like many in this film they pray to see they're not especially on the mind, maybe because of absence of success. For them it's almost kind of like for previous generation it was shameful to like go and buy for life or like a temple. And the same like for like an engineering research chapter, you really consider this deeply such project. And then like this like a poor woman is trying to bring this project to investment committee, like just a man in this investment committee. Of course it's not approved and the story ends. And it's not like a problem just a flaw, it's a problem of the whole industry of female health. And I think the plot played extremely significant role for the market because we showed example of success and we showed example that it's possible to raise significant capital. And our last round from general pantheon to hundreds of millions. It was the biggest investment to digital health in 2024. It's now like all other companies, smaller companies start up the same way. So like look like we will be as successful as fluent in problem investors with the can probably it's possible like now we have now we see benchmarks. And when we started we didn't have opportunity to show something like ploy would be like like this one like this company and it made this fundraising even more difficult. But we managed to like to raise capital and also we initially we just used our own money and at some moment it was even difficult because like in 2015 we had crisis in other businesses and we stretched all our reserves extremely to save or flow at that moment. It was moment when we would have died easily just because we just didn't have enough money to support it. But then we were here with this. 2015. But then like what was very supporting that in 2016 MSQRZ like a company like my brother invested as an angel investor was sold to Facebook and it was quite good deal and we got money and it supported flow immensely at that moment without exit of MSQRZ. I'm not even sure that flow would survive 2016 even with traction because it was so difficult to get external money to this project. But the story of MSQRZ, MSQRZ like it was quite because of virtual masks because of competition with Snapchat it was a very interesting story itself. But I promised like to connect this story with my books and it's a very interesting story to finish our conversation because this story is about that sometimes we just don't know what's significant and what's not significant and what a small small element in your current life would play immense role in future. What's the application point because and the story is about like my book about action script like I saw a program in language of Mokramidia Flash I wrote this book in 2004. I saw this book which had 1,100 pages. It was published in 2004 and that moment this book was gifted to a teenage boy. He was maybe 12 years old at the time. His name was Sergei and he brought the gift of this book to him and he says that if you would learn programming by this book like he would become like a successful man in future. And he did that and he became like started to make like a sourcing us a flesh or that time like he was again an experience. And then like 12 years after he became like a founder of MSQRZ and we met this point again and then like MSQRZBass Salt it supported Flo and I got my single shot in this life and I became in a corner of the mountain. But he might easily Я думал, что если в that time я был в less stubborn, и не would spend one year writing this book, и я не так много в this book. Он не would have learned programming. Он would not have been a master of the book, and then would have not gotten any money. Поблов would have died in 2016, и я не would be like a Unicorn founder, like a podcast, who want to talk. But between these two points, I'm writing this book at night, and this moment when you want to talk with me as a Unicorn founder, is 20 years. And it's like 20 years, but without these small points, the rest of the story would not happen very easily. Again, it's better not to overthink, and just act, put points on your map, move forward, be patient, remember about potato story, your potato is just a seedling in the ground, you should write for all to get your harvest. Not, you should not eat tomorrow. One day, if you have like 90% of luck, you will be successful. Meechy, that was a perfect story to end this on. I know this episode is going to be very inspirational to so many people, and I know flows. And my accent, Mike, I was really lucky, but maybe not like even for record. I mean, I used for record, but it's a funny story about my accent. I had like a podcast with 20vc podcast, you watched it. And after that, I got a letter from like one company which is making learning courses. And this company proposed last night, my allowance to use my interview as a course, and the idea was that they wanted to show to students that even having such terrible accent, you may become a successful person. Who's that? I was thinking that my mission to this life is to improve health of hundreds of million women. And now I understand that I have additional mission is to empower people with terrible accent. Talk about impact. Well, you know, on the woman piece, I can tell you definitely you're impacting our lives, my wife's life. And I know many, many millions, like you said, hundreds of millions of women, I think flows already made a dent like you said in terms of venture investing for many, many health startups, especially those type of female health. And I know that when you become the next, you know, stock ticker, like a dual-lingo, you're only going to have much, much more impact. So I'm patiently waiting for that day. But thanks so much for sharing your story. It's been absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You remember like the first person who told you about Bitcoin, the first person who told you about Uber? You want to be that person because being first is cool. So be a cool person and tell your founder friends, set it to them on WhatsApp, put it in a WhatsApp group, put it on a Slack channel, let people know about the show, let people know about this episode. And then you can go to the website and find out what you think about it. And I know that you're going to be the first person to tell your founder about it. So I'm really happy to be here.