Hardy Michel & Shak Lala: Go slow to go fast

We ended up going to a really, really large advice conference and we actually exhibited the product and it did not exist at that point. So we turned up as a vendor, we built essentially like a very rough working V1, but it was designed incredibly beautifully. It looked great on the front, but it did not exist. - Advises have been 80% of the time non-client facing when their job is to be client facing. And the people like many shares is a mistress who can't afford advice, or don't have access to it. Those are the ones who can disproportionately benefit the most from it. - I think you went through a bunch of ideas while you were in that exploration phase. Solar installation at one point, I know like trade finance, I think was another idea. Why did that not make the company down on this model did? - The way I characterised that period of our journey was that no frameworks don't find markets. - What does it actually mean to move really quickly, ship really quickly, but it still be beautiful and still be compliant? - Hi everyone, I'm Sam Wong, one of the Blackbird Partners and welcome to another episode of Wild Hearts, where we uncover the bold moves and the unlikely paths behind extraordinary founders and operators. Today's guests are Harding Michelle and Shaqial Lala, the co-founders of Marlou. A company transform me how my financial advice gets delivered. Marlou is singular in that it is the first investment Blackbird has ever made before the founders had an idea. This conversation unpacks their go-slow to go fast philosophy. Are they spent months in the IDMAs exploring completely different industries? Why they embedded themselves inside advice firms before writing a line of code? And what they learned by watching advisors struggle through their day to day work. We dive into how they validated demand before the product existed, including by exhibiting at a major industry conference with a barely working prototype and had a build a culture where disagreement is encouraged and clarity of ownership drives speed. This is a story about rigor, conviction, and choosing a problem that you could dedicate a decade of your life to. Artie and Shaq are two of the most intentional first-owned founders I've ever met, and I'm so excited to share their journey with you. So let's get into it. Welcome Shaqial and Hardie to Wild Hearts. Can't wait to share this story with our audience. As a way to get started, I might hand it over to each of you to introduce yourselves and just talk about how it is that you came to start Malu. - Cool, happy to be here and start off as well. So hey everyone, I'm Hardie, I'm the co-founder of Malu. Quick backstory on me grew up across Australia and New Zealand, spent most of my childhood in New Zealand. Lots of competitive sports, which led me to actually cycle competitively for New Zealand race internationally, win a bunch of national titles, and very naturally from there fell into startups and early stage company building. And probably most notable helped build chassis and New Zealand. So New Zealand's leading retail investing platform and probably one of the most loved brands that's out there as well. So I was lucky enough to join us, the second employee and helped grow the business over five years from just a few of us to more than 15% of the New Zealand population as our user base, billions of dollars of assets under management and a team that went from five of us to well over 200. So that was a real roller coaster in Rhyde. And then more recently, I've ended up in London and the UK where I was headhunted for a role with a company called Lightyear, which was building a retail investing platform across Europe, so helped build and launch that from the zero to one stage across 22 European countries. - I sweat. And tell us a little bit about how you came to start Marlou with Hardy. - Yeah, so quick background on me is I grew up in Auckland, Proud Kiwi, but ran across the ditch to explore greener pastures for university and ended up doing a degree in a meth sober in Melbourne. And then like all lost STEM graduates ended up in management consulting for a few years. - And then in the three persons strategy team at Aureka, which is the world leader in mining explosives. And then after that found my way into Shazies when they eventually helped me shape a role that was essentially an early stage strategy role where my main focus was to identify new products and look for areas for Shazies to expand into regionally. And then after graduating from that role, I pitched to start with my boss at the time, the B2B product team, which we eventually grew into a team that was able to build products for some of the museum's largest companies like Fonterra, Spark, Meridian, Conte, and Conte M in New Zealand. And in that found myself cutting my teeth, building consumer grade, Fintech experiences, but for enterprise audience, which certainly shaped a lot of what Marla was today, but also where I met Hardy and we busted out intent to build a company. - Awesome, love that intro. And so I guess you can kind of see from those hothead histories that consumer finance and investing platforms are sort of in both of your past. Like I'm curious what was the itch that still needed to be scratched or what felt unsolved that wasn't being solved by those huge platforms with all the benefits of scale that they had? - Yeah, it's a really good question. So I think the thing we encountered was the demand for financial advice. So we had hundreds of thousands or have now built products for millions of people over the past few years. And it always came back to one thing for me, which was what should I do with my money? And the demand was there and kind of what I learned is that, hey, by and large, everyone is engaged with their finances. They want to do the right thing, but we don't necessarily have the tools to help them at the time. So the example I would give you would be, let's take the pandemic or maybe Trump tariffs earlier in the year when you have kind of historic volatility, like the VIX index, which is a measure of volatility is kind of like at an all time high. All we could do in those moments was really send an email to our entire customer base saying, hey, don't panic, the market goes out, the market goes down, you might remind them kind of the S&P 500 returns over the last 50 years or so, which would kind of gradually up into the right. The problem is that human psychology is such that it's exceptionally hard to do that during those moments. Every being in your body is wanting to sell, wanting to kind of de-risk, even the feeling of seeing yourself maybe have less on paper than you do yesterday. It's not particularly easy to navigate. And so we thought about and looked at things like, do we offer robot advice? Do you maybe bring human advice as onto your platforms or what a lot of retail investing platforms in our standards to do is build their own wealth management kind of arms and businesses to offer kind of a higher touch service. - So they human-powered wealth management services? Got it. - Yeah, exactly. And so what we kind of saw through that was just the demand that it wasn't necessarily being met and kind of a byproduct was that we spent a lot of time with financial advisors themselves. And I guess my view on it is that the power of financial advice at the right moment is transformative for people's lives. And it isn't just, you know, what should I invest in? It's things like, can I afford to retire? What should I do with this inheritance? I could be going through separation or divorce. Am I going to be okay? Can I afford to buy another home to grow my family? Like these real kind of pivotal event driven life moments and the power of having trusted advice from someone who understands your goals, motivations, you know, capacity for risk, all those sorts of things can have a really material kind of difference and like impact and trajectory on your life. And so kind of the drive for me was that we were keen to see more of that in the world. - And then off the back of that, the other challenge we saw in the market was that like advice is quite a troubled industry from an economic perspective. And like, advisors have been, you know, 80% of their time non-client facing when their job is to be client facing. And the people like many shares is investors who can't afford advice or don't have access to it. And so it almost opens your eyes to a system that's really broken when like helping more people is bad for your business where you've got more customers is bad. Fun based or asset based fee models where you've essentially got a variable fee for a fixed cost. And so these are three-shouldered which you become economical from an advice client perspective. And frankly, that for shoulders fairly high. And it becomes very difficult under the current delivery model for people who need advice to just get advice. And that's something, you know, some of the things we resonate with as well. I don't see an advice proposition calling out to me saying, I'm right for you and you can be my client. And that's some of the change, you know, we'll get to later that would like to pull forward in the world. Yeah, we'd love to chat a bit about that. A bit more as we dive into product. But maybe sort of staying kind of at the pre-Marloo or genesis of Marloo stage. You know, those of our listeners who are keen followers of Hardy and I on LinkedIn will know that Blackbird invested in Marloo before I think it even had a name. I think it was called Hardico at the time that we went to IC. And you didn't yet have an idea. So even though I think it's fair to say that you have robust experience and clear ideas around what the market needs and what your customers could benefit from, you did spend a good while in the IDMAs, in inverted commas, trying to work out what that first idea for the business that you were going to go all in on would be. And so I would love to dive into that a little bit. And maybe even talk through some of your own internal frameworks that kind of convinced you idea A was better than IDAB, for example. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe some good context is during my time at Shazies, I was lucky enough to join Blackbird as a flocker or a scout as we might otherwise have been known. And so basically, the whole intent of that was, hey, Blackbird's getting set up in New Zealand and our goal is to see every early stage seat or pre-seed deal that's going and basically build a network or an extension of Blackbird people like myself who had kind of good connections, knew lots of other early stage founders and kind of in return for bringing deal flow. We were basically taught kind of Blackbird's world of investing, which was pretty incredible experience for 12 months. It was really structured. There was kind of five or six of us. And that really opened my eyes to a few things and kind of complemented the operator experience that I was starting to build out. And so on one side of the table, you have kind of how to build a company at scale and like go through kind of hyper growth to billions of dollars of assets and lots of capital raised and hundreds of employees. And on the other side, how to kind of really robustly frame and then evaluate like lots and lots of different early stage companies, which is an incredibly hard thing to do. And so I absolutely love that. And kind of the view of the world that I started to form was it just takes a long time kind of stuck in the idea maze to build a truly iconic company where the product that people like love to use. And really that like a lot of people that I saw on the Blackbird side of the table were like incredibly smart. They really could have built and done anything, but they just went and worked on the wrong thing. And it wasn't for lack of trying, but it was just that they didn't get the kind of foundational steps or stages of their business right. And they weren't maybe as rigorous as they could have been to really evaluate the size and stage of kind of where they were and then where they wanted to go. And then you end up raising capital and you kind of lock yourself onto this treadmill that is exceptionally hard to exit. And can you know take years before you really have that conversation with yourself and go like, hey, is this the right thing for me? And am I actually competent in this business? And so we kind of set out with this first printable approach where we said, hey, we want to go slow to go fast. And I'm claiming that term now. I need to buy the demand. So I might do that for this goes live. Basically like the biggest headwind for most outups is working on something that like doesn't matter. It's in a domain that's not growing in any kind of macro sense. And really kind of the thought process was choosing a material problem matters like way more than your ability and like the amount of effort that's required to kind of execute on it. And if you get that right, it's really a force multiplier for everything that comes after that. And so we basically said like, hey, we want to spend kind of six to nine months going un reasonably deep on problems that we might actually want to work on to decide on the idea to build and really just to be in listening mode for a long time and try and learn more than anyone else. So find insights and secrets that compound for a unique kind of view of the world and then go after them with kind of intensity and purpose. So I think you went through a bunch of ideas while you're in that sort of exploration phase. I want around like solar installation at one point. I know like trade finance, I think, was another idea at one point that kind of got cut from the chopping block. But like maybe he's using one of those as a live example. Like why did that not make the cut, but you know, the company now known as Marlowe did. - We did absolutely explore numerous like very different ideas. And a key part of that process was to sharpen our teeth at identifying what would make a good business for us versus not. We always wanted to be in a big market under transformative change with good tailwinds. And so some of those markets in the funny ones we ended up exploring were verticals asked for roofing, trade finance, buying employee purchasing large or in retiring businesses. And yeah, what we learned from that and we'd started to develop after each of those ones was adding to a growing list of, let's say, what ended up about 20 evaluation criteria which made a good business. And I just just deeply remember one day, hardy, and I just looked at that list and just said, or realized or dawned upon us there. And we're not gonna find something that's gonna tick all of these boxes. It would be lucky if we even got to one that hit 15 at a 20. So we did something quite funny. So basically screwed up the list and threw it away. And just said, I can't like, where do we have an unfair advantage? And like the way I characterized that period of our journey was that frameworks don't find markets. And we had gone through a period of basically writing a bi-weekly memo about each space that we're interested at the time and debating each other, trying to pull it apart to build this list of 20. And when we threw everything out of the window, it just kind of helped have been quite serenable to this lead to us where we just started going back to what we felt innately close to and interested in, which was starting to ask people and talk to people in the financial services space and it slowly narrowed itself to advice in it. Just like it felt so much more organic in terms of where our like thinking process in it. You could just feel the excitement in our two person shoebox room, like building and building. And then we started to get to a space where we were just able to message people and talk to people at the click of our fingers to noodle and noodle further into what ultimately ended up as financial advice. But I'll throw it a hearty to see if he's going to want to add to that interesting part of our journey. Yeah, I think the takeaway was you can't framework your way to a great business, although that was like a really useful exercise to us. So I wouldn't necessarily have like discounted what we did, but we had to experience it to reach the point where it was like, OK, we need to shift approach a little bit. But it also narrowed down like what the things were that actually mattered. And I think ultimately for me and like the reason that we ended up walking away from home services, like roofing specifically, was that I couldn't see myself being passionate about the space for 10 years or having roofed with all homeowners as my customer maybe as like the more honest question there. Everything on paper said that that could be a great business. And it made sense. And like it had a lot of the kind of themes that we were looking for. But yeah, it fell down on the passion front. And like ultimately that's probably the most important. So how did it feel at that point where you kind of screwed up the piece of paper? Did you feel like you were back at day zero and you had nothing? Yeah, like just kind of impact that a little bit. Yeah, it was an incredibly uncomfortable experience, I would say. It was very uncomfortable because you're essentially sitting there, conducting this search process. But we had kind of pretty clear guidelines and principles in place. And there wasn't necessarily like a timeline. But what I would say is that the ghost load to go fast kind of approach doesn't mean that we were any less kind of intense. So we're like, we still moved extremely quickly. We like had a lot of rigor on what we were doing. So it's definitely not to get confused by, you know, we had our feet up on the chairs. We were waiting for the bolt of inspiration to land. Yeah. That was not happening. But like essentially what we did is we kind of did two-week sprints. And kind of the clear litmus test for us was, we could very quickly go out and talk to a whole bunch of people. And so we could open doors. And we found that pretty hard to do it with a few of the early ideas that we found. And then kind of the second stage of that is convince people to let you in house with them. And so the intent of that was, we're not financial advisors and this case, we do have a lot of kind of tangential experience. And that helps us open doors. Like as soon as you go to someone and say, like, hey, I built these things and they manage billions of dollars under assets. And I've held regulated roles. And like I understand. Yeah, there's a bit more trust there. And by the way, like here's these proof points. It immediately got us meetings. So I think within the first two weeks of kind of the pivot to the financial advice we had, more conversations than we'd had in the previous kind of several months. And then by the end of that two week period, we had final six firms signed up to let us go in house with them. What does that mean to go in house? Unpack that because I don't think everyone's fully, people do custom the discovery or whatever, but is that the same thing as in house? No, this is like a few levels deeper, I would say. So going in house literally means turning up to their offices and embedding yourself in there for a few days to kind of a week or so. And so basically we put together a two page pilot partner agreement. And it basically said nothing. It was really a social culture. It was like a social contract and a commitment to let us come into your offices for a few days and to spend time with a bunch of different people within your firm. So for us, we said we wanna have kind of like minimum three two hour sessions with management, that could be a CEO that had a compliance managing director. These are the types of things we're looking for. Then for your advice team, we want a couple of hours with a few different advisors with your back office with your support staff and then depending on the business, for example, one at a call center, we also said hey, and so we were basically getting a commitment from them that we were gonna spend a bunch of time with your team to really try and understand like what's the purpose of your role and then how does that tie back to the day-to-day reality? And we essentially said we think we can build something in this space. We clearly have a very good background and in return for letting us do this, you will get early access to like preferential treatment. We decide to build the thing. And that was it. It was reasonably vague. But what we found in return was kind of the pain that people were experiencing was so great that they were signing and returning these documents the same day, they were sending us calendar blocks to like make the time with their teams and all of this was unprobbed from us. We essentially didn't have to organize anything. And it was pretty incredible now thinking back on that but it was just really early signs that there was demand and that we were getting called kind of into this area and that there was something very clear going on for us to pull apart and really understand. And so the way I would kind of differentiate this is a lot of people go in to kind of customer infuse and they say like list out your top 36 pain points, right? And like you get heaps of notes and you walk away from that and you're like yes, I've got data, I've got information. Like there's something here that it doesn't necessarily equal demand. And so like what you're really looking for is we did two things. We did kind of informational interviews like this face to face, just getting to know people kind of getting them to lower their guard a little bit, understanding what they're trying to achieve in their role. And then we also did kind of side by side kind of desktop sessions saying like hey, let's bring up all your emails that you received yesterday. What are they? What do you do with that information? What does it mean? What are the systems do you interact with? And we started to learn and see really interesting things and kind of where like the purpose of a role starts to diverge from the reality. And this is kind of the messy middle where a lot of pain and frustration starts to occur. Really interesting. Shaq, did you want to jump in there? Yeah, there's a couple things that were really core to that approach as well. We felt it was so important to have them put something at stake the whole time. And that's why we invented that social contract. I think it gave them like a 50% off to the versversion of Malo that had no confirmed delivery on data or whatever, what it was going to look like. But it essentially instilled in us this commercial intent and always forcing a commercial question. And I think the benefit of that approach is it always pulled us out of this. This is interesting and this is called type situation because the next thing and they always expected was like a question to buy or a question to pay. And then like working back from that, we framed our questions a lot more around like what would stop you from buying this? And why aren't you doing it? And some of those very, very early interviews that we had maybe a year ago now really also helped and pre-sales for what ultimately became Malo. So we essentially developed like 300 or 400 lists of people that we could eventually head up to start doing that. And I think that that comes going back to that constant approach of evaluating the tools commercially forced other people to decide what it is and focus on what their pain points were because we heard every pain point under the sun. Someone said, "My pain point is booking meetings." But I get my assistant to do that. And it's just like, "Okay, we need to understand exactly what constitutes a real pain point in your job." And I think where we then focused a lot more effort was then where people were sort of saying no and where they were having trouble or understanding the product. And then when we couldn't communicate the product or the initial version clearly enough, it's almost as if we step back and say, "This needs to be so obviously simple in terms of an initial wedge product that I need to describe in three points. You have a problem with taking notes. Let Malo record your meetings. We'll do it in a minute versus an hour." And we had very strong signal that those are problems based for us to build in, but we needed to identify a very small wedge to start and that we could communicate very clearly. And so that whole navigation piece became one of us identifying for ourselves as well what the initial version of Malo was. And I think it was incredibly helpful that we didn't feel so rushed at doing that, but we were felt very sure, you know, after six months of doing that, what the first second versions of Malo were going to be. - It's really interesting because most founders think first about problem identification, right? And then solution shape, form, et cetera. And then once the product is kind of actually ready to be used by anyone, what is the language, what is the channel, et cetera, that I'll try and distribute that through. But there's obviously room for error at each handoff point between those three stages. And I guess your process collapsed all of that into just one stage. So you just did not start building product until you knew you were building the thing that was going to sell because you would worked out how to articulate it in such a way that they were like, shut up and take my money kind of thing. - And I would say that like we didn't, you know, have the crystal ball inside, you know, at the start of that journey. But we just had enough gut instinct that one was the market big enough to, is there enough change in it? And three, are we passionate enough about it to care to actually push the market and the technology for it? And we answered as strong years to all of those. So like, okay, go, let's just insert ourselves in all of these situations, right? The way from superannuation funds that, you know, we're running critical compliance workflows off a bunch of Excel spreadsheets where they could be, you know, hand, hand, like a license losing penalty if some of the stuff was wrong, right? The way through like an individual, original individual mortgage advisor selling mortgages to, you know, a handful of clients. And that spectrum of client diversity as well also helped us like tease out, okay, like what's something that could be picked up by, you know, a lot of people off the bat and open, open our surface area to learning more and more pretty quickly. Gotcha. - The way I would describe it is, we did not build anything. We didn't even go into solution mode until we felt like we had exhausted, like every avenue and we'd learned as much as we possibly could, probably more than anyone else about the, like, current reality of the advice space. And so we were just like exhausted. And like I just distinctly remember, we ended up in the boardroom of like a very large, very well-known firm with their entire exact team. And they were just grilling us, like, just taking us to the cleaners. And it was fantastic because we were able to kind of turn that conversation around. Everything just becomes a customer and view in that situation. It's like, hey, you said X, can you tell me more about that? I'm curious. And we got all the way down to the point where we basically asked them how they would procure software like ours. What would they take us through? What are the checklists and expectations would have to meet? So like we just ended up basically having all this information up front from what could we actually build? What might that look like? How would we market and sell that? All the way through to like how is it procured by, everyone from an individual to the largest enterprise kind of operating in the space? And so we kind of paused and stopped at that point after a few months and said like, are we absolutely convinced? And the trick was just to be like very intellectually honest with yourself. Like is this actually the thing given everything that we know right now? And there was definitely a pause moment. And it was kind of like a few days and we went like, yeah, we are incredibly fired up about this. Like let's go. And the final stage was that we ended up going to a really, really large advice conference. And we actually exhibited the product and it did not exist at that point. So we turned up as a vendor. We built essentially like a very rough working V1, but it was designed incredibly beautifully. It looked great on the front. But it did not exist in any way, shape or form. And we basically spent three days selling this thing as hard as we possibly could. And we just came out of it so energized and also so like abundantly clear that we had now lost sales and we should have built it yesterday and just went into like crazy fast execution mode. And it was like panic. Like, oh my god, we're onto something here. Like let's go and we should have done this three months ago. But in hindsight, we had done everything right up until that point. and we're extremely-- confident and kind of tick the like critical boxes in our mind. It's like we were passionate, we were fired up. There was like change in the world that we could bring forward and then we'd found real demand strong tailwinds and there's real opportunity to make an impact. I love it. Just quickly touching off the back of it. It was pretty funny that you know like much to our surprise, the largest advice conference in the country doesn't check whether you actually have a product or not. So we got in with a vibe coded product and a marketing website and we're essentially selling the dream to people who wanted it immediately and we couldn't deliver it to them. So that's what convinced us that we should have hired our engineer the month before and then just gone straight to it. What did it look like actually to run that sort of test of turning up at a conference like what level of interest you know convinced you are this is more than just the people I've gone in house with. It's the number of people who like through a one minute demo of the product and immediately got it and they're like okay I'm in and all it was was a web app we clicked record as a fairly brittle as well. So half the time like maybe a third of the time it just kind of broke because in neither of us knew how to fix it and I get to spend a minute but there was no database it basically recorded like a minutes conversation between like myself as a fake advisor and you as a as the fake client and then it would send that to a retail workflow it would summarize the meeting against you know that it was an advice meeting and then send you an email summary. So we also used it as a bit of a lead gen tool. Yeah I'm going to have to have to take that email off you so I can send you this summary. Exactly. If you want this exactly and they got it into their own inbox I asked them to check their emails anonymously then they had something from Marlou in their own emails as well and I think that was a nice like closing loop to it as well. So how much did that call it an experiment? How much did that experiment cost? Oh maybe 10,000 AUD. Good experiment. For three days and that included like flights turning up a whole bunch of marketing materials and t-shirts and I think we negotiated the cost of the stand down and guaranteed them that we'd be back next year. We're actually just about to go for a walk. Awesome. With a much less. It's sponsoring the drinks. It's going to be great time for social but we basically committed ourselves a year in advance in order to get a big upfront discount. I mean it's so counterintuitive right to spend 10 grand when you don't yet have anything to sell but on the flip side spending 10 you'll spend way more than that building a product that you don't know anyone wants to buy. Yeah and like that was a big reason as to why we should raise in the first place to help let us be resource constrained but not to resource constrained. Like having the flexibility to spend 10k and really prove something out was well worth it for us. And like you know founders who would have spent months chasing down the wrong rabbit hole and we just wanted to be so rough. Yeah 100%. I think it also comes back to like the reason for raising and again my view on kind of how companies should be built in the early days is you're trying to answer like a true false question and so for us that was can we raise money to get a product and market that we absolutely like are convinced of that we know people love and that there's clear demand for and can we answer that yes or no within 12 months. And then like if you can answer yes it unlocks like a huge amount of uncapped upside and then like another set of kind of true false questions that you then need to go on answer i.e. Like can we scale this thing up? Can we launch multiple markets? It kind of like one leads to the other but that's how I think about venture capital and really like it's an aid to answer those questions with massive upside like if you can answer them like truthfully right. And I think we basically like did everything that we kind of said in those first 12 months we got the product like built and launched and then yeah kind of off to the races. And so like that that period of our time became like that or that what that series of true false was looked back for us was initially leveraging our network as an unfair advantage to find people to talk to and then it became like sell to learn and prove demand as much as possible. And then once we were convinced enough of the space it became something or more along ones like noodling around for the perfect or the right implementation of the idea because like it just need to be so easy to communicate what we were doing. And that was almost different very different like a long term version of the company but very early on it became so important that we so clear to us that we needed to have early wins on the board with the product that we could sell before we could start to paint the vision of the future we saw for advisors. Yeah awesome and I'd love to kind of like dive in a little bit more to you know what makes the product special you know this the idea that this you know it's beautiful it's simple secure but it's also full regulated advisors you know in a very high risk high trust sort of situation like what what does it actually mean to move really quickly ship really quickly but it's still be beautiful and still be compliant. Yeah so that's a great question I think a couple of like starting thoughts for me was like one all the software that we came across and we went extremely deep as well on existing software we looked at everything we got demos we signed up as potential customers and said like show us how this works. CRM's modeling software basically every other tool that an advisor could possibly use and my overall like view on what we saw was everything was Windows 95 era it was awful to use extremely clunky and if you asked any advisor whether they enjoyed using that software or not they would come back with extremely strong negative feedback it was just so one exciting to us that that was the case and to a parent that you had to build something that the advisor actually loved to use and if you think about who they are their you know relationship builders they give trusted advice but they're also the revenue generating function of their business and so if you can build something that's incredibly easy for them to adopt that the time to value is you know one or two clicks i.e. I sign up it's easy it's simple intuitive and in our case I get my meeting notes and like the perfect format specific to me and my needs and two clicks that was going to absolutely blow them out of the water and so that's kind of how we came up with it's a product led growth approach anyone can sign up get on board it can start we're going to give them you know as much value as possible upfront and make it the fewest possible clicks so like our design ethos is like we spend hours arguing about like what buttons to remove versus like what buttons should we add and it just had to work and do the thing that I wanted basically other than the sort of like one to two clicks and ease of starting to use the product were there any other sort of principles or choices that you use to sort of earn that love ability or that advisors talk about how a Marlowe is in vertical as life changing and and that's a very big statement for note taking essentially so what sort of other thing is until is that I think some of it was definitely instilled during our junior shazies building consumer grade fintech like we set the bar so high for ourselves on what it would take to get someone who's probably in the late stages of their career like most of the advice world is someone who's relatively fearful from adopting new technology it's an industry that's incredibly regulated that's that's often how you end up in these situations where you get unloved technology that's been the status quo for 20 years because there's not a huge appetite for change and people are scared to make it effort you know could put them at some kind of regulatory risk so from our perspective like the workflow trust had to be earned and that's why we spent so long noodling around in the space to find the exact implementation because this is an industry that you know it is basically like some advisors would run back to backs all day long kind of thing about meeting after meeting between clients and fund managers and they almost burden themselves by working so hard to deliver an elite client experience but it's often you know their name that's attached to the advice and they might even be their manager director of the firm so there's a lot of personal brand tied up with the quality of advice that they offer all that to say that for busy people we needed to make it very simple for them to use and like make them feel appreciated by using the tool so one of the first things we did was allow anyone in their team to access a meeting output as soon as it's been the recordings been generated and what that did and sparked and saw as that I'd realization that you could start internal workflows without an advisor having leaving a meeting and it like very simple realization for firms allowed them to like start work sometimes like half a day before it would ordinarily end up with a support person and so some of those like observations or product features or approaches or principles that only came about from us like sitting next to people and understanding okay like once you do this thing what's the next thing you do and we saw it because the calendars were jammed and they told us that actually in truth I meant to be delivering this update immediately after the meeting but in reality I send it at a club at night after I've put the kids to bed like these kind of like hidden insights were certainly some of the things that helped us communicate the value of our tool back to advisors when we said hey we hear you I know you're so busy and this is why we built this tool for you I love how this sort of process of going slow to go fast and it must have seemed just like crazy to be sitting there for a whole day and those days going on for weeks with all these different customer personas. But I think the thing that you sort of almost can't buy in all of that is just the empathy, right? Like you know what their lived experience looks like. You know what is the like most painful part of their day and selling to pain and alleviation of pain is very powerful, right? And real pain, you know, not just inconvenience or yeah, inefficiency. Absolutely. And it manifested itself in our own product development process when when we were debating features and things to do, we'd not only, you know, said like I'd like to do this thing, it almost became like those people's names were attached to the feature that we're solving. So like, remember that person from XYZ fund that was complaining about this? Like that's kind of similar to what this person over here said. And like I think if we actually do this slightly differently, we could really unlock an exciting feature for them. And so it's just the small things, like, you know, having to record a meeting or even click to record, is it a barrier to people's like day to day because they have to remember to record. So we made that and a requirement that we wouldn't make people do that within Marlow. And like the number of people who generate transcripts because they, you know, have what of otherwise forgotten to click record is astounding. And it's those kind of simple things that allow people who are, you know, towards the end of their career, just readily pick up a tool that they've only seen a few months ago. And the last thing I'll say on that is like, we built an incredible amount of trust with these people that by the time they saw us actually come to market with a product within five months, they were just immediately convinced of where we were going for a company. So on that pre-sales front, it really helped warm them up to us. And yeah, as a provide. And at least the case of one company, they've already pre-committed to their whole exact team. What they would commit to, right? If you, if you deliver it on the product. So nice one. So the, I want to kind of switch to also talking about how you make all these customers incredibly happy while also trying to get customers on four different countries at the same time. Like, how do you manage to sort of balance that, you know, I've made something that someone really loves while also having it generalized enough to be adopted globally from the beginning? Yeah, it's a good question. I would say that we're not afraid of being unconventional. And we've been very unconventional, like truly unconventional, I think, from day one. And so like, when we launched the product in April, we went straight into multiple markets. So UK, Australia, and New Zealand. And we now have paying customers in more markets than that as well. And that was really down to a few things. One, it was, we wanted to be in big markets from day one, to the way that we kind of conducted our customer research was it was global. And we were convinced that the same core problem existed across multiple markets. And therefore, it just meant that we had to work out how to build the products to be adaptable. So what that meant is we could spin it up in different regions. We could localize extremely easily. We could give an exceptionally high level of customization and personalization. And so because we did that work upfront, it informed our view of kind of product strategy and just allowed us to build in a way where we were unencumbered. And actually in the space of, you know, eight weeks, reminding the first line of code to like, launching public money after having a testing phase went straight into multiple markets. And it was because one, we were determined to be in big markets from day one, but two, we were convinced that the problem was, was global and that we should not just limit ourselves kind of by like, geographic. I think this thing that is not immediately obvious is, is it kind of every stage after you sort of flipped to, I think we're going to do, and I know taking for financial advisors, you kind of flipped to a posture where you almost tried to fail. You know, tried to kind of like any of the reasons why this wouldn't ultimately be the thing you wanted to spend a decade on. The markets not be enough. People won't pay. We can't get enough adoption across an org to make the ACVs worth it, whatever it is. Like you sort of pretty systematically sort of head on confronted, whether that was possibly going to be an issue. That feels like a really core part of your kind of like company building force, if your company force fears that, is that fair? Yeah, I think we, we look for disagreement rather than agreement. So like, Shaq and I say that we probably agree 80% of the time and actually having a good healthy level of debate and disagreement is kind of creates the best outcomes for us. And so we'll always pause when we're kind of confronted with the decision and sometimes we're happy to sit on it for a few days or a weekend and just go like, what are the reasons why we shouldn't do this and really just focus on those because we're like, obviously very confident and you know, the upside and the opportunity, but it's really interrogating and being certain of like, we understand the downsides, we've like debated, we traded them off and like we're confident and comfortable and it just means that you never have to revisit anything. So we can just like generally move forward extremely fast, but with like purpose and intent, without necessarily having to worry about like how we ended up where we are. And I think that approach of designing like a global from day one product had its obvious benefits, right? Like currencies, regulations, terminology, all that stuff was flexible from the start by design. And that that flowed on to things that like I couldn't have seen coming, which was super interesting when we started to realize it. So like what I mean by that is, we built a lot more flexibility into the products such that when we wanted to repurpose elements for a different, you know, use cases around the product, like everything just became faster to ship incrementally because there was more flexibility and modularity within the entire product itself. So there was certainly head and benets benefits that have paid off, you know, three or four months down the track when we've tried to like replicate, I use case over here somewhere else in the product. And that's really allowed us to scale even faster globally. So like it's sort of two degrees or two verticals of speed in terms of like one global, but two like product expansion even one in the same geo. So Marlou's obviously raised to help grow the team and help more advisors around the world. So hopefully future hires of Marlou will be listening to this podcast. Tell us who thrives at Marlou and who doesn't? I think about this pretty simply. And in terms of like we've got this coin approach now, everyone is a doer and like you're either selling or building it's in very simple terms and preferably both. There's a lot of us that do both shout out to Ben. But I think the most simple way to put it is people who, you know, spike in a particular area and then who have like high ambition, high talent and we can have high trust and like it's at a few is very simple once you look through just a few key things like like that. And it's just like the people who really want to capitalize on an opportunity to make Marlou the big step in those career in their own career. I think other people who absolutely like thrive in our environment. And it's been an interesting observation from just running a couple of hiring processes recently. And I think I'll just point to two things that were unexpected signals of what turned out to be like really a successful hires for us to date. One, it's people who showed, you know, went a little bit beyond in the interview process. And the easier signal was some people signed up to Marlou during the interview process and that just demo and we could see through the internal stats, are host generating some race who's asking questions and the people who had a point to prove around just purely for their own sake, trying to familiarize with themselves with the product. It was like immediately a great signal. And the other the other point I would add to that was like people who immediately felt like they were doing, they were doing diligence on me instead of me doing diligence on them within five minutes of the interview they'd flipped the script entirely. And I was just getting put under the pump. I feel like those are the two kinds of people who just like really came out. If I was to characterize the people who we end up hiring as like they showed those two characteristics extremely strongly. And then lastly, it's some of the people who stuck out, you know, super strong was that were people who said they eventually aspired to be founders themselves. I feel like if I am, if you're those characteristics, like if you're spiking in a few of those areas and those aligned to you, it becomes a really interesting place to hire from. Nice. I would just add to that, it's just incredibly kind of ambitious high trajectory people. And what do I mean by that? It's you're hungry, you have a chip on your shoulder, you want to kind of succeed or be successful. And like joining a company like Marlow is a fantastic way to do that. So you can have purpose, like the product, the way delivering is literally getting unsolicited feedback on a daily basis that it's changing people's lives that they cannot live without it, which is pretty incredible at this very early stage. That you're extremely comfortable with kind of ambiguity like. And that's not an obstacle for us, but it's just like we thrive on kind of figuring things out when the path is not perfectly clear. And yeah, as Shaq said, like high agency. So we operate a really high trust model. We set very clear expectations. And then we trust you to take ownership and really execute with speed. So we do things like we get rid of bureaucracy on necessary meetings. We just create like the lowest possible overhead environment where you can take initiative and run with your own ideas. And that definitely sets itself up well for people who really want to see how a great company gets built and then subsequently go on and do their own thing. And so I have this view that kind of people are the hero of their own story. And so the people who are coming into the company into Maloo, it's more of a mindset of what can I do to help make you successful, to make your time here as fantastic as it can be. And how can we arm you with kind of the skills, the experiences and the tools so that at some stage in the future, when it does make sense for you to go and do that, like we can support you and like really support you and that that is saying there's like a positive thing to do, not just for us like selfishly as a business, but for like a whole ecosystem as well. And like that's how we end up with more founders, more kind of great companies that's getting in at the grammar, it's seeing how things are made, chalking up those learning experiences. And then like I would absolutely love for us to be known as a founder factory for people who-- - Yeah, Maloo, Mafia. - Or one of-- - It's got a ring to it. - Exactly, exactly. - Yeah, I love it, I love it. And for what it's worth, I think you're building an amazing culture and an amazing place to work. So let's talk a little bit about the customer now. And you've started with this beautiful, simple, loved, can't live without it wedge into the market. But what are they gonna do with all this newfound time that they have? What do you see as the kind of future path for the product and for the category? - Ultimately, like the change we want to see in the world is like, sure, free them up more time, but it's more time to focus more on bettering your craft. It's not necessarily more time to go to the beach and like, sure some of them might want to spend it that way, but like the change we want to see in the world and the part of the vision of Maloo is like increasing the accessibility of advice and through law and the cost of advice. And the what needs to happen as part of that as advisors are able to, and Maloo is able to power up advisors to see five times, 10 times as many clients through a completely different engagement model. So what do you want to see? That people can ultimately access more advice through advisors being shifted from doers to reviewers and allowing Maloo to do a lot of their work in the back end. - I love it, really exciting. So to kind of bring us home, maybe I thought we could sort of reflect and do a bit of a full circle and at least for my part, you know, the exercise of kind of investing in you both pre-idea has really been a journey of trust and trust in people and process and honesty. So when you have this combination of people who are really honest with themselves, really honest with the data in front of them, really honest about what they want in life. And then you sort of trust each other. It gives you this space to kind of pursue things in a very different way and so far that that seems to be working out really well. I'd love to kind of turn it over to you and sort of ask, what did you each learn about trust with each other? The Twin Founders investors, even employees, like what does it mean to kind of bring employees on at that early stage before you even can articulate a full product vision? Yeah, that's a great question. I think at the investor level, like I would definitely encourage more people to kind of undertake the approach that we have, but that does require like very high trust. It's not a kind of a seed pantomime in terms of like, we have all this traction and these big ideas and it works. It's like, no, we're gonna do this the right way and we need your backing and belief to go out and do that. And so like, what helped that? It was just building a relationship over time. It was doing what we say and delivering on that, like building a track record and the kind of, the dots to line approach, I think for sure, is the way that we want to build trust and relationships and the company over time. And just like a really strong kind of biased action on both fronts. So like, where Blackbird really helped us was, not just the capital and the belief that we could go out and do something like this, but it was one checking and in keeping us true to what we set out to achieve and not being afraid to push us on that front. For example, when we made the decision around, are we gonna commit to roofing or not? And then secondly, it's the network and the people that we were able to access as a result of that. And so it wasn't just Blackbird, there are 20 other angel investors that joined us in that first round before. We even knew what we were doing. And then more recently, we had another kind of 20 or so, come on board as well. So we now kind of have this whole community of people who have this wealth of experience that we can tap into and who can help and support. And I think the thing that I've really appreciated is it's always been left to us to basically decide what we think is best, but we are not afraid to seek out kind of opinion and input. And we synthesize all of that. And then we decide like given everything that we know, what do we believe is the right thing to do. And then we just kind of commit and go hard behind that. So yeah, it's definitely, it's an interesting dynamic, but it has to be grounded in like high trust and belief. And we felt like we've always had incredible support. And I think that when it's two of us in a room with no customers and a whiteboard that we've now scribbled on both sides of over multiple, multiple days, that's like more important than ever. Yeah. And I think like just to answer the problem like the trust between co-founders and employees, if it's many listeners might not know this, but Hardie and I spent probably half of the last year on opposite sides of the world. I've been in New Zealand essentially working on a product with Ben and Hardie's been in London. So like you naturally have to learn to trust each other's raw intuition and gut shell because one, like clear lines of ownership are the only way to make that work. You can't have to discuss every single thing otherwise you'll be in death by decisions and committees. But also it's also very hard to operate at the speed second guessing every decision. So empowering each other to like own this respective areas to allow the business to operate as fast as possible is like the most important thing when you're sort of operating on the other sides of the world. It's neither Hardie nor I want to be on 10 calls a week. Each morning and night trying to discuss and litigate certain situations. And like that's the only way you get to move this quickly, really. And I think that approaches ultimately just filtered down to the rest of the team as well, where it's created that environment where everyone is like the owner of their own workflow. It's up to them to not only deliver it, but convince others of the problem, propose the solution, deliver the solution, and then own the commercial outcome attached to it. And that's the kind of culture I'd love to create here. It's like one of experimentation and commercial ownership, which is something we get the benefit of by doing by remaining relatively thin. And it's also been very deliberate. So this might sound kind of crazy, the fact that we've been on two opposite sides of the world. But again, it's never been endowed in my mind because we've built what I would describe as like cultural infrastructure. So like if we want to begin big markets from day one, if we want to launch in like Australia and the UK at the same time, that means we need people on the ground and totally polar opposite time zones. And so it's just a matter of working back and understanding like what needs to be true or how can we solve for the inevitable pain that will arise. And you'll see lots of Australian and New Zealand companies that'll start locally, they might spend a year or two growing, and then they try and go overseas and expand. And we just decided that we were going to kind of back solve this from day one. And so it's building in a very deliberate culture from how we use Slack to how we communicate to, you know, how we kind of assign work and set expectations around like autonomy and ownership. It's not, you know, we haven't gone into this not thinking, you know, about it. It's been very intentional and very deliberate. And yeah, if I was to kind of describe it for people, I would just say like we've been intentional about the cultural infrastructure that we are putting in place so that this does work. And we might not always get it right, but we'll kind of recognize and of course, great, very quickly if we need to. And it's not just on Shack and I anymore, it's on every single member of the team to like, feedback and have input as to what that looks like. Yeah, awesome point. And really well said. And I think that combination of high agency and high trust is sure to build a little factory of founders that I also can't wait to invest in from the very beginning. So maybe with that we'll wrap there. Thank you so much. I know it's late, Shack and probably pretty early for you, Hardy. But it's been an absolute joy. And one of the highlights of my career to kind of go on this journey with you so far. And I just can't wait to see all the big impacts that you're going to have in the decade to come. Awesome. Thanks so much for having us, Sandra. - Yeah, thanks. - Okay, take care. (upbeat music) - Thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Wild Hearts. If you wanna learn more from other ambitious people building, designing and creating the world that we all wanna live in, then please hit the subscribe and follow button. It would mean the world to us, the founders, the operators and the investors who join us in Wild Hearts. This podcast is a labor of love from the Blackbird team and day one, the show is produced by Kimela Herring and Melia Raynor, a Blackbird. 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