From guesswork to validation - how Ixaria learned to build for real users with Alexandru Mesesan

Hi, and welcome to Beyond the First Wins, the podcast about what happens after the plateau, when early wins are no longer enough in business, product, and design. I'm Daniel, founder of Duran, and today I'm joined by Alex, co-founder and CEO of IXARIA. Hi, Alex, really nice to have you here. We know each other for quite some years now, but we didn't really have a deep discussion about how you started IXARIA and the early days of IXARIA and how you ended up on this journey. So please, yeah, introduce briefly yourself and tell us a bit about what Xari is doing and how you started this whole journey.

Okay. Hi, Dani. Thanks for having me. So I'm Alex. Alex. I've started my journey, I think, in the 4th year of college when I've, you know, I fell in love with 3D and everything 3D. I think I've been learning 3D since end of high school. And during the college, I've studied architecture and I started developing 3D products for, as a freelance I started an account on Elance and oDesk back then, which eventually became merged together and became Upwork. And I was successful at it. I was quite good at it. I knew very fast how to attract clients, how to keep clients happy. And I grew that thing. Eventually it became a company called Aieke, which functioned between 2014 till 2019. At its peak, we were 16 people working on it and what we were doing, we were developing 3D applications for the browser. So that means we've done some architectural projects, some mechanical projects, a lot of presentations of products, and a lot, and I mean a lot, of product configurators. I think one of the biggest projects we ever had at IKEA was a product configurator which spanned for like 1 year and a half. In 2019, I got a little bit bored with services. And I decided I need to change this. I need to completely change this. I wanted to focus on the life of the products that I was developing. Until then, I wasn't really part of the product's life. I was part of the birth and maintenance. I had no idea how the users use it. Do they like it? Do they not like it? What features do they like? No, I was in the blank. And that in a way became frustrating because, you know, I was so curious of what's happening. And eventually I realized that the only way I'm going to find out is if I build my own product. And then I met Viktor in 2019, which I was still developing a product configurator back then, a gravestone, a tombstone product configurator. Yeah, that exists. And I needed a very good developer for it. It was developed in Angular and I needed somebody really experienced in Angular. And I posted a job on Upwork and this was late 2019 and Viktor applied. We discussed, we liked each other. We agreed on the pricing and everything. So we decided, okay, let's start. So we started working on this project and, you know, how things happen, you discuss things, personal stuff along the way when you work with somebody. And we realized that we both have this entrepreneurial hat. It wasn't really sitting on our heads back then, but we were thinking about it. And we, you know, keep on discussing, we kept discussing and we realized that we both have, you know, distraction and we decided eventually, you know what, let's start building a product together. Let's do this together. And in 2020, we decided, okay, it was COVID, no-go. So we met in 2019, and I think we haven't met for like 1 year because COVID and lockdown, but we were in the same town, right? And then the first time we met was to go to, you know, start the company.

Oh yeah, when you have to register the company name and all the details.

So we had to do, you know, we, we, we had a coffee, you know, we saw what we had to solve. And of course, 2 days later, both we had COVID. So first time we met. Yeah. So that was, this is pretty much the, you know, how, how things have started. And Ixade eventually started as a generic configurator of configurators. The reason for this is that before that, as I told you, we had a lot of projects developed custom for companies that wanted product configurators. So we said, okay, let's, let's make things simpler. Let's build a platform where it's really easy to build any kind of product configurator. Let's make this really, really easy.

So basically you used your, your knowledge from the services to basically build the configurator, right? For the client, the clients were quite, quite the same in a way, or the need was the same.

Yeah. So we started— yeah, go ahead.

No, I just wanted to ask, like, when you started, it was in the beginning, it was just you and Victor and like you split in a way everything between you two as like happens in startups, right?

Yeah, that's exactly it. The thing is that we started in, I think the company is founded in 2021 or 2020. I think 2021 in February or something like that, because next year on February, we're going to have 5 years. So we're going to celebrate 5 years.

Nice. Quite a milestone. Yeah.

Well, the thing is, it's not really 5 years of IXARIA because back then it was Virtual Config. And our first project, we didn't really start building our platform right away because I've got a project to build another product configurator for a shoemaker in Timișoara, Alexandru Pop, Alexandru Pop Shoes, which is still currently using. It's a really nice configurator we built. That took a while to develop. And after we finished that, we had another project for door companies from Cluj. And, you know, we, we kept that energy from, from before and, you know, continued with some other projects that, you know, we use that money to fund ourselves, to not to fund ourselves, to fund extra developers and to make things a little bit faster. So eventually we started building the platform, the product configurator platform, which right now it's functional, it's working, and we're doing a good job with it.

So you basically went from a service provider in a way of generic service provider to developing configurators for specific clients, and then you used all that to then create a product. Okay. And like in the beginning, as you mentioned, it was mostly you and Victor, and I assume as the things started to pile up, you onboarded more developers or kind of what were the roles that you started to, in a way, ask for help for?

Back then, it was me and Victor in the beginning, then we worked with Razvan. Razvan is a very talented developer. We also worked with Claudio for a short period. And other than that, we had some people on the 3D parts, right? So you have to create the 3D models. So we worked with Aleksandra, with Stefan, and with Laszlo. So this— they were not actually directly part of the team. They were more subcontractors because we didn't have a constant flow of work, you know, to make sense to hire them. So Even if we paid a little bit more just to have them as subcontractors and to keep things more dynamic.

And if you're thinking about like when you switched gears into like product and like launching a product business versus the services business, the product itself and the product flows and the UX that kind of who handled that, how it was handled, whose role was in a way, whose hat, if you want to go with the hats, whose hat was that and how it was handled?

So it was my hat. It was my hat because I had the most experience in how a product configurator is used, right? So I've built like maybe more than 20 product configurators before. And, you know, after you build something 20 times, you should have an idea about what you're doing. And I was that one. And also I had— I have a lot of experience in 3D, so I know how the assets needs to be managed and how they need to be put together. So I was developing the UX in the first part.

Got it. Okay. And like, if you're thinking like going back a bit in that first month, maybe first year, like there is a lot of stuff that you have to take into account and solve, right, as a founder or as even part of the founding team. Which part of the whole journey of the users was most like where you focus your your attention the most, or what were the main challenges?

Okay, so in order to explain this, in order to answer, I need to dive a little bit deeper into what our product is. So there are 2 aspects of our product. You have on one hand the platform. So the platform is a web app that allows you to upload 3D models, textures, set up materials, set up lighting, set up products, create attributes and custom properties and layouts and so on and so on and so on. So we have this platform, which in itself is quite complex from UX point of view. And using this platform, we're actually generating an experience, right? The output, when I'm done, I have a publish button and then I have a link. And this is the resulting experience, which that resulting experience needs another UX, a different UX in itself, because that is aimed at the end user. So I would say that one of the biggest mistakes we did is that we focused on our effort, most of our effort in developing the platform and the platform's UX with priority rather than focusing on the end product's UX.

And in the end, the end product's UX was basically what the customers of your customers saw.

Exactly. That's the result of our work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Okay. And like moving a bit like on the timeline, if you're thinking about this whole journey, right, when things started to pick up in a way and you started to feel that, okay, there is something You don't plan to go back to your services business, you want to actually do a product business. How things started to change and where you started to focus? Because there's quite a shift, right? There is like, at least in Romania, there are a lot of services business who wanted to become a product or a business and they never really did it and for various reasons. So how you managed to do this shift?

Brutally. The only option is it has to be like, you know, you patch right away, you take it right away. I tried it before, right? When I had my other company, I said, okay, let's do this. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work. So I had to completely shift gears. I dropped the previous company and I completely moved in this new company. I built this new company and, you know, it's still tricky because the money is not enough to get paid and to pay all the monthly things that we have to have to pay. So even right now, I'm still working on other gigs. I guess, you know, trying to answer your question, I would say that the most important decision and the best decision that we made is to participate in accelerator. Like it was AdRevest Accel. I think that was a really important part because I really didn't know much about what entrepreneurship and building a product means. And it was like a door opening into that world. There's a lot of know-how and a lot of information that came from that direction. But also it opened my mind that, hey, there are books available that you can read, right? So—

Is there like on the business, on your business side, let's put it that way, was there a specific moment besides the accelerator that you said, okay, this actually has potential now, it's worth investing in it?

Tough one.

Or it was more like, well, you know, burn the bridges and hopefully it will work out?

I would say that right from the beginning, I truly, I mean, both me and Victor, we truly believed in this idea, right? We spent so much time and money and everything in this idea. And if, you know, I, if I didn't believe in the idea right from the beginning, why would I do that?

Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's like, I'm trying to juggle all these, you know, it's like when you, when you have that, not necessarily a certainty, but like a proof that you're on the right track to— Yeah.

You know, well, I guess getting clients, right? I guess getting clients and then getting happy clients and see them that they trust you so much that They pay the invoice in the same day that you send them. You know, that is satisfying.

Yeah, that's true. And regarding the product, like as you mentioned, your product, it's like it has 2 sides. So it's not like a standard product. How the product changed in the meantime? Because I assume it evolved as the clients changed, the typology of your clients changed, as your knowledge and experience in the business changed.

And our understanding of the client changed. Yeah, it changed a lot. I mean, even right now we're in a changing process. What we essentially in the beginning thought, we assumed that a product configurator can somehow increase conversion, revenue, sales, or anything. But the truth is it can't. That's the thing that we realized. It really can't. I mean, it's not enough. The product configurator If it exists, you know, somewhere, if it's hard to find, if it's not a satisfying experience, if it's not meant for that type of person, if there's too many ifs.

Mm-hmm.

So we realized that, we realized that, you know, product configurator is not going to solve what we're trying to solve. We want our role in the partnership with our clients is to make them sell more, right? This is our something that we want to do. This is okay. I'm partnering with Exadia because I want to increase my revenue. I want to increase the funnel, you know, to have more leads, to have more conversions, to sell more. That's what we want. And the biggest issue is that we were focusing only on that configurator and that configurator needs to be inserted in a website. And, you know, who was working on that insertion? And nobody really. You have on one team, you have our client's web dev team. Maybe they have a team, maybe it's a subcontractor, I don't know. And then you have the configurator. We would say, okay, let's put the configurator there and let's hope for the best. And yeah, that's not, it's not working like that. It's not working like that. Right now we're switching a little bit. So it's not a substantial pivot, but it is a pivot where we're going to focus on the product page. We want to be able to control the full experience, not just a full 3D configurator, which sits somewhere at the bottom of the page. And nobody sees it. So we want to focus on really having chances of increasing conversions.

Okay. So you basically, you would say that this whole transition and evolving evolution of the product and the business was mostly driven by how well you understand your customers and their needs. Yeah.

After so many discussions, I mean, maybe 1,000 plus.

And in this whole journey, like startups in the end are like, you put some bets down and you hope it will work out and this thing starts to pile up, right? You know better where you put your bets and where you invest resources. Along this journey, was there a moment or a decision, a product decision, or let's say a product decision in the beginning and maybe after that the business decision that felt like big bets and actually changed in a way how people and your customers perceive the product and the business.

Yes, yes. We had a client, I'm not gonna name names, and, you know, we had a deal. It was probably the fastest deal we ever signed. And what happened, they were selling really, really cheap furniture, really cheap. And the thing is that it doesn't work. It doesn't work because if you sell really cheap furniture, you have to understand who is buying from that company, right? So if you sell a bed, a full bed with a headboard and everything and it costs €250. Who is buying that? What are the type of people who are buying that? And, you know, funny story, I had Bogdan who worked with us on sales for a while, had a discussion with one of the clients to understand and he was hearing sheep in the background. And so, you know, his clients are people who come from really low incomes and They're not really used to technology and stuff like that. And with that type of client, we're going to end up making, making that client sell less. So yeah, that was something that we understood the hard way. It's not for everybody. It's really not for everybody.

And if you're thinking about like keeping this whole bets and resource allocation in mind, were there any big bets or chances that you took on the product side that I'm sure there were, but I don't have a big one in mind. So it's mostly, you built mostly in an iterative fashion then and test, iterate, test, iterate, something like that?

Yeah. Yes and no. Yes and no.

It was more like gut feelings?

It was in, I mean, in the beginning it was, you know, the proportion, it was more gut feeling. And then when we're getting closer to present, it's more, you know, the other way around. Testing and iterating.

Oh, okay. Yeah, but that's usually, I assume, at least from my experience, it's usually how founders do this. They start with the vision, they build something and put it out there, collect feedback, iterate on it and so on.

Yeah.

Okay. Like, again, just keeping that moment in your mind. Was there anything in the business or the product that you, like, in hindsight, you know, that you kept for too long and you should have changed it Maybe faster or maybe don't even go down that path.

Yeah. Well, as I said, I, as I previously said, the fact that we spend so much time on developing the platform, something that nobody sees, and we spend so, so less time developing the, all the, the, you know, the end products that should, should have been different. I mean, exactly different the other way around. On one hand, another thing that, uh, you know, it's something that we realized that it was right from the beginning, a bad idea to focus on Romanian market.

And you started out like focusing mostly in the Romanian market, less than European market, right? And when you realized that you have to shift the focus, at least what made you actually shift this whole focus of the market?

For both the situations?

Yeah.

Yeah, for both the situations, when we got to the point that the platform is perfectly, is working perfectly, so no issues with it. But the end product is kind of shit. That's the point.

Basically, people can build stuff, but the end result is not there yet.

Yeah. And this one, and with the Armenian market, is we got to that point when we almost finished the Armenian market. We know almost the whole ecosystem and we spent so much time and energy and I would say that We're not there yet as a country. We're not there yet. There's so many businesses that are not focusing on the business aspects of the, you know, of what they're doing and they're very old and they're not open to new technologies. They just want to open new showrooms.

So basically tried mostly to sell directly to the client through actually showing them the furniture instead of like—

And through conventional ways. Conventional ways. And to be honest, this is, you know, the more I know the Romanian market, I see it, I see it as a, as a huge opportunity in Romania. I mean, the, the, on one hand you have really good furniture. I mean, Romania has really good furniture. We, we have a very solid production of furniture, but most of these companies, most of the good companies are companies that are built by technical people, right? A good woodworker, you have some very good Wooden engineers, so they were really specialized, very technical, and they really focused on the technical aspects, and they never focused on selling. And especially after the after the '90s, they were selling naturally because people had to buy something. You know, and eventually what happened is they kept relying on it's gonna sell sell it, and nobody really invested time and energy in trying to understand how to sell better. Just showrooms and That's it. That's it. And right now there is a huge potential in the Romanian market to conquer the online market because there's a lot of competition, but most of the competition is really poor. It's really weak.

Weak as the materials they use and like the whole quality of the furniture?

What means selling? What everything? What means the whole experience? The whole experience is really bad. So there is a huge opportunity here in the market.

And you still think that if you say that there is basically a big gap between the opportunity and where the market is, and this is why you prefer to focus outside of Romania instead of like in Romania?

For Romania, we still have one client that we want to experiment with them until we make them big. So we want them, we want to use them as a case study, a big case study, and we're starting working with them. To generate what we believe it's what means to have a great experience of purchasing furniture online.

Okay.

So we're gonna start up with, yeah, that's, we're starting with a Romanian client. So it's a client of ours. I'm gonna name the name. It's Agake. It's a company from Timișoara. They have really good products. They sell through conventional ways and they recently started to sell online. They have maybe 1 year and a half, 2 years, and they want to focus on selling online. And they want to conquer this and we're going to help them, you know, to get more market share. So we want to see how far we can take them.

How do you see the product evolving for this? Like from what you have right now and the state of the product that is now right now in the business that you have to that type of business/product that delivers these kind of promises, if you want. For your clients?

Okay. So a lot of iteration, a lot of iteration. You know, I have like a vision, but it's probably not going to— it's not going to end up like that. I can, I can say it is not a big deal. The way I see it is to, to have dynamically generated pages that would change based on what users are searching for, like the details. One of the things about, for instance, a sofa, the sofa would have usually has like between 200 and 1,000 pages of documentation. You know, if you think about, you have, it's a lot. And you have like the textile, the upholstery, which is produced by somebody else, right? So when you purchase from them, you get a sheet with detailing, okay, this is resistant to fire, this is resistant to acidics of I don't know what types, it resists to pulling, it resists to, it can be, it has to be cleaned in this specific way, it's guaranteed if you do this and this and this. So there's a lot of documentation just Just for the upholstery part. And then you have documentation for all the mechanism that you purchased. Then you have documentation for the foam. So there's a lot of documentation that some people would really have a specific goal in mind. I have to buy a couch that will sit in a lab that has to resist to that and that and that. So what do I do? Okay, you're not gonna find that information anywhere, right? There's nowhere available that information. And you're calling and you're calling. A sales agent and that sales agent has absolutely no idea to answer you, right? There is information, but it's not available. So this is an example. So on one hand, our product is going to be— is going to collect all this information and based on all this information and what the users are asking and are demanding to see to purchase something, all the page will assemble itself based on this information. What are the most relevant information? And so when you read the page, everything that's relevant to 90%, to 80% of the people will be in the first part. And then if you scroll down, you're going to have a little bit more information. And of course, you're not going to be able to have all this information on a website, but there's, you know, room for some conversational AI where you can ask for something else.

Okay. And when it comes to these, these new ideas and initiatives that you have, how do you plan to create them, maybe test them, iterate on them? Kind of what's the plan on delivering something like this?

Right now we're trying to verify that this is a real problem and that the solution is good. So this usually happens through dialogue, through interviews with people. And right now, people from whole Europe. So from whole Europe, we don't want to get the cultural bias again. So that's why we try to get opinions from different countries, right?

Mm-hmm.

First, we're going— we're still right now in the process of validating this hypothesis that this is something that, you know, it's a real problem, that it's actually people are looking for a real solution for this. So this is the first phase right now. Somehow it's— I would say that it's true, but it's— we still have to follow up and to speak with more people about this to really confirm that this is a real problem and then that this is the A good solution for that problem. Once we have this, then we move to the second part where we'll probably start with some drafts, maybe some Figma sketches and stuff like that to see that this is the right direction. And this time it will be an iterative process. It's not going to be anymore a gut feeling. Okay.

So basically what you said is that just to summarize it, you do a bunch of interviews with potentially customers, extract the insights from there. Then based on that, you start catch out something or create a prototype or something similar. And then you test that with them and then you make the call of what's next.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. Where, like, this might be a bit of a weirder question because like, obviously you don't have 400% proof of like, this is the way to do it. This will work out. Where do you see the transition of I have enough interviews, let's move to the next step? Or I have enough knowledge, let's move to the next step. That's one of the questions that a lot of founders ask in a way when we have these discussions about, oh, but how many people I should talk to? But how many interviews I should run? But, you know, how much information I need?

So how do you see this? That's the cliché of customer interviews in a way.

Yeah.

The cliché is that when you keep on hearing the same answer over and over and you know what they're going to answer, that's enough. You know, I don't know if that's going to happen, but I would say like 5 to 10 interviews would give you a rough confirmation and then you can move to maybe a form-based thingy and, you know, continue to see. But I guess 10 would be enough to confirm.

Kind of when you start in a way hearing kind of the same answers, that's usually around 10 people. That's because you know quite well your ICP, right?

Yeah.

So basically you first define who you go for and then you talk with them and this is how you pre-select or pre-filter, you know, in a way the people that you talk to, they have to match the target audience that you have. Got it. Okay. That's quite a journey, I would say, but—

It is. I love it.

I love it. Yeah, I can see that. Okay. So in this whole, because you mentioned iterations quite a lot. Like how you iterate, what's the plan for future, which also involves quite a lot of iterations. Thinking about these iterations that you made so far, were there any like small iterations that paid big dividends in the end? Any kind of small changes, iterations, bets, if you want, that paid out having a very big impact, though in a way what you've done is like maybe just a small tweak or a small—

Yeah.

Fakes.

I guess I would say that our lovely shadows. We have so lovely shadows.

In the configurator, like how people see the products and how realistic they are in the end.

Exactly. And it was such a small thing to do and with a huge visual impact.

And when you think about the impact, it's what customers tell you or what kind of impact you are looking for? Let's put it that way.

The, yeah, that's not the impact I'm looking for to have prettier and prettier, although it's a nice thing to have. What I'm looking for is to see that it makes financial sense for our clients, that they're happy to pay this amount of money and they want to scale up and they want to do more.

Okay, makes sense. In the end, like everybody's doing business, right?

They have to see money.

Awesome. Well, moving towards the closing part, I'm really curious, like Thinking back to this like 5-year journey, if you would meet Alex like maybe first year of Fixaria, were there anything specific that you would tell to that person or maybe to another founder who's starting this journey and you kind of know what they will go through because you went through this already?

Yes. Read more, read more and apply what you're reading.

That I would say. Okay, then I will follow up on that. What books you would recommend?

That depends for what?

For you, what was helpful for you?

Lean Startup. It's a very basic book that everybody should read it. Then depends on what you want. The One Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dibb. It's, I think it's a really good book for marketing. I'm trying to remember any other. The Mom Test for, you know, how to create interviews. Anything by Daniel Pink. And one book that I think it was really nice, really, really nice, especially for what we're currently doing is Inspired.

Yeah, I really liked the book and also recommend it quite a lot to founders.

Yeah, it's very spot on. It's very, it's a guide on how things work and how you should do them.

Yeah, he's going a lot about prototyping, testing, in a way, very, very lean way of building business.

Exactly, exactly. But more detailed, like in the Lean Startup book, it's very nice, but it's still a bit abstract.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, true. They have a bit of guidance and questionnaires and stuff like that, but it doesn't go in all of the details as it happens in the slides.

Exactly. And explains the behind the scenes and everything. I really like that book a lot. Awesome.

Cool. Well, if you have anything else that you want to add at the end, now it's your moment.

Okay. So I don't know.

Any advice, thoughts for other founders that Might be helpful? Anything that helped you lately? Anything that's, I don't know, steered you towards—

Read, read as much as you can, especially personal development books or business development or anything all the time. And one thing that I think that really helped me is to create a habit of what you're doing, to make a very strong routine, like every single day for 2 hours I do this and no matter what I'm doing that. I think that helps a lot.

And you book that in your calendar, I assume, or something?

Always.

No?

Yeah, every single day.

Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you so much for being here. It was really nice learning more about how, how you steered Xaria, how you built it, how things changed along the way and all the iterations that went into it. Good luck with the next steps and maybe we do a follow-up on this once things change.

Thanks for having me, Dani.

Thanks. Bye.