Why Startups Need to Fail Fast | Getaround Founder Jessica Scorpio

I'm going to jump into the last story for today, which is to fail fast and listen. I already talked to you a little bit about our launch at TechCrunch Disrupt. Here's a photo from that day. See me there? I look pretty similar still. And then this is some of the team. Our team was so small when we launched. I think this is pretty much the entire team. Yeah, it is. So people thought we were huge. Something about having a big idea. And just having, I guess, a good brand. People thought we were huge when we launched, and people always think we're a lot bigger than we are, which is kind of a double-edged sword. It's a very nice compliment, but it means people have really high expectations, and it's really hard to deliver on those expectations. So, I mean, especially for us, we have 2 sets of customers. We have owners. We have renters. We can't build product features fast enough. We're always picking and choosing what we're gonna work on and how we're going to keep people happy and make them even happier than they are right now. So basically, it's pretty cool. We have the typical startup story. You launch. You get Series A money. Then you go out. You try to grow. And you basically think you've figured it all out and you've done it. Well, the thing I'm going to tell you is that at every stage of the game, you're having more hurdles to overcome. There's just— you've never figured it all out. There's always more problems to solve. And so, part of the reason you're entrepreneurs, or trying to be, is that you like problem solving, and that you think you're up for the challenge of all the stress and all the heartache and all the long hours. And I'm sure you are. But I just want to make sure you're prepared for that. So, part of our story will help you, I hope. So yeah, basically, we launched, and then we quickly— as soon as you raise money, you're told, okay, now you have to expand. And that is a very big pressure that you're going to have to battle with and make sure that in your board meetings and in your discussions with your investors, you're going to have to do what you think is right, but also take the advice. And so at this point, we thought, okay, yeah, that's the right thing. We're going for car sharing everywhere. And so we quickly expanded to a few cities. And what was interesting is we got good feedback. I love this. This is so cool. This is so great. But pretty quickly, we discovered that not enough people were getting cars. And it took us a while to figure this out. But in transportation, in anything, if people are trying to use your service and it doesn't work, that really sucks. So you have to make sure it works for the majority of people. There's still things that can go wrong today. For example, even though we figured a lot of stuff out, someone could be away with their car, and then the person trying to pick it up can't get it, or someone's running 5 minutes late, and someone has to wait. But in the early days, our model was basically around a request-based system. So if any of you guys have used Airbnb, for example, they're pretty much still very request-based. based, where you need a place to stay. You find a good place. You request it, send a message. And then hopefully people accept. So what Airbnb encourages you to do is request lots of places. And then one's going to come through. They've tried to get more hosts to allow for instant booking. They've come up with a payment flow that lets you commit to it if the host will take you. And so they've come up with solutions. on their end. On our end, Airbnb was kind of the best model for us in the early days. How does it work there? OK, we should do something similar because people are used to that. And that's probably a good way to start. But you have to quickly iterate from there. Because if it's a different type of product, it's not necessarily the same thing is going to work for you and your customers. So essentially, with our story, we had lots of requests going through. And not lots of owners accepting. So we basically felt that that wasn't a great solution. And it's just because the friction was way too high. And in terms of the alternatives, Zipcar, for example, it was really, really easy. They had all these parking lots of cars that they'd built up over a 10-year period, and you could just go and swipe in with your membership card. We never liked the membership card. There were things about that experience that we revolutionized. We got rid of the membership card. We got rid of the membership fees, the signup fees. We can approve a new member in as little as 60 seconds. And so we get a lot of good feedback about that. But if you can do that and then you can't— no one accepts you, it's just really disappointing. And we don't want to be disappointing. We want to wow people. We want people to shout from the rooftops how great Getaround is and give our owners lots of love. So basically, we made some tough decisions, and we've always been very open and kind of have a very close relationship with our entire community. But we've been very fortunate that I think they've accepted a lot of the tough decisions we've had to make and just worked with us and realized that even though we have good funding, it's still such a new concept that you have to keep iterating. So basically, what we did was we What we did was we ended up testing— so I'll give some background on why we did the request model other than just looking at Airbnb and seeing that that worked well there. The background is that with sharing your private cars, it's so— it's kind of a brand new crazy idea that we wanted to give owners the most control. We wanted them to choose when to share it, who to share it with, and how much to charge. So a lot of control and flexibility went to the owners. What we realized is that we thought we had to do that, but then what we realized as the transportation sector was changing with Uber coming in and more and more sharing economy companies, with this becoming a space, people got a lot more comfortable with the idea, and that allowed us to go to this more on-demand model. So essentially, what we saw was that We expanded out to all these places, and we didn't have the team size, like the marketing team size, to actually grow those markets, to bring them up. To bring them up from scratch to an active user base. Get enough people using them in all these different places. And even in San Francisco where we were doing the most marketing, we had a lot of awareness, we weren't getting enough matches. So in terms of our metrics, we weren't getting So one stat for product-market fit that I'm sure you guys know is you want to get about 7% week-over-week growth for whatever your key metric is. That might be revenue or bookings or some sort of key metrics about how you're doing. So once we switched our model, we started seeing the type of numbers that everyone dreams about. And we saw that it could be really scalable. So essentially, how we did this is that One way is we didn't want to just get rid of everything that was kind of working, so we came up on the side with a beta called Getaway. And so we actually announced this with our Series A funding. And so we got a lot of people who were excited and wanted to participate in it. Essentially, I think listening to your customers is extremely important, so that's what we tried to do. We had 2 different groups of people approach us that said they wanted to share their cars, but they needed a bit of a different solution. solution. Some people who were basically traveling abroad or working abroad who said, hey, I have this car, but I can't manage it. Can you guys take it and manage it? And then we had other people who kind of knew about the home rental space, and it's been kind of an ongoing thing for at least 25 years that people would invest in— have investment properties. So some of these folks saw cars as the new investment property. Or investment vehicle, if you will. It's a bit of a pun. So basically, we launched with Getaway. And so part of the way that we've been able to figure out, bring a brand new idea from nothing and get it to work really well for tens of thousands of people and do millions of rental hours at this point, is that we kept trying different things. Even though, the funny part is, if you take on— and I'm sure you guys might be at At a junction like this at some point. If you take on a new project or a new business idea, it's basically signing up for a lot more work that you don't necessarily have time for. So it's very risky because you already are super busy. You're supposed to be focused over here, right? But then at some point, if that's not working, you need to try other things, and then you might need to kill the other thing off. So we tested out Getaway with about 50 cars. Again, similar concept to a small proof of concept. And with these cars, we decided to make them instantly available. So on demand. If you need a car, you can just book it. And then basically all of our business went to these cars, and we had transactions just going like crazy. They were— everyone was using these cars. People were really enjoying it. And so we decided, okay, we need to work on a transition plan to make the whole product experience like like that. It took us a little bit of time to actually do that and execute it. The interesting thing, some of the technical people in the crowd will know, but you think simplifying the product actually makes it easier for engineering. It does. That's one of the reasons why we wanted to simplify. But there's actually engineering work to simplify and to basically get rid of old code bases and rename things. Change things. So just keep that in mind if you're ever in this situation where you want to be very careful about the initial decisions you make so that it's flexible enough to basically evolve if you don't know exactly how you want everything to work. It's a really broad thing to say, and it's very hard to pull off, but hopefully that helps. So I talked about Getaway. This was an amazing eye-opener for us. And basically, the lesson here is that you have to make bold choices, especially if you're tackling a big problem. You have a big idea. Just don't be scared. Fail fast. Some of the things I've already said. This has carried us a long way, and it's how we've been able to get really good growth and get a product experience that people love. Still not perfect, but it's gotten us most of the way. So, Winding down here, and then we'll go into questions. This is Getaround today, some of the team at least. We have about 80 people on the team, about half of which is in San Francisco, and then we have a team in the Philippines doing our customer happiness, the expanded teams there. We have some here in SF as well. Then we have local teams in all of our markets. Originally, we were in about 6 cities, and now we're in 3. So that was part of the change from— request to Instant. We just launched Washington, D.C., actually this Monday. Mm-hmm. So with Instant, it's— we have a whole playbook, various playbooks actually, in terms of how do you kick off a market, how do you install, what's the process for onboarding cars, how do you get interested owners, and the whole process. But this is the SF-based team. In terms of update on where the company's at, We've raised $40 million in funding. That's Series A, B, and seed. We have over 250,000 users nationwide. And this is a little bit out of date because we're growing so quickly, but we have about 1,000 cars in San Francisco, and then we're growing up our fleets in Portland and D.C. And we— now that we're back in the expansion mode, we'll have a few more cities that are launching this year. Great.