Transcript Synced · select any line to jump ▾ 0:00 Shakeel Lala: We had all the ingredients to start a business except for the exact application or idea. It very much felt like we were in this void for about 6 or 7 months where we had both left our jobs. We appeared like we had a product, but it was something that we had vibe coded in the, you know, week before. You can vibe code your ideas, you can vibe code products, but you can't vibe code customers. And the best time to provide like life-changing advice is at the, you know, younger end of the spectrum. But unfortunately, that group of people are locked out of getting advice purely because of the cost. 0:27 Speaker: Shocked. Raise venture capital before before he had a business idea, then spent 9 months, 800 conversations, and a vibe-coded conference demo in order to find the right idea. Now, his company, Marlu, is the AI doing the work inside more than 650 financial advice firms across 6 countries, and he just raised $10 million to fix the one thing he couldn't find for himself: affordable financial advice. 0:50 Shakeel Lala: My name is Shaquille Lala, co-founder of Marlu, and this is Founders in Motion. 0:58 Speaker: Quick thing before we get started. We have a huge goal this year of hitting 10,000 subscribers. Yes, it's ambitious, but it lets us help more people build really great companies. So if you enjoy the content, learn something new, the best way to support us is by subscribing. 1:16 Thea Ngo: Okay, let's get back to the video. So Shaq, you spent years in high-structured environments, consulting, corporate development, product lead. Then you walked away from all of it to start something from scratch. So what was the moment you knew you were actually kind of taking the leap? 1:33 Shakeel Lala: We had a bit of an interesting start, right, where we decided to start a business. And I felt like we had all the ingredients to start a business except for the exact application or idea. 1:45 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 1:46 Shakeel Lala: So Hardy and I spent almost a year in investigating and validating different spaces before we committed. It didn't really feel like we had started a business until we had found that exact application. And that was about 9 months into the year. 2:02 Thea Ngo: Oh, wow. 2:03 Shakeel Lala: And so like, it very much felt like we were in this void for about 6 or 7 months where we had both left our jobs and we were constantly pitching and propositioning different ideas to each other. But it In many ways, it felt like we were agreeing on the principles of how we would build and run and operate a business before we decided exactly how it would look and feel. So it very much started and felt like we were on our own from the get-go. But then in terms of business building, that was a 6-month away period. 2:41 Thea Ngo: So take us all back to this 6-month period when you were testing different applications and ideas in industry. industries. How did you go about it? What were some of like the frameworks you guys had in place to do that easily or quickly? 2:56 Shakeel Lala: Probably 3 big lessons from that. Yeah, and I'll mention them and then we can go, um, deeper into them. And the first one, and it's funny that you mentioned frameworks because I call the— 3:08 Thea Ngo: it's the consulting background. 3:10 Shakeel Lala: It is the consulting background, 100%. The first one is, um, frameworks don't find markets. As an ex-management consultant yourself, I'm sure you can appreciate the most logical thing to do when thrown a high degree of uncertainty is try build a framework. 3:26 Thea Ngo: A decision tree. 3:27 Shakeel Lala: Or a ranked and ordered list of like the key characteristics of the market and the idea that we would essentially assess every potential initiative on. The challenge with that is the 5-point list grew to a 10-point list, grew to a 20-point list, and then all of a sudden, Nothing ever ticked all the boxes or even 3 quarters of them. So it became this like constantly exhausting exercise of when are we going to find the perfect idea? And I'll talk you through like some of the, some of those framework points and like some of them were almost principles of the market that we'd like to have. We wanted to be in B2B. 4:15 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 4:15 Shakeel Lala: We wanted to be in vertical SaaS. So those ones are much more easy to tick off. 4:21 Thea Ngo: Imagine if you just wake up in the morning, you're like, I have to build B2B vertical SaaS. 4:26 Shakeel Lala: I feel like that is also most founders at the moment. So like, we will not, I will not ignore that that's probably the majority of people at this stage. But some of the more nuanced ones where, you know, it had to be like a high frequency, high pain point. where we could communicate not only the product, but also the feeling of the solution within a sentence and a half. 4:55 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 4:56 Shakeel Lala: And like that became very, very hard to do for many, many problems and situations because it had to be a natural extension of what someone is doing today without being too far ahead that it kind of loses their interest or loses their ability to believe in you. Yeah. It was an interesting 2 or 3 months of like constantly frameworking up ideas where, and we actually investigated things like vertical B2B AI SaaS for home services like roofing, plumbing, electrical. 5:32 Speaker: Yes. 5:33 Shakeel Lala: Incredibly hands-on labor-intensive industries that don't have a good software stack or at least a very strong sense of fragmented tools, saw the value in bringing those tools together through to a bunch of other ideas like helping retiring business owners sell their SMB businesses, which we ultimately decided was not only a software problem, it's also a market problem. I think the way I close out that period is that the frameworks don't find markets. So we just decided to have more of a gut feel and found a market-led approach to initially getting our way and narrowing down the selection of ideas. 6:16 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 6:18 Shakeel Lala: But I would say that that exercise of trying to force framework fit on things helped us rapidly go through a whole bunch of different ideas, helped us sharpen our problem and idea identification such that when we found a particular space we're interested in, we could defend it and articulate it far better and faster. So while it was a good exercise in and of itself, it just wasn't the only exercise we went through to find the eventual idea. And that sort of takes me on to the second one, which is when you have nothing, particularly in our case, our network was our moat. 6:58 Thea Ngo: Your network is your net worth, you know? Oh man, we were so cliché. We really needed to get the consulting background out of us. 7:06 Shakeel Lala: Yeah. the frameworks out the window. We essentially went back to, okay, like, who are the people who are interesting that we can just talk to, to start testing applications of vertical B2B AI SaaS? 7:23 Speaker: Yeah. 7:23 Shakeel Lala: In a whole bunch of different markets. And it just started to feel like a snowball where we were able to reach out to managing directors, heads of firms, CEOs with our background experience at Sharesies. Yeah, because we did and held like relatively impactful roles there, that, that in and of itself was how we got our first early beta conversations, customer testing that opened up doors to eventually get that 800 conversations we had in the first 12 months. 7:56 Thea Ngo: Beautiful. 7:57 Shakeel Lala: And the last thing, just to close it out, was like when we're in those 800 conversations, It wasn't just tell me about your pain points and listen for problem identification. We took a slightly different approach. We initially got those conversations by saying, okay, look, let us sit inside your firm for 1 or 2 days. Let us talk to management, compliance, support advisors. And we'll help you shape what could be, you know, an AI-first way of operating. So it very much was that consultative approach to get us in the door. But when we were in the door, it quickly transitioned to more of like a product propositioning exercise where we constantly positioned Malu and repositioned Malu to eventually we got to the point of having someone listen to the half sentence and through that alone being keen to buy the product. But we didn't get there overnight, right? It took a number of months to get to the point where we had that really sharp proposition. And so the proposition was, by the end of it, let me record a meeting between yourself and a client. And by the time you get back to your desk, The notes will be written for you in your own style, tone, structure, format. 9:26 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 9:26 Shakeel Lala: And that was it. That was enough to people feel like, wow, okay, if the, if what these guys are saying is true, then I'm not doing my notes after I put the kids to bed. I'm not constantly stressed between meetings trying to tell my team what I actually discussed with a client. Like, I feel the sense of relief when they're describing the product to me. 9:45 Thea Ngo: Yeah. Awesome. So, okay, before we get ahead of ourselves, I do have follow-up for that. 9:50 Shakeel Lala: Okay. Oh, sorry. 9:51 Thea Ngo: No, no, no, no, no, no. It's a really great breakdown, so I just wanted to dive deeper into it. But before we get there, so what is Marlo? 10:01 Shakeel Lala: Marlo is an AI partner for financial advisors that helps them do their work within an advice firm. So we started very much as a note-taker and assistant for advisors when we launched a year ago. Now Marlo is doing the work inside advice firms to ultimately allow advisors to be much more client-facing. 10:21 Thea Ngo: So back to how you went through that process of ideating, testing, and pivoting. There is a balance between moving from ideas quickly and also building a deep understanding in that space before you move on. Like, how do you balance that? 10:37 Shakeel Lala: The fastest way to balance that is to try and defend it in front of someone else. And if you can't get strong alignment and buy-in, and that was like the Hardy and I approach, then immediately it's dead. The sort of time investment we gave ourselves was very much, can we convince the other person that this is worth a day's work to further button down and investigate? And then we'd both commit to helping push the idea forward. But then we'd almost force ourselves to write another one-pager. 11:10 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 11:10 Shakeel Lala: And re-pitch the idea back to each other. That would unlock potentially the next 3 days. We forced ourselves to be relatively commercial with our time so we didn't spend the whole year just in research mode. We very much knew that we had to still have a product in market within 12 months. And by the time we were 6 months in and still without an exact idea, that very much turned up the heat again. Just needing to have a large surface area of exploration to get a good sense of what good felt like and what bad felt like was a necessary exercise because I don't think we would've jointly agreed that the exact application that we've chosen now was the right one unless we had, you know, turned over all of those hats. 11:59 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 12:00 Shakeel Lala: But then once we did turn, you know, the Advice AI application over, it felt that that was the right one immediately. 12:08 Thea Ngo: Yeah. It also makes a lot of sense based on how you guys met, your background in fintech, So it really felt like a natural fit. 12:16 Shakeel Lala: It did feel like a lot more of a natural fit than potentially roofing. 12:20 Thea Ngo: I love roofing though, you know. 12:22 Shakeel Lala: It's a positive cash flowing business. 12:24 Thea Ngo: It's actually, they make a lot of money. 12:26 Shakeel Lala: They do. 12:27 Thea Ngo: They do. 12:27 Shakeel Lala: Yeah. 12:28 Thea Ngo: I can deeply sense that you guys are very much about pain point discovery and making sure you're building the right thing before you even start building. 12:36 Speaker: Yeah. 12:36 Thea Ngo: So I think there's a story that you mentioned that before you guys had a working prototype, you and Hardy, paid to exhibit at one of Australia's biggest financial advice conferences. So at some point, probably, I assume, someone walks up to the booth, maybe asks you a few questions, or maybe try to play with a broken demo. What's kind of like going through your head at the moment as someone that has always been like very deeply analytical? 13:02 Shakeel Lala: Sell, design, build is the way to build products, particularly in this era. So it's not enough to be analytical and sure because you can get a lot further just by being highly iterative and fast. And that starts to contend a little bit with what you're saying around really, really analyzing the situation in the market before being confident enough to get something out. The way things are moving now, speed matters more than anything else. And so you're not going— I think it's about accepting that you're never going to be right. But the most the fastest path to be right is to just getting started. 13:38 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 13:38 Shakeel Lala: As opposed to overanalyzing the situation. Once we decided on the idea, we spoke to, you know, 800 advisors around the world. The tail end of that was buying an exhibitor stand at the Financial Advice Australia conference in Brisbane at the end of 2024. We appeared like we had a product, but it was something that we had vibe coded in the, you know, week before. on the earlier, on the sort of 2024 versions of Vibe Coding. So it was probably a lot more clunky than what you can get shipped with Claude today. And it was a very simple product. It would allow me to record a meeting, a fake meeting with someone who had come to our store. And by the time the minute was up, 10 seconds later, they'd get an email summary of the meeting. But the key difference we started to show was the benefit of it being an advice-specific. We deliberately talked about how's the weather, things that extended beyond the advice conversation, just so I could show them by the time that recording was done and they received the email, it filtered out all of the— 14:47 Thea Ngo: All the noise. 14:48 Shakeel Lala: Additional information. It was just a nice concise advice-specific summary. That was it. Yeah. And then we had people ready and willing to buy it. So it's as much as we could have analyzed the situation, we couldn't have predicted where exactly people would get interested and the exact words that we would say that would light up their eyes. That's why being analytical helps for a little bit, but it doesn't help you push through into getting a product proposition out to market. 15:18 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 15:19 Shakeel Lala: So once we had people interested to buy the product, we knew we should have started building it yesterday. 15:24 Thea Ngo: Yeah, you know, it's like sometimes you have to live in the uncomfortableness to test certain things out in the wild. 15:32 Shakeel Lala: Yeah, because like you can vibe code your ideas, you can vibe code products, but you can't vibe code customers. 15:37 Thea Ngo: Yes, for sure. And you can't vibe code sales. 15:41 Shakeel Lala: No, exactly. Distribution matters more than anything. 15:43 Thea Ngo: So somewhere along this process between the 800 advisors, between the 6 months, between the 9 months, one of the largest VC in Australia, Back to you and Hardy before you settled on a business idea, something that is quite unheard of in Australia. When was this across that discovery journey? 16:02 Shakeel Lala: It was right at the start. 16:04 Thea Ngo: Right at the start? 16:05 Shakeel Lala: Right at the start. Almost as we were getting started. 16:08 Thea Ngo: Oh, really? But at this point, you've quit your job. You've already determined that you're going to do it either way. 16:14 Shakeel Lala: Hardy had quit his job. I hadn't just yet. Yeah. Like Hardy was Yeah, ready. He was all in. And I needed a few more months to get there. As in, I committed, but I had a few more things to wrap up. But he managed to secure some early funding before we got started. 16:32 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 16:32 Shakeel Lala: On the promise of let the two of us spend a year investigating different markets and trust us that we will get a product to market. in 12 months. 16:45 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 16:46 Shakeel Lala: Or know that we haven't found anything and be relatively honest about it. And that was a bit of a trust exercise as well. Yeah. 16:54 Thea Ngo: So obviously that's very uncommon with the funding market here. What do you think made you guys really good bets? 17:01 Shakeel Lala: You are purely investing in the people. If we really, really believe that founders are the driving force behind a business. 17:08 Speaker: Yeah. 17:09 Shakeel Lala: why do we need to make sure that they have an idea? 17:12 Speaker: Yeah. 17:12 Shakeel Lala: If in a number of situations we've seen founders pivot, change, or end up over-capitalizing in potentially dud ideas, it kind of does make sense to give someone or a group of people the space to properly test a specific market and application before doubling them down. doubling down into this, into the exact idea. And so like, and that formed a lot of our early thesis as well. We wanted to be very, very sure about the market before we decided to go guns blazing at building in it. Because the belief we had there was that it's never been easier to build technology. What matters more is that you build the right thing, you can distribute it, and you can't vibe code those 2 things. 18:02 Thea Ngo: I do think conviction is a really important thing. Like, I can imagine like you guys already saying that, oh, we're going to do this like either way. We already have the methodology and the thinking and the frameworks and the timelines innately for ourselves that we're going to follow with or without this. 18:18 Shakeel Lala: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were up for doing it ourselves anyway. 18:22 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 18:22 Shakeel Lala: So like the, the upside was that we had a little bit of extra cover on the, you know, keeping ourselves afloat side. 18:30 Thea Ngo: And then with taking external capital so early on, Which is a little bit against the philosophy right now of like you can bootstrap up until like $1 or $2 mil. Do you ever feel a sense of internal pressure? 18:43 Shakeel Lala: You always feel a sense of pressure, I would say. And like we set very high expectations of ourselves. And I think like the helpful thing in that dynamic is like, I think the internal pressure is probably higher than the external pressure. So we constantly challenge ourselves. to the point where external pressure doesn't matter so much because the internal— 19:06 Thea Ngo: One is so heavy already. 19:08 Shakeel Lala: Exactly. The internal expectations and the internal intrinsic motivation we have is so powerful that that carries us through a lot as well. And that's also what I would say catalyzes the team to feel motivated as well. It's not this, this is happening to us sort of like victim-led mindset of like pressure's being forced upon us. We've completely flipped that narrative. It's like, We have the power and the resources to make something like truly large now. It's on us to like— 19:39 Thea Ngo: To execute. 19:41 Shakeel Lala: To execute and turn it into a really big thing. 19:43 Thea Ngo: So your co-founder is based in London. You have a dev team in Wellington. You are around Sydney, London, and Wellington every now and then, sometimes New Zealand to visit family as well. You guys kind of been running Marler across hemisphere. How is it like on a day-to-day building with a co-founder from the opposite side of the world? 20:08 Shakeel Lala: I would say it comes down to having really good and clear alignment and division of responsibilities that allowed us to build almost entirely async. And, you know, the product was developed largely on the APAC side of the world. And it was distributed in the UK and other markets via Hardy and the UK team. 20:35 Speaker: Yeah. 20:35 Shakeel Lala: So, and we very much, yeah, had good instincts as to like what each other should be leading from to make it easier to build almost entirely async. 20:49 Speaker: Yeah. 20:50 Shakeel Lala: And that worked well, but we're now at the size where there's a lot more overlap regionally. And that has allowed us or made us think more deeply around how we build now a global team where we do have go-to-market initiatives that technically overlaps a little bit across the different regions. And we're now thinking through how we connect other members of our team so we don't have an entirely globally split team, but we're all singing from the same song sheet. 21:22 Speaker: Yeah. 21:22 Shakeel Lala: But some of the feedback early on was definitely that we are building the business on hard mode, having the 3 founders. So Ben, our engineering co-founder based in Wellington, having them all, us all synced up was, yeah, fairly challenging. But once we got into good rhythms and patterns, like it's allowed us to divide and conquer a lot faster, I would say. Yeah. 21:49 Thea Ngo: And is there any benefit from that as well? 21:51 Shakeel Lala: Yeah, obviously, like the main benefit in that is that we get to be present in 3 markets at once. Usually startups that we've seen, you know, go on this journey of graduating market to market, particularly being from New Zealand, we always had this view that like every other market other than New Zealand is bigger than New Zealand market. So it's challenging. You've got to like, either graduate, but if you employ that methodology of needing to graduate from each market, as we kind of discussed, like if time's of the essence, you need to go now. 22:26 Thea Ngo: Mm-hmm. 22:27 Shakeel Lala: So that's why we took the approach of like launching in the UK and Australia and NZ all at the same time and being up for the challenges that came with it. And so we built the business around that being true as opposed to the alternative, which was like needing to graduate through all the different markets. But that has enabled us now to be present in 6 or 7 markets. which is truly a phenomenal achievement that I don't think would've happened if we were to have just started in one. It forces a high degree of flexibility to be built into the product from day one, such that now we are far more flexible as a team in terms of executing product opportunities. 23:09 Thea Ngo: That's really interesting too, because you would think for a product like financial advice or financial services, it's quite localized based on the regulations around the financial services. So how do you think about building a product with the flexibility for it to be in 6, 7 markets at once? 23:27 Shakeel Lala: Yeah, totally. It's hard to do at the get-go, but once we cracked it, it was unbelievable in terms of how much of the same infrastructure we could use as a business to apply and create quite different, materially different outputs in different markets. So I'll give you a super quick overview of it. It's almost, we built 4 levels of flexibility into the product. One is like essentially the laws of the country that you're in. Then the next degree of flexibility is like the network and licensing arrangement for firms within that country. And each firm could be in a different network. And that's important because each licensing arrangement has different things that they're regulated by the regulator on. Then you've got the firm's preferences, style, and compliance program. And then you've got the individual's tone, structure preferences as well. So building a product that could be variable to 4 different environments or have 4 different levers that could all change for any particular individual on the product was a complex problem to solve for a year. 24:32 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 24:33 Shakeel Lala: But now that we've cracked it, it's allowed us to rapidly scale out to different markets. 24:40 Thea Ngo: Yeah, super exciting. And then, so when you, when you think about commercial pull, where is it mainly coming from market-wise for you guys? 24:47 Shakeel Lala: We had our early success and growth in the ANZ side of the world, but now we're growing fastest over in the UK. 24:57 Thea Ngo: Oh, okay. Exciting. 24:59 Shakeel Lala: Really exciting. 25:00 Thea Ngo: And then you said 6, 7 markets. So it's UK, Australia, New Zealand. 25:05 Shakeel Lala: And we've got smaller numbers of paying customers in US, Canada, South Africa. 25:11 Thea Ngo: That's impressive. 25:12 Shakeel Lala: A lot of English-speaking countries. We handle 44 languages in the app, but that's for the purpose of recording a meeting and getting an output or creating a document. The UI is all in English currently, and obviously we're thinking about ways we can be flexible on that front as well. 25:29 Thea Ngo: So the mission framing of Marlu is all about Yeah. The everyday person who can't afford a financial advisor. But the product that you're selling right now goes to large financial advisory firms. 25:42 Speaker: Yeah. 25:42 Thea Ngo: So how does one become the other and what has to be true for that to actually work out? 25:48 Shakeel Lala: The story behind the question and the story behind the answer was that while I was working about 5 years ago, I tried to find a financial advisor. And I was unsuccessful. And the 2 reasons behind that were, one, I did not have enough liquid assets. 26:07 Speaker: Yeah. 26:07 Shakeel Lala: To transfer into a portfolio where someone could charge a variable fee on those liquid assets to cover their fixed cost of servicing me as a client. The second piece is that I didn't feel like there were any attractive propositions that spoke to me as if I wanted to be a client of that particular business. 26:26 Speaker: Yeah. 26:27 Shakeel Lala: Most of them were geared towards people who were perhaps 10 or 15 years my senior, probably had a family, probably had a mortgage. I had neither. I was very much in the growth stages of my career, but I wanted some early advice to help me just test some ways of thinking around my personal financial situation in the modern world where, you know, a lot fewer people are now buying property. There's a lot more renting. Um, like, what if you weren't to follow the traditional path of you need to buy a property to financially secure your future? Like, help me test some other ways of thinking. And I didn't find those propositions. 27:06 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 27:07 Shakeel Lala: One of the big drivers of advice inaccessibility is the cost to deliver advice. You talk to any advisor, you talk to any client or potential client who's considered The cost is not a small amount. The value is certainly there, but the compliance requirements for an advisor to provide advice to someone are so high that the costs get pulled up in order to deliver that advice to the person. So we very much were convinced that the inaccessibility is driven by the cost to deliver. And that translates into the cost to the client. 27:44 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 27:45 Shakeel Lala: And that's how you end up with those high minimum fees. 27:48 Thea Ngo: I think it's an area I'm also very personally, um, aligned to. I think growing up I did a finance degree, and even after all of that, I felt like I had no understanding of what actually works in terms of my own portfolio, how to grow my own financial assets, and like what's actually accessible to me. Um, so, and, and I think it's something that a lot of people struggle with. 28:13 Shakeel Lala: Yeah. 28:13 Thea Ngo: Especially at at the early where you're having small sums of money and you don't even know what assets you can invest in. 28:20 Shakeel Lala: Totally. But if you speak to any advisor, they would say the best time to provide like life-changing advice is at the, you know, younger end of the spectrum. When you're 25 to 35, when you've just started earning money, you're thinking about forming your long-term financial habits. If you can change someone's habits and make them think about money saving, budgeting before you get to investing and depositing, like if you get them to think about money differently, fundamentally, those are some of like the biggest shifts you can have in terms of someone's like long-term financial trajectory. 28:59 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 29:00 Shakeel Lala: But unfortunately that group of people are locked out of getting advice purely because of the cost. And I think that's why, you know, we were so motivated to attack this specific area. Because we ourselves wanted advice and couldn't get it through largely, you know, the cost and accessibility. 29:19 Thea Ngo: You guys just raised a huge $10 million round. Well, first off, congratulations. 29:26 Shakeel Lala: Thank you. 29:26 Thea Ngo: No small feat in this market. 29:28 Shakeel Lala: No, it's not. It's not. 29:31 Thea Ngo: What does Marlo have to look like in 5 years for you to feel like it was all worth it? It's all going well. 29:39 Shakeel Lala: Look, I think that first of all, timelines are being extremely compressed. 29:43 Speaker: Yes. 29:43 Shakeel Lala: A year ago, we started out as a note-taker that allowed people to use a custom template to get an output that looked like theirs, felt like theirs, and they could ask questions of that particular engagement or meeting to get a very specific output. Like that was a note-taker plus a few extra features that wrapped it up to feel compliant, tailored, personal, And also, you know, reminding or reassuring if someone had forgot a particular detail. 30:13 Speaker: Yeah. 30:13 Shakeel Lala: We always had the view that note-taking would be commoditized fairly quickly. A year later, we can— I think we can all say note-taking has been completely commoditized. Every digital tool out there offers some version of an AI summary now. And so the bar for us is so much higher, which we've met and definitely exceeded in terms of then it's not enough to help with the work. You actually need to do the work within advice firms. And what I mean by that is now we do your notes, emails, advice documents, tasks, and forms. We pull that all into one area to build Malu as the AI partner for advice. 30:56 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 30:56 Shakeel Lala: We're doing the work. That's the current state. Where we want to get to is to be that true system of action where advisors are focusing on the parts that they are good at, that they're good at, that they are paid for, which is the trust, judgment, empathy in delivering advice. But right now they spend 80% of their time not doing that. 31:20 Speaker: Yeah. 31:21 Shakeel Lala: It's on the busy work. So my 3-year vision is that Malu becomes that true AI partner for advisors that allows them to focus much more on clients and delivering advice, and Malu handles a lot of the rest of the work. 31:38 Speaker: Yeah. 31:39 Shakeel Lala: For the different personas in a firm. So it's extending from, you know, just being a tool for advisors and support staff to being a tool for, or a product for compliance and management to understand how the firm's actually operating. Because at the end of the day, Compliance is such a key consideration in the advice provision when the rules are so specific and clear that there's a lot of nervousness around provision of advice. And so there's a lot of checking and sampling that goes on in the compliance world. 32:16 Thea Ngo: Exciting. You've really compressed your timeframe. I asked for 5, you were like 3. We'll get there in 3. 32:21 Shakeel Lala: We'll get there in 3 because like I said, 12 months ago we said note-taking will be commoditized. We said it'll take a year, it took 6 months. 32:29 Thea Ngo: So it's been over a year for you guys. Still early days, but a decent amount of time. So what do you think has been the most valuable lesson that you've learned in your founder journey thus far? 32:42 Shakeel Lala: I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to sell the product before you build it. Find some people who are so excited about your product, they're willing to tell other people about it. 32:56 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 32:57 Shakeel Lala: Your product does not even have to exist. It's the proposition that matters more. And your proposition should be so clear that your product does not need to exist for them to communicate and tell someone what it does. And for at least you to understand how that proposition makes them feel. 33:13 Thea Ngo: Yeah. 33:14 Shakeel Lala: You can get very far with the likes of Claude Design right now that your job is to communicate a product that has an insane amount of value in a very simple manner, and that should be your sole focus. Some of those early conversations we had, like the 800 people that we spoke to— 33:32 Thea Ngo: That's also a large amount of people. 33:34 Shakeel Lala: That is a large amount of people that, yeah, working alongside them, working in their firm, multiple different personas within a firm, management, compliance, support, advice, conferences, webinars, virtual meetings, LinkedIn outreach. It was attack on all fronts to find that 800. We needed to be sure enough that they came from different advice verticals, different countries, industries, different ways of thinking so that we were more sure and tested from just a single market product. That helped form the base of our early customers. So when we had a product ready to go, we didn't have to go find the customers. We already had a network of people to market it to. And that became the early catalyzer of our go-to-market motion. 34:16 Thea Ngo: Well, so not only did you get advice, you literally have a perspective list. Yeah, as well. So you're essentially doing kind of like go-to-market distribution prior to even building everything. 34:26 Shakeel Lala: Totally. Network is your moat. 34:27 Thea Ngo: Thank you so much, Zach. Appreciate you coming on. And I learned so much about the early discovery period. 34:33 Shakeel Lala: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. 34:34 Speaker: That's a wrap. If you liked this episode, please hit the like and subscribe button. It helps us bring on more awesome guests, level up production, and bring on new series you'll want to watch. And if you want to hear more early-stage builder stories, check out our other episodes. 34:49 Thea Ngo: Okay, see you next time.
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