In this episode we talk to Mahyad, founder and CEO of SigmaOS, and discuss why the world needs a new type of browser and the value of taking a truly product-led approach to development and growth.
Episode Links
Connect with Mahyad on LinkedIn
Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd, and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers in the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses. Hey, and welcome back to the podcast really pleased to be joined today by Mahyad, founder of SigmaOS. And yeah, great to have you here. Looking forward to our conversation.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Hey, thanks for having me.
Matthew Todd
No, no worries, I think yeah, we really good, good conversation today. I hope there’s a lot that people can take away from it. As always, I’d like to kind of kick things off with the guest introducing themselves introducing their business. So I don’t know if you want to just give a little bit of background about yourself.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
So a bit of background about myself. I’ve been a software engineer for about, I think 10 years now been through the startup journey quite a few times. Yeah. I think I met four or five startups now. Most of them I was first hire. And at certain point I decided to just, you know, start my own thing came to the UK about six years ago for studies just me myself and a backpack, nothing much more than that. We didn’t know anyone here and went to King’s for computer science. And during that time, I was always trying to find something new starting something new. First year of uni, I tried to do two startups. One was basically students sharing food, like basically, when a student cooks, and they cook a bit too much food, they can put it on this platform, and they’re like, hall mates can buy it off of them for quid or something. Okay. And the second one was basically a augmented reality app that would allow you to measure yourself in the mirror and then try and close in augmented reality, kind of like a virtual closet, where you can easily try any clothes on to see if they fit you or not. And then that didn’t get much traction.
When I was first year of uni. I didn’t have much experience there. So I decided to join start joining few startups my second year of study, first startup I joined was interesting enough eat for like about three, four days, it didn’t go well. And then I joined another sort of memento for the summer. I was there for a couple months, didn’t really like it. And then I joined loop, which was this event organizing app that wanted to essentially one place to organize your events and personal life and parties. Yeah, I was the first engineering hire there. I was there for three, four years actually met Ali and saw of my current co founders there. They were the co founders of that startup. And then we tried to fundraise. It wasn’t working. So I left joined another company called compose. worked with them for a while, and then pandemic hit. We had to make some cuts. And then basically, I decided it wasn’t getting as interesting anymore for me there. So I decided to move when things start stagnating, I tend to just be like, Okay, I’m moving on. Yeah. And then yeah, that’s where the journey of Sigma was actually started.
Matthew Todd
Cool. Awesome. That sounds like really, really kind of varied experience, you know, firmly kind of in the in the startup land and ecosystem. I think, yeah, we get to talk a little bit more about kind of how you got to signal S and how you got it to where it is now. But yeah, first off, do want to give people just a bit of a background about what SigmaOS is.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
So let’s take one what is it is a browser that works the way you do, what we mean by that is, it’s a browser that matches the intentions you have on the web. The way it works is, for example, in Chrome browsers, if you want it to let’s say you have a page open, you don’t want to attend to it right now and you want to attend to it at a later time. You would do three of the workarounds instead of keeping it open. You either keep it open and say okay, I’ll come back to it or you bookmark it, it gets dumped into the bottom of a big you know folder and you hope to find out at some point or third is sending it to yourself on a messaging service, which is the most broken one my opinion. But on Sigma was what you can Do is actually snooze it. So what it means is it goes away, and sigma springs back to you automatically. So your actual intention here was like, I don’t want to have this here, right now I want to have a later time. And that’s what we provide, what sigma was another one is, which is the most important functionality or feature of Sigma was is workspaces. So what that is, is essentially, we allow you to create flows. So, it’s not just about grouping tabs or pages together, like for each work that you do, you have a specific flow.
For example, let’s say you’re doing payments, you have your payment app, open your slack, open your zero pan, because you need to send invoice to zero invoices Slack. So usually, what a lot of apps do they say, okay, these are your finance categories. These are your calendar categories. And they put up separately like that, where we think like, what is your actual flow? What is the way you work? How do you move from app to app, and we categorize it like that into workspaces. And for example, it becomes your finance workspace becomes your analytics workspace and the tabs there are more that you can smoothly go from one task to another without breaking the flow. And a great example is what I have is my day starter. Basically, it has tabs that I need first thing in the morning to go through to set up everything for my day, for example, it’s calendar, then it’s analytics, then it’s flagged, and it’s payments, stuff. And then it’s our community Slack channel. I see. So it just makes sense for me to have like, I’m slowly going through today. And that’s basically what we are a browser that works the way you do your flows, your personal way of working on the web.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And I think, you know, many people might ask, do we need another browser, but this certainly sounds like it’s definitely not providing the same kind of user experience at all. And it reminds me of, you know, what happened with email, you know, pretty recently, you know, email clients were just pretty static, you know, working the same way as every other email client with just different skins on them, basically. But then, you know, kind of fun, a few more modern ones that let you do things like, you know, snooze emails for them to come back later. Because like, you know, with your browser example, it’s not that you don’t want it. It’s just that you know, when you want to get to when it is not right now. So rather than just keeping it in the inbox and doing workarounds, like you, you suggested with the web, again, you snooze it and bring it back. So I think it is a different paradigm different way of working. So it sounds really interesting to take that into the browser as well.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Yeah, it’s basically like, a lot of new apps are coming up in the productivity space, or in the experience space, like user experience space. And the entire thing is called future of work or the work of less movement that focuses on a better experience and experience that makes more sense in terms of the user. Like, do we need another note up? Did we need another calendar app? Did we need another presentation. But all these apps notion airtable pitch superhuman, all of them came in, they are now humongous. And because user are loving them enjoying them, and it works more reasonably with the workflows we have these days.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, so definitely sounds like a more kind of modern and appropriate experience to what people are trying to achieve. So I guess my kind of first question then leading on from that is, what made you decide that was a problem, and that that was a problem you wanted to go after?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
So it was pretty interesting, because after leaving compose, I was looking at different things I could do. I looked at like going working at Facebook, Apple, Google, you know, the classic Fang companies, and none of them excited me enough, like I interviewed for some of them, and none of them really made me go like, Oh, I really, really want to, you know, join this team or join this company. And during that time, actually, I was like, Okay, let me apply to a bunch of like accelerator programs. Let’s see what happens. And there were two actually, that I applied to in London. One was called EF which is entrepreneur first and one is antler. And interesting enough, my co my current co founder also applied to both of them. He got into entrepreneurs first I bumped into Anthony, I were joking about like, Oh, we got both networks now, and at some point we’re gonna combine the networks and he was doing his own thing at that time. On HealthTech and the same time, so the esport time, what they do is you join them without an idea, okay. And basically you spend the entire program, finding a co founder and finding an idea.
So that’s the entire thing. I went through like few people just talk to them. I like, like one of them, we started working together. And we’re looking at different ideas. And for me, being a techie, I was super excited about technical stuff. And at that time, I was very much in productivity, you know, superhuman composed basically, when we started building compose. It used to be a messaging, kind of messaging for superhuman for messaging occasionally. And I really enjoyed working on product like that, I realized I want to work on productivity tools. And I was looking at different things happening to like 10, different windows, open 50 tabs on each of them, researching markets, researching ideas, I was looking at, like how to have stripe for machine learning, for example, deploy any ml system in production without having any much code written. Basically, you focus on the app, we focus on the machine learning or basically visual search stuff, very high tech thinking like, oh, it would be so cool if we built like a high tech thing. But I was slowly getting tired and like overwhelmed with the constant context switching between them. I was like, how cool would it be if I could actually, you know, do all my work on one window, and I didn’t have to switch and I didn’t have to feel like everything is scattered everywhere. And then I was like, what if I worked on a browser, but perhaps it’s like telling yourself I’m going to work on a browser is as scary as saying, I’m going to work on a search engine, right? It’s such a big thing that you’re like, Oh, I’m, I’m crazy for thinking that. Yeah. I was like, Okay, let’s put it in the ideal funnel. Let’s check it out. Competitors, love checkout. Users, let’s see if anyone actually has a problem with a browser.
So what we did was interesting enough, I started like talking to the batchmates, a lot of them had certain relevant issues. And we weren’t, we were solving. And I actually started talking to Ali, my co founder, and he was like, very much like showing me signs that he has these problems as well. And towards the end of the user interview that I did, he was like, What are you building? And I said, Well, I’m thinking of building a browser, and he was super excited. He was like, You know what, like, if it if you actually start building, I’ll be your first check in I’ll put like, even if I can, like, 2k 5k, I’ll put it in. Yeah. And I was like, Okay, this seems interesting. Let’s do a test. And then I went on namecheap.com and bought, I hate my browser, LOL calm, nice. And basically started like doing some small Twitter ads and polls with the link to see, okay, how many clicks do we get? How many people are interested? Because at that point, when I told antler, they were like, nobody has a problem with their browser. That’s a non problem. You’re making it you won’t get any traction, you’re not gonna get any signup, nothing. Within two days, I got 800 people on the waitlist. Of I just want to tweet, I hate my browser.com. Yeah, like, if you hate your browser, just sign up here. And they were taken aback a bit, they got a bit excited, we did their pre IC thing. It was going well. And at that time, the person I was thinking of CO founding dropped out, like, Oh, I got a job at this series, a series B Company. I’m thinking of doing that. I was like, You know what, fair enough. No hard feeling.
I tend to enjoy interesting part was when we parted ways. And I was like, Oh, we don’t we can’t do a single founder thing. I was like, fair enough. I stopped the program there. But I was in contact with this very interesting person called Simon Vance, Kalina. He’s a bit of a known person in London startup world of AI basically introducing youngster like getting very excited about young entrepreneurs. Yeah. So him himself was a founding team member of Munzo. And he would get super excited about cool ideas, and then making sure those people can get to write access to VCs and investors and angels and everything. So when I talked to him, I basically DM him on Twitter. And he was like, Yeah, sure. Let’s jump on a call talk about it. I was like, that’s cool. And when I talked to him, he was pretty excited and then introduced me to a bunch of VCs, bunch of VC communities, and I started seeing like anti In a lot of serious VC calls, like from very, very big VCs to small angels. Yeah. And at that point, Ali was becoming a burned out with what he was working, because his co founder also was slowly dropping out. And what I told him was like, how about this? What if you work with me one day a week, on product with me on sigma West, and a bit of help, I’m starting to think to build a prototype. And then we go from there. Yeah. And he was like, Sure can do it. Loads of friction, both of us very big personality very much like the penny did of our our products. And we started working on it. And then we got few serious calls for basically last calls with VCs. And basically, that’s when we met 7%, some some ventures, pretty decent VC, that is known to back some of the cooler which called startups that became unicorn.
Matthew Todd
High risk ideas, then?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Yeah, they like their big ideas in their email. The interesting thing was, like, when we were there talking about it was like, we like to back you because we think this could be a unicorn or decacorn. That’s why we’re going for it’s not to be like just, you know, for for a couple of millions. So they are they they are people who invest early and just write the entire journey with you. And they were super helpful from day one. And we started talking to them. And interesting enough, they were like, Okay, well, we’d like to see a demo. At that point. I had to like, barely in figma prototype, like a bit more like, kind of everything hard coded. And we were like, okay, cool. Let’s do it. I told ally, look, help me. Be I know you’re working on your own thing. But help me figure this out. We called up our other co founders sort of, he’s just a one man army. He’s our CTO now, one man army monster comes to tech. And at that time, he was contract. And it was I love my contracting job. There’s no way I’m going to start a new company. There’s no way I was like, You know what? Join me, helped me do this over the weekend. And when I raise all hired as a contractor, how about this. And we the three of us sat at a we work for the entire week, and then over the weekend at Ali’s flat trying to figure out this prototype. And by the end of it, when we walked away, all three of us had this kind of excitement in us that we’re like, what if we actually went through with this? What could be the journey be like what we could do we could build such a impactful and big thing with sigma less? And what if we did it as three co founders instead of like, just be like me building it and then being like, kind of contracting? Yeah. And then interesting. No, 7% liked it. They were like, Okay, last thing. Do you have any potential hires in mind that you want to bring on? That we can meet? I was like, how about this? I, you pretend to be the product person, sort of you pretend to be the tech person meet them. And then we go from there. And they were like, Yeah, cool. Did that. And interesting enough. At that point in my head for a long time. Like, initially, I bring them on like this, to give them a taster. So I can ask them to be my co founder. I already had in my mind, I want them to be my sander. Yeah. And southern person ventures was interesting enough emailed us, email me saying like, okay, we’re happy to events we want to invest. Whether or not you take our advice on this, we’ll still invest but how about you make the other two co founders? I know you started earlier than them but in the long journey, this doesn’t matter.
We didn’t care I didn’t personally care because it was like three four months of work. Nothing like huge saying like, Oh, we we basically built I built the entire company. And you guys are just joining it was like, very immature at that point, the product and everything. And I went to an ally was emailed me or messaged me, sorry, said, Oh, can we talk? And I was like, Yeah, I met up with them. He was pacing in his living room being like, I need to tell you something. What was I? I want to be a co founder. I was like, I know. That’s why I’ve been teasing you with it. Yeah, let’s be a co founders and then 7% in money hit the account. And I call sort of obvious like we’ve got money so do you want to co found and he’s just like, behind him values like, you know what pocket let’s do it. And that’s where We started and to be fair set of principles, our first check for a seed round that we wanted to do at that time. And what they suggested was like, Look, you have a bit of money. Why don’t you do this apply for yc? Y Combinator is an accelerator in the US in California. And some of their biggest companies that came out of there is Airbnb, Dropbox Coinbase. Like all the good ones, all the a lot of 20 coins, basically, yeah.
Interested in most of the 20 coins, I feel like I’m out of there. And it was really cool, because we applied, we didn’t hear anything for a month. And then and as movers, were moving my stuff from my fire to my new flat. I received this email from YC updates on your application. And in my head is like, okay, it doesn’t say, Oh, we love to talk to you in the title. So it’s probably like, you’re rejected. Yeah. So I skim the email, trying to find the word unfortunately. And I don’t see the unfortunately, they’re like, Oh, we actually like to interview you. I was like, Oh, that’s pretty cool. What’s the next slot? And I see the next slot is like, either the coming Tuesday or two weeks. I was like, Okay, I’m not gonna wait two weeks, I’m gonna be too stressed out of my mind. I literally booked for like, the two next days, the interview costs are the costs are up. And for two days, we’re walking around London, just asking us the classic YC interview question, what are you building? And riffing trying to figure it out? And then the interview day comes, and we jump on the call, it’s literally like 1015 minutes of like, high speed questions, like from everywhere on the screen. Like it’s, it’s, well, technically, if you were in person wouldn’t be all around the room, but it’s everywhere on the screen, because in zoom, but like, you get so many questions, and you’re trying to answer every one as non bullshit as possible and as accurately as possible as as best as possible. And the interview ends and we feel alright about ourselves. We don’t feel great. Like we 100% got it. We didn’t feel like absolutely should like, there’s no chance we were like we did our best. Okay, back to work.
Matthew Todd
Well, that difficult questions, you know, where they kind of driving into projections or, you know, kind of detailed numbers? You know, what were the kind of questions?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
The questions, it was very interesting. They weren’t asking us, okay, how much money are you making or things like this, they were very much like they. It’s interesting. And this is something every founder finds out when they do a YC interview. The questions are so relevant and so much more deep than classic, you know, interview or angel or VC questions that like, like kind of surface level, they ask you details, like, Oh, what about this exact thing about your competitor? How are you different in this form? And we were being interviewed by harsh do stuff, Nikolaj and I think one other person. And the interesting thing was, we had to interview again. So basically what happened, what happens is after the interview, you either get a phone call if you’re accepted, or you get an email if you’re rejected. So we stay up until 4am, hoping to get a phone call. And then I say, You know what, guys? You know what they know. It’s 4am in London, that’s why I know they’re not calling us Let’s go to bed. They’re gonna call us right in the morning tomorrow, like middle of the day, completely in denial, by the way. Because what they do is actually they like, check if you’re off or not. And if it’s too late, they ask you like, Hey, call us back. Okay. That’s the funny part that I didn’t know.
And then, basically, we received an email at the end of the day, and we received an email and we’re like, fuck, reject it. But what happened was they emailed us to say, actually, we really liked the team. We were a bit unsure about certain parts of your idea. Would you like to do another interview? And we’re like, yeah, of course. And as in store, or like debating, like, should we get the one in two weeks or three weeks? And then I look at them like, Guys, I booked the one for the Friday this Friday. And they’re like, Oh, my God, why? Yeah, so we had another two days, three days just to figure out like, everything about our product, everything about like, the questions they have, because they were nice enough to ask send us the questions. They would want to talk. And we jump and we jumped on the call. It’s good stuff. And it’s only good stuff this time. And he starts off the call with Will I was growth at Airbnb. I built basically he built growth at Airbnb, if anyone knows him, he’s like the goat of growth. Y Combinator. And he was like, I was the YC partner for station. Station. was one of our competitors, they died while we were at the batch, like they were the first like newcomer in the hole, we want to change the browser experience super well on product Island, like 9000 of boats, product a day product that we proud of the month proud of the year like all the things and they were like, they were unable I was their partner and they were unable to figure out.
You know, product market fit, how are you going to figure it out? Yeah. And we start presenting, showing we showcase the product, how different we are everything we’re throwing at, like, at him and he asked questions again, like we’re up to 100 200 questions at this point, I feel. And then he’s like, Okay, one final question. And we’re like, okay, what is it like, what else can we say to convince him? And he’s like, Would you like to do yc? And I was like, hell yeah. Let’s do it. And we were so excited. We were screaming. Like, there’s, I think, a video on Twitter, how we’re screaming like monkeys out of excitement. So if anyone wants to just check our Twitter and you’re going to laugh. That that’s that was the start of the YC journey. For us. We had a little bit of a hiccup. Since I’m Iranian. We got kicked out of yc. After two weeks, because of US export laws. We had to jump on a call and talk to them being like, okay, maybe just kick me out. Let me figure out a permanent residency, and keep the other two co founders. And I managed to figure out a program, basically, in Paraguay, I hadn’t become basically Paraguay in two to basically continue yc. So we basically the story is we got kicked out of yc. After two weeks, and we hustled our way back into YC in a week or two, and they really liked that. We’re like you’re generally hustlers. You didn’t take no for an answer. And you push back and you made it through. Yeah. And I was super excited. We were back. We finished a batch with a very nice high. We launch on Product Hunt, and on product. And we became part of the day of the week product a month.
Protocol ProductHunt wrote a little article about us calling us the next number one browser. And it became very exciting. We did a pretty decent fundraising after that. And yeah, we continue building, building building building after that. Yeah. So that’s that’s been the journey from day one until today where basically we went from kind of couple users that we had that we would interview talk to manually onboard to all the way to having a big funnel of users just coming in every day, like hundreds of users coming in. And yeah, like being 100x. Well, we were a year ago.
Matthew Todd
That’s awesome. Yeah, fantastic. Progress and rate of adoption, how important were the product was product hunting, in getting that adoption and growth?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Problem, it was really valuable for us, because right after Product Hunt, we were getting a user every two minutes. Okay, wow. And it was becoming very insane for us. Because everyone, there are early adopters, people are hungry for new products. And it’s very concentrated in the type of people you would want you would love to have on your product. And it was very valuable. It’s not a consistent way of growth, because there’s a lot of work to be done to ramp up to a launch. But it’s a nice easy way to get like consistent like, every time you go on it, you will at least get 1000 people into your product.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. So what are the main kind of sources of, of new users on the, on the browser?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Now, for us, it’s interesting because it started with product haunt and Twitter. But now these days, people are coming in and when we talk to them, they’re like, Oh, I saw someone using it at a cafe or, Oh, I saw like my friend using it or my colleagues using it or people being like, Yeah, I’ve been basically hounding my friends, co founders or teammates to use it. So it’s become it went from like us like pushing it onto people to them, just grabbing it out of our hands, which is a very interesting feeling because people are so passionate now about it that they get mad at us. When there’s something something isn’t there. Okay, you’re like, I love this. Why don’t you have this? And we’re like, I don’t understand if you hate us or would love us at this point? Yeah, because they become very much like passionate and like, sometimes furious if something isn’t working. But there is a difference between like, I’m just furious because your product is shared versus like, I want to use this more, why don’t you have this? Yeah. And that that nuance in the feeling is very different and satisfying for us.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I guess it shows that that unique perspective that you have on the way that browsers should work really does resonate with them. And they are fully bought into that. Yeah, that unique perspective.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Exactly. So it’s been a very rewarding journey, like, in terms of going from basically me my laptop in my studio apartment to basically doing a massive fundraising and having a decent office, great team around us. And interestingly enough, our team is still relatively small group for people with a lot of caffeine compared to our competitors who have like, teams of 50, developing the product, we’re just for people with a lot of caffeine and building the same thing and competing with them, which is very rewarding and nice. And it gives me a little bit of a giggle, that we are doing basically the same thing, if not better. Yeah, that’s resources. And, yeah, this is this has, this has been one of the most rewarding journeys, for I think, all three of us. So far, excited for more and more and more.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that sounds exciting. Definitely. And what then, aside from the number of employees, what sets you know, SigmaOS, aside from your competitors that you’ve got?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
We really focus on our users, we really focus on our product, and what we’re building versus how we’re perceived.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
I think it’s mainly the way we think about the product. Like we we really focus on our users, we really focus on our product, and what we’re building versus how we’re perceived. We don’t like mission statements, manifesto, or anything like that, like a bunch of our competitors are talking about like we’re making, we’re humanizing the web, we are making the web friendly again, or like we’re making the world a better place. We’re like, we’re building a browser, we want you to enjoy it, we want to build the best browser that works the way you do, and you can enjoy your time on it, and move on. Like, that’s it, we all need to make it so fancy and hoity toity to, you know, get value or provide value to people.
Matthew Todd
A more personal message rather than claims of changing the whole world.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Yeah, like, basically, we care more about our users coming to us and being like, this makes me feel genuinely focused and US promoting the idea of we are changing everything fundamentally, the classic like very much Silicon Valley, if you’ve seen this show Silicon Valley, the first season, when they’re pitching TechCrunch Disrupt every company, it’s like making a joke of every company being like, and we’re changing the world for a better place. Like all of them, just like this kind of very verbose thing of like, okay, look at us, applaud us. And in the meantime, we’re like, just heads down on the product, talk to the user, and actually build a valuable product and valuable business, where you can provide value to people’s day to day jobs. And that’s it, then there is nothing. Actions speak louder than words. That’s a classic thing, right? Yeah. If we can make people genuinely be more successful, and they talk on our behalf of like, actually, your product is amazing. There is no reason for me to keep going on, you know, the internet and trying to scream out how amazing Sigma was, is it speaks for itself?
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Sounds like a very well kind of dialed in, you know, product led approach, which I think is is fantastic and more people should adopt. And I guess on that note, one thing I’d be interested in kind of hearing your thoughts on are that kind of initial onboarding experience, then kind of how important Have you found that to retaining users once they’re, they’re inclined to check it out.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
So the, this is the most important part like when the activation process for a user is there very, very key for getting new users. What that means is basically Sorry, I just got a message. So I know. Basically, the onboarding process is very important because the way we have structured our onboarding and activation process is like a game. We’re thinking okay, what is in the first couple minutes? What is the Survival Kit we can give you that you can survive and thrive in Sigma was. And because our UI and UX is so much different than standard browser, like, for example, if we basically built Chrome, but with a underlying core functionality that you didn’t have to even see, yeah, we wouldn’t need any onboarding, you’ve used it a million times, you know how it works, then the focus isn’t on product, the focus is on distribution, just just put out ads, get cheap ads, and go from there, right. Classic example of these days for a browser that break how to break through is break their eye identical to Chrome, they’re only added value is Adblock. And basically, you earn money as you’re browsing.
For Sigma wise, it’s just basically, we’re trying to break a lot of bills and habits, whether it’s our keyboard shortcuts, workspaces, you know, how you search how you interact with pages, tabs, everything, right? So we need an onboarding. And the idea there is we need to showcase every one of them in a very valuable way, where the user can feel like okay, this is actually really cool and exciting. And I get it, basically, you want them to finish the onboarding, with the phrase saying, I get it, like, why I should use this. And everyone, at some point had this experience, for example, with notion I get it to make sense. That’s why I’m going to use it. And we want to give the same thing for Sigma was like, at the end of it, they go like, I get it, it makes sense. Yeah. And we basically after the initial onboarding, there is the contents that we send the contents that we post, but the biggest Interesting thing is actually our community. People join our community can talk directly to us post questions, problems, they might have feature requests they might have.
And what started happening after a while, like, basically, it’s been, it’s been quite a while that this has been happening now. Users answer each other, they talk to each other. It’s just like a little community now and village that people just solve each other’s problems. It reminded me I was talking to Ali the other day about this reminds me of early days of iPhone, like when the first iPhone came out. It didn’t have a user manual. Even though it was such a different phone, you had one button and the rest was screen versus all the other phones, blackberries and Nokia’s, that had like a million buttons and massive handbooks that explain to you what each thing means. And the way people would find out about stuff about iPhone is like, they would discover it and tell their friends like Oh, have you checked this out, like how this works? Yeah, and this is how Apple always works. They don’t have tutorials much at all, if any tutorials or like little onboarding is what they have is essentially you are starting to use it you find things you learn from the internet, you learn from friends. And that’s it. And that’s the most important part for us as well, where basically users talk to each other and, you know, get the value themselves.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that user driven, kind of content, user generated content is really, really important. I think once you get over that critical mass, like I say they support each other, which is really, really, really good. But I think if you look at what Apple have done, you know, there are articles coming out every week. You know, it seems like oh, did you know about this hidden feature, or whatever it may be? You know, it’s not a hidden feature at all right? It’s just someone’s hack or prefer preferred way of working with to try and achieve something on the iPhone. And then that generates a whole lot of content, a whole lot of interest in, in the product and the platform as well, doesn’t it?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Yeah, exactly. Like, it’s basically. And it’s really interesting that you mentioned it this way. Because the whole day starter idea, I think one of our users did as well, or the way we started seeing how users are using workspaces, or the split screen, or the snooze functionality, or all the other functionalities made us realize, actually, there are ways to use even our tools that we didn’t think about that are super nice, and people are enjoying. And that’s the classic thing, like, they found hacks with our product that we didn’t think about. And it’s very delightful when you see users being disinvested in your product, to the point where they they think almost day and night about it. Yeah, more than sometimes. Maybe even if you do like they they genuinely it’s not about like you pushing the product onto them and be like, yeah, please use it. Please use it. This is how you use it, please use it. It’s more like, here’s a tool and they pick it up and try to play with it like a game and they generally enjoy it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s amazing. And I think that you were those kinds of users it enables users Learn at scale. But then like you say, you’re not pushing anything on them, you’re purely labs, by their problems and what they’re trying to achieve, which for any product, but for, especially for this kind of products, you know, it’s gonna work really, really well.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Yeah, exactly like for us the biggest testament to what we’re doing is valuable is the fact that we have very passionate people talking about it, and using it and requesting more and more of it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s amazing to see. And, you know, to, to get the product to that stage. So I guess my question now then is what’s what’s next for sigmaOS? How do you, you know, take what is, you know, pretty amazing achievement and growth and, and achieve those kind of bigger ambitions of that unicorn status or beyond?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
So for us, we are still like building wrapping up to, we have early signs of product market fit, and we are just doubling down on this. Our focus right now is growing, growing, growing, growing to the point where basically, most people know about us in the space and users. Our main focus is basically right now, we’re always iterating over our onboarding, because that’s one of the most valuable parts of the product. Yeah, one thing we are starting to test is actually a collaboration. feature of work is collaborative, we highly believe in that. And we’re starting to work on actually functionalities, which means you can directly collaborate on any website web page, with your teammates, your friends, your classmates.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
And that’s on the product side. On the team side, we are slowly but surely growing the team and focusing on growth, getting as many users as possible.
Matthew Todd
Cool, amazing. Sounds like sounds like a great plan. I certainly look forward to seeing, you know, seeing how SigmaOS grows, you know, I’m sure rapidly over the over the coming months.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Yeah, that’s, that’s exciting for us as well. Yeah, we’re we’re gonna be we never thought we would be here a year ago, when we started on the journey, we didn’t think we’re going to go through YC, we wouldn’t think we would have a good funding, we wouldn’t, we didn’t think we would be able to do product. I remember, talking to Ali initially will be like, Oh, can you imagine having like, top three product of the day. And not only do we get part of the day, we got part of the week, month, and we’re like, holy shit, that’s actually amazing like that we managed this.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, it was a fantastic achievement. And I think for anyone listening to this podcast, you know, given that you, you kind of weren’t expecting that, that kind of level of growth and success. What advice would you you give to someone else kind of in earlier on in the process trying to work out, you know, how they should launch or how they should get that product market fit?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
I would tell them, It’s rude launch as fast as possible, like, launching is so stressful. And you think of it as this big moment where you’re announcing it to the world that you are here. But sorry, to burst your bubble, nobody gives a crap. When you actually launch the first few times first 10 times know the noise out there is so much that nobody knows you. Nobody cares about you. And they will forget about you. So it’s better that you launch fuck up, learn from it, iterate, improve, then keeping it in spending more time, and then launching because it’s very, very like, unless you are a wizard. The first few times you launch people, you’re going to have problems, people are going to look at it and be like, No, this is an offer me or Kant was not our first launch. It was our first launch on product concept. But we had launch at least 1020 times on book face different platforms to our friends and families. People not caring whatsoever. Like we would be very greatly disappointed. We literally launch on Hacker News and people tore us to pieces. They’re really and yeah, they were like why would anyone need this? The funny part was they were using the classic phrases from the dropbox launch where it’s just like, Oh, I could do this and Linux with this and this and this. Okay, well, like That sounds familiar. Yeah. Last time. You guys said that Trump oximeter. I guess we’re doing something right at least. But that’s the interesting part. Like don’t be scared of launching. Don’t be scared of putting yourself out there. Just go ahead. Do it. Learn from it and people Next time, that’s it, that’s all you can do.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s great advice like a launch is not just one thing that you’re pinning everything on, right? It’s almost like a series of launch experiments, be willing to learn.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Exactly. You are constantly launching, like, if you look at any, that’s a differentiator between a horrible startup, a decent startup and a great startup. What is the rate that you’re launching at? Did you launch once a month? Did you put out a new release a new update? Did you do something every month? Yes or no? Like, if you haven’t for us, we basically have two releases every week. And that’s how we learn we basically do a test run, and then we do a proper proper release one every week, every single week. So we have basically four launches a month. Yeah, right. And then every other month, we have a bigger launch on Product Hunt, or on different platforms, like indie hackers, or whatever. And that’s the biggest thing for us that makes us learn, okay, are we better than two months ago? Or worse? Or how are we doing in the entirety of the journey, but we kept it inside and waited for the perfect moment to have it’s like launching being the silver bullet to all our all your problems? That’s not the case. It’s not a silver bullet. It’s just another, you know, bullet that you have in your chamber, or you need to use it all the time.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, 100% agree. And I like what you said there about that question to ask yourself, have we better than two months ago? And if you’re not putting yourself out there? If you’re, you know, just keeping everything internal? You never get an answer to that question. The answer is always no, because you haven’t done anything.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Exactly, like, worse than no is like, yeah, we are because we’ve been building. Like, just because you’ve written lines of code and design done. Work, doesn’t mean you’re better. That’s the hard reality of startups, just because you’re putting energy and doesn’t mean you get value out. Like you can be working 20 hours a day, every day for three months, four months, but never spoken to a single user. This is less valuable of you speaking 50 minutes to an actual user, hands down guarantee there isn’t there’s never been a successful startup that got this way that they didn’t talk to their customer. If there is an end user and customer, whether it’s b2b enterprise, whatever. Like if you’ve never spoken to them and spend months building, that thing is not valuable at all. It’s less than, like, valuable than a toy.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that value is only ever something that is extracted by the end user is not something that you can put in. That’s why I think what you described is very kind of product and problem-led versus solution-led, I think too many startups are so led by the features by the solution, and they try and sell a market based on that, rather than having that true, deep connection with their end users.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Because problem-led is sometimes not as exciting. Because like, especially for technology based startups and founders, it’s so exciting to use, like new technologies, new programming languages, new design paradigms, like it’s super exciting. I’m building things. But sometimes the problem is so big, but the solution to it is so simplistic, and so unsexy that you’re like, okay. But if you’re not passionate about the problem, then you shouldn’t be working on it. There is enough problems that might, you know, pique your interest that you can go for that might the solution might be interesting for you as well. Yeah, for us. We are genuinely curious people. But we liked the problem of the browser. And the solution was building a browser a very difficult, very frustrating thing to build at points, because, for example, interesting enough, riverside.fm doesn’t work in Safari. So our engine is Safari based, so it doesn’t work on Sigma. So I opened it sometimes happens, we open pages and we freak out and we’re like, oh, is sigma is broken. And then we check it on safari, we say Oh, it doesn’t work on Safari on Chrome, and I’m like okay, it works. And then we have to go backwards and make sure like okay for this website, use this agent do it this way. And it works for signals as well. So there’s like this kind of plethora of like different And pages that exist on the web might not work for a browser browser that works on Chrome or motherboard on Chromebooks on safari, that you have to make sure you have covered all the bases, while at the same time, this is something we’re excited about, and we enjoy everyday getting in and working on it.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that’s that’s definitely the right approach. And I think that’s, that’s what happens if your your problem and product lead. And I think that’s a great message to kind of leave people with, I think to wrap up this conversation, I’m sure we’ll have another conversation future to catch up and see how things have been developing. But I think is a great way to round things off for now is emphasizing that importance of being customer led by a lead problem lead, and yeah, challenging the status quo of just because this is how browsers work doesn’t mean, that’s what is right for the way that people are actually trying to use them now. Right, the Internet has changed. You know, it’s changing all the time, and the way people are using it, and the way they interact with it, you know, continually evolves. So now, you know, thank you for this conversation has been massively, massively interesting. And I hope people do take notes, and listen to it and adopt a lot of what we’ve talked about. But for anyone that’s interested in, you know, what they’ve heard about sigma s and wants to give it a go for themselves, where should they? Where should they head to?
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
mybrowser.com That’s the easiest link to go to.
Matthew Todd
Fantastic. I look forward to seeing how many people are coming in via that link. So yeah, thank you very much, again, really enjoyed the conversation. And I’m sure we’ll we’ll speak again soon.
Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi
Thanks for having me.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp. Remember for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest, you can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening