What Was the First Time You Worked With a Lab Company?

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It was entirely different then the prior products before. The biggest sign of it was that we had zero marketing. Was just spreading firily, word o mouth. Within two months, we had some of the biggest names in the industry reaching out to us and noticing what we were doing. Now we can work with people who have more decision making power and authority.

Today’s episode is with Tara Viswanathan, co-founder and CEO of Rupa Health. Tara started Rupa Health in early 2018, but the product vision today looks very different from what she first built. As she’ll talk about over the course of today’s interview, she went through plenty of sometimes painful pivots on the path to finding product/market fit for Rupa.

Tara is incredibly candid about all of the things she had to learn the hard way as a first-time founder going from zero to one. For the first half of our interview, we pay particular attention to her lessons in finding the elusive startup holy grail of product/market fit.

We cover the aha moment that the first iteration of the product wasn’t going to work, and why she thinks hiring a few folks before finding product/market fit was one of her earliest mistakes. We then dive into her decision to create a new product knowing that it wasn’t going to be the thing that ultimately worked — but was bullish that it would lead down the right path.

In the second half of our interview, she talks about hiring Rupa’s early team, and her tactics that go against the grain of conventional startup wisdom. For starters, she leaned heavily on external contractors rather than full-time employees on the path to product/market fit — and she thinks more founders should consider doing the same. She also dives into why she hates job descriptions, and what she prescribes instead.

As a founder still in the trenches, Tara is game to get super tactical about the things she’s tried along Rupa’s winding journey that did and didn’t work. It’s a must-listen for other founders — or anyone that’s got a burning curiosity about what it’s actually like to be an entrepreneur.

You can follow Tara on Twitter at @taraviswanathan.

To learn more about the “who” interview, check out the book “Who: The A Method for Hiring.”

Be sure to check out the recent coverage of Rupa Health in Forbes.

You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson