Prince Ghosh
Appearances
Code Story
S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
It's really important to build a team that has one foot in the industry and one foot in technology. It's really hard to build vertical software for an industry if you are just a bunch of pure technologists sitting in your ivory tower saying, hey, why doesn't the industry work this way?
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
It's really hard to build vertical software for an industry if you are just a bunch of pure technologists sitting in your ivory tower saying, hey, why doesn't the industry work this way? It should work this way because this is how software industries work.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Conversely, it's hard to build a technology company in particular, a venture-backed technology company, that too, by just being a pure insider of the industry without understanding or knowing how technology can change and influence workflows and actually change the industry.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
My goal was always to build a group of folks that were technologists who understood supply chain and supply chain professionals who understood technology.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
So across my head of operations and engineering and product and sales, marketing, go-to-market, people, ops too, I've sought to bring together a group of folks who come from manufacturing supply chains and quality as an industry and vertical and folks who have built technology but can empathize with how the physical world works and how goods and products are made.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We find ourselves constantly having to fight scale. And this is one of the beauties of the physical world, but also one of the most challenging bits is that everything is not pure software, right? The beauty of software is software can scale. You can build once and then you can scale a million times over.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
In the physical world, and especially when you're building kind of technology-enabled operation, you touch the physical world. Like, these are people involved, and these are atoms that are involved. So that level of scale doesn't quite happen there. But I would argue that optimizing for scale early on is one of the most surefire ways to kill a company.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We went through Y Combinator, and Y Combinator famously has this quote saying, do things that don't scale. Large companies have to do things that scale because they have to every quarter go up in front of Wall Street and have an earnings press report. And the CFO and the CEO have to hop on with investors and they have to talk about how the business is so scalable and so efficient.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And because of that constraint systemically, legacy companies or incumbents or big companies in the space can often not do things that scale. So if you were trying to build a software, a new company in software and services, and you are trying to ask yourselves, hey, why are we uniquely positioned to do this? And why can't an existing legacy player do that?
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Your biggest advantage you have is you're not withheld by that constraint of needing to do things that scale. What that means tangibly is for us early on at Factored Quality, we did a ton of things that don't scale. And we still to this day do it, right? Things like white glove customer service onboarding.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
For many of the brands that we work with, having our human customer success team as a point of contact for them was one of the biggest reasons they started working with Factored Quality. And to be honest, it's one of the biggest reasons why they continue to stay.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
They love having a person on the other side of the phone that they can call or hop on a call with, especially in this world where every big company is under more pressure than ever to, for example, automate customer success using AI and agents.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We're actually like going completely the opposite direction and saying we think that the biggest opportunity to build a company in this space is around actually creating a very boutique customer success experience, right? Because we don't have that public market led pressure to to build a scalable customer success motion. So I think things like that have been a huge attribute to Tara's success.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
But I think doing things that don't scale is actually so important in the earliest stages of a company. Ultimately, at some point, though, you have to figure out a way to try and pseudo scale those things that don't scale. So this is the part that all things come to their point of reckoning at some point or the other. You can get creative about ways to do that as well.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
But doing things that don't scale, again, just becomes one of the biggest assets that a startup has in the earliest days.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
The customer set that we've served and the outcomes that we've enabled for these customers. In a world where so many software companies and tools are so focused again on that scalability piece, where they just wanna be a tool or an infrastructure layer, something that enables someone else to do something. We think that this has left most customers floundering to figure out outcomes themselves.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
What I specifically mean by this is when brands use factory quality, we help them reduce the number of quality issues across their supply chains. We help these brands directly impact their both their bottom line and their top line by reducing the amount of defective inventory that just sits on their balance sheet that isn't able to be sold.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We help these customers build higher quality products that ultimately end up building customer loyalty with their customer base. It helps convert more and more customers into true fans, which, of course, drives additional revenue. And I think the ability for us to be so deeply tied to that outcome and touch such a mission critical part of a customer's supply chain operations is
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
is the biggest thing that I'm the most proud of. We work with anyone from small, emerging direct-to-consumer brands, doing their first 10 million in revenue, all the way up to publicly traded customers like The Honest Company, Use Factor Quality, to run critical parts of their manufacturing and operations.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And I think just being able to build a world-class platform and world-class team and world-class service experience for these brands is what's enabled us to have the success we've had so far. And that's by far what I'm the most proud of.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Going back to that previous point, because we are so deeply tied to outcomes for brands, when we screw up, there are serious and true consequences. Very similar to a company like Stripe. If Stripe screws up, people don't get paid, companies don't make money. And if someone like Rippling, for example, screws up, people don't have health insurance or they don't make their payroll.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
For us, if we screw up brands, they don't have inventory that they can actually sell, which directly affects their cash conversion cycles.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We've had a couple of incidents where as we've grown our customer base kind of exponentially and grown our number of customers and regions covered, we've had our own scaling challenges and we've made mistakes where we haven't done inspections up to as good of a level or quality as we hold ourselves to, which ultimately is not something that you want to be known for or we want to maintain as a status quo, but happens as companies go through this period of hyperscale.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
But the way that we've rectified it is by first just being truly honest and transparent with customers and saying, look, this is what happened. We know exactly what happened. This was the mistake. This was our mistake. Then the second thing that we do is we help customers rectify that, right? We figure out what the impact is on their business, what we can do to make that whole again.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
The third thing that we do is put a process in place to make sure that this is not a repeated event, right? Or if there is risk of this being a repeated event, we try and understand how can we hedge against this either via automation and additional process? What can we do to make sure we don't make the same mistake twice?
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And then ultimately, we continue to deliver and execute for customers and show that we've actually rectified our mistakes. Inevitably, mistakes will happen, right? Like we are all companies that are going through this hyperscale together. I think the way that you acknowledge, address, and then rectify those mistakes is what makes or breaks your reputation as a vendor.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We ultimately believe that the way that commerce is done today is broken. When you first start a consumer brand, companies like Shopify have made it simpler and easier than ever to scale your brand from your first dollar in revenue to your first million to your first hundred million to a billion in revenue to on the front end of the e-commerce stack, right?
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
They've made it easier than ever to do everything you need to set up a website and set up your checkout flows and set up your product pages and scale revenue on the front end. What happens inevitably is the back end of your brand becomes hyper complex. Like I said, you end up onboarding a bunch of different factories and we think that's inevitable. That's just the way the world goes.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And people, they source new factories and new regions and new countries all the time. And this is not a trend that we see stopping. Actually, in fact, we think it's a trend that's going to continue to happen as you see more fluctuations in global trade wars and tariffs and shipping and logistics constraints.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We think that it is inevitable that brands build a more complex supply chain on the back end as they scale. Right. Look at the largest companies in the world, the Nikes, the Apples. They have hundreds of factories all across the world that ultimately make each individual piece of a product that you and I use or love.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
What we think is fundamentally broken is how brands manage the back end of that entire supply chain operation. So today. brands, they are working with a bunch of different vendors and software and services companies for quality. But this extends past just quality.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Really, this extends across everything that a brand needs in order to be able to reliably source and find a factory to manufacture those products and to order those products from those factories and to finance that inventory and to ensure that inventory.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And today, brands string together a bunch of different software solutions and vendors, services companies, and then throw internal people and consultants at the problem to try and run what is called these quote-unquote supply chains, right?
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And over the last 10 years, there's been a bunch of investment and a bunch of companies that have emerged on what we describe to be the middle and the last mile of the supply chain. So we call the middle mile of the supply chain how goods are moved from China to the US, and the last mile of the supply chain is how Those goods are fulfilled from a warehouse ultimately to an end consumer.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We think that there's a huge opportunity to build a modern operating system for the first mile of the supply chain. The process through which, again, those factories are sourced, those goods are manufactured, everything up until the point where those products are loaded onto a shipping container. and ultimately moved into the US.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And we think that there is a huge opportunity for us to be the platform that global manufacturing runs on reducing the need for consumer goods brands to hire a bunch of vendors, software providers, and internal team members to try and throw in and solve the problem. We believe that quality is the perfect wedge to get a foot in through the door. And that's how we think about things.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Maybe this is trite, but truly, I often think of myself as extraordinarily lucky for having won the parent lottery in life. I grew up in a house with a mom and a dad who worked my entire life. My dad used to run global operations or actually still does run global operations for a large software services company based in New Jersey. And my mom, she's an educator.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
She's a teacher and is now a vice principal and curriculum supervisor. I think I was so extraordinarily fortunate throughout my kind of childhood and formative years into the early part of my career to have just phenomenal role models in both of them. The way I describe it is my mom, she taught me how to be endlessly curious about the world. And I think as a founder and as a leader,
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
curiosity and the ability to constantly question why things are the way they are is such an important innate trait to have. And my dad, he taught me the value of work and just how to have a truly world-class Olympian level work ethic. Growing up, we moved around a ton because of my dad's job. And I used to See him put in 12, 13, 14 hour days and he can still do that today.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Conversely, it's hard to build a technology company by just being a pure insider of the industry without understanding or knowing how technology can change and influence workflows. My goal was always to build a group of folks that were technologists who understood supply chain and supply chain professionals who understood technology. My name is Prince Skosh.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And this is not to say that his hours put in are everything, but the work ethic and dedication required to create a truly world class blue chip level customer experience, either via software services or all of the above. It's something that I had just the immense fortune to see and witness firsthand.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And I think shaped a huge part of how I think about my own dedication to the craft of building products and building companies today. Again, like I said, maybe trite, but I truly do think of my parents to this day as role models and exemplifiers for what I want to bring to the table every day I show up.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
The, I think, most valuable advice I would give someone is to do exactly what they're doing, which is to start showing the world your product way before you think it's ready. The entire buying cycle, especially for a early on product, is as much of a bet on the founder and that founder's pace of iteration as it is the actual product that's being built.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And in fact, it's probably anyone who's buying a product from you at the earliest stages is probably betting more on you and your ability to build that product than on the current state of what that product looks like. If that statement is true, which I believe it is, it becomes actually all the more important to start showing the world your product early on, right?
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
You should almost be embarrassed of that kind of first version you put out in the world. It should work. It should do the thing that you say it should do, right? That shouldn't be used as an excuse to shortcut quality or craftsmanship.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
but you should put it out before every I is dotted and every T is crossed because the converse of waiting too long and just building in a hole before showing or getting a product into your customer's hands can lead you down a very dangerous path of wasted iterations and product development cycles without anyone ever actually validating or invalidating the product idea.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
A lot of people will say they want something and in reality, once you build it, they'll realize it doesn't fit into their workflow or they don't have the budget to buy it. There's a thousand reasons past just the rational of this is helpful to me, why people use or don't use products, both on the consumer level, but also on the B2B levels.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
The faster you can get that product into a customer's hands, the more valuable it is.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Factored Quality is a digital platform for consumer goods brands to run quality control and compliance across their global supply chains. So we build both software and help brands run quality control services across their global manufacturing. On the software side, we look like what's called a quality management system, a QMS platform.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
So this is a software that helps brands manage all of their quality compliance and operations related processes and documents. And then on the services side, we actually help brands run what's called quality control across their global supply chains. We do this via a network of thousands of third party quality control inspectors.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
So these are people who are actually going down to factories all across the world to audit those factories to inspect the goods as they're being made or to test the products. as they're being developed. So our kind of mission and vision is to help consumer goods brands of all shapes and sizes manufacture high quality compliant products from trusted manufacturers across the world.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And our belief is that if we can do that, we can actually reduce the complexity it takes to scale a consumer goods brand as brand goes from a million to a billion. Before Factored Quality, I had actually started another company in the digital supply chain space called Workbench, which was building what you can think of as just the software part of our system today.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And then my co-founders, way before Factored Quality, built a company called DorisDev, which was a product design, development, and supply chain management agency, like a peer services business that helps you source a factory product,
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
place a purchase order to that factory to manufacture product they'll help you actually design the product and develop the product so workbench my last company was ultimately rolled into doris dev and they were one of our customers at first and we realized there was so much kind of opportunity and synergy there that we decided to merge together and ultimately we came up with the idea of factored quality because
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
As brands scaled again from a million to a billion, they typically started working with just one factory across the world, typically in China or in India.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And then over time, as the brand scaled from a million in revenue to 100 million to a billion in revenue, they would add a bunch of manufacturers across India, China, Vietnam, Korea, Europe, the US, Mexico to keep up with that volume of production.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
As these brand supply chains became more complex, it became harder and harder for the people on the brand side to actually know what was happening across their factory floors, right? You can't go over to a dozen factories and shake the owner's hand and actually see the products as they're being made.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
But in the global supply chain space, most modern consumer goods brands work with dozens of manufacturers across all these different countries. So we realized that consumer goods brands were struggling with this problem of product quality and trusting their supply chains.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
We realized that the way to solve this was not just via a pure software approach or not just via a pure services approach, but by actually bringing the two together in a technology-enabled services marketplace manner. And that's what ultimately led us to down the idea of what is today factored quality.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
One of the reasons that we believe that we had an unfair advantage to building Factor Quality was because we'd actually built a lot of the fundamental building blocks of what's needed to do what we do across previous endeavors. So before Factor Quality, Doris Dev, they would actually run quality control as a managed service for all these brands.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And when we were sitting inside of them, we saw this kind of repeated process. We saw that brands did this process of running QC, quality control, every time they brought on a new factory to source from or every time they placed an order to their factory to order production, to order inventory.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
So the first version of Factor Quality was actually just taking Doris Dev's services team, running quality as a service, and using a spreadsheet and kind of building an internal operating system that was purely spreadsheet driven. So that's how we first got started. From there, we quickly took every part of the spreadsheet and we started building software around it.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And our kind of initial North Star for MVP was saying, hey, if we can get a customer to egress off of using Doris Dev to what was now factored quality with no change in their quality of service or in the quality of service we were able to provide, but just internally swapping out that spreadsheet for our own software.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
that was our first benchmark of success and from there after we had built our own software that's when we could really start driving operational efficiency underneath the hood and optimizing more and more steps across the entire quality control process
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
You have to optimize across this triangle of quality, scope, and timeline. If, for example, you have a LOI committed from a customer saying, hey, we will pay you 10k a month in MRR if you can launch this by this date, this time, obviously timeline is the factor that cannot move.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
In other cases, if you have that LOI from a customer saying, hey, we'll pay you 10K a month the second that you can get us to feature parity from another platform or system or service that we're using, then scope is the thing that cannot move, right? Because you can't deliver less than that necessity. In general, I don't like quality to ever be the thing that gives.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
I think scope and timeline are the two variables that you should play with. But ultimately, the quality and the craft of the product or the service that you produce as a startup, that becomes a very integral kind of cultural identity that you build as a company.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And I think that's something that's really important to set in the sand early on of saying, we are a company that builds high quality, high crafted software services experience, whether that customer is a consumer or whether it's a business. And then you can decide what is it that really matters for you.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
For us, we very much build our roadmaps as the amalgamation of two mindsets, right? There's the top-down mindset saying, hey, as founders, we had this pain point. We saw the pain point firsthand, and we always had a vision of the end version of the world that we wanted to see. Let's work backwards from there to create a roadmap. And then there's the bottoms up version.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
The bottoms up version is customers saying, this is what we want. And this is what we need, ultimately, in order to give you factor quality, more and more wallet share, right? Companies are companies, right? We need to make money. And we can only make money by doing one of three things. by building something so revolutionary that it introduces more budget or wallet share for a customer.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And I say all this with kind of the caveat of this is how B2B products are made. So number one is you create new budget. Number two is you displace existing budget, right? So you take something that someone is paying for and you swap it out for your solution one to one.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Or number three is you if you start with number two, you expand wallet share over time, meaning you build more that either provides more value for customers and they pay you more or you eat into more parts of the customer's P&L and what they spend money on.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
So going back, the reason that the top down approach to product roadmap building is challenging is because sometimes you can build this vision of the world you want without thinking about buying cycles or where the budget is going to come from for the customer to actually pay you. for the thing that you're building, that's a very dangerous and slippery slope.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
But then conversely, purely building bottoms up leaves you very susceptible to the demands, particularly of your largest customers. And while that may be good in the short term, and maybe that's what you need to do right there and then in the moment to make sure your largest customers are happy,
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
You ultimately want to make sure that you are building for not just the customer of today, but also the customer you want to close three months from now or six months from now, especially as a venture backed startup, right? Where you can afford to continue to think in the future of who you want to close next. And you don't need to purely just be obsessed with who you want to close today.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
So the FactorQuality team started with me and my co-founders. So my co-founders, like I said, they had started Doorstev, the services agency, which is still around actually. And today they sit on our board and support the business via that sort of relationship. I run the day-to-day of Factored Quality as Foundry's CEO, and we built up quite an extraordinary leadership team.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
Factored Quality, at its core, we're a vertical platform for an industry, right? We're building software for consumer goods manufacturing as an industry. Quality, we believe, is our first wedge. Over time, we want to build more and more of what it takes for a consumer goods or consumer product brand to source a factory, manufacture their inventory, finance that inventory, ensure that inventory.
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S9 E35: Prince Ghosh, Factored Quailty
And we think there's an opportunity to build an operating system for global manufacturing. The reason I say that and the reason it's relevant is because anytime you're building vertical software, I think it's really important to build a team that has one foot in the industry and one foot in technology.