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- [00:01]
A
I think we all read on Twitter or X about I replaced my entire sales team with a bunch of agents and bots. Okay, I don't believe that that works right now. At least I would not be comfortable doing that in our company.
- [00:16]
B
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to it. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Today our guest is Mike Weider, co founder and CEO of Froogle. Mike, welcome to the show.
- [00:54]
A
Glad to be here. Brett, nice to meet you.
- [00:56]
B
Yeah, great to meet you as well. So you're on your fourth company. You must like pain.
- [01:00]
A
Yeah, masochist for startups. I have tried to retire and found that I wasn't ready, but yeah, the fourth time and you know, it's one of those things that you keep getting sucked back in because while you're in it, it feels like, why did I do this? You know, to inflict so much pain on myself. But then as soon as you're out of it for a few months, you're kind of missing the rush and the excitement and what kind of drives you forward, which then sucks you back into the next one.
- [01:29]
B
What's the longest you made it for retirement and did you have a trigger? I, I talked to someone earlier today who very similar. They had a great outcome for their company and he said that he made it like two weeks. So then he found himself organizing his spice rack and that's where he was like, no, I gotta go back to work. Like, I can't do this.
- [01:45]
A
Yeah, I lasted longer than two weeks, was maybe a couple years between the last one and this one. And I attempted to transition into more of a VC kind of role where I was helping invest in other startups and help them out or be a board member. And whilst that was interesting, it just didn't really scratch the itch for me this in the same way. And I found that maybe there's some people that are great at being, you know, helpers to others that I was constantly feeling like I wanted to get in there and actually do the work. So, yeah, you sort of realized what really drives me and gives me a fulfillment. And that's kind of back to the grind. Maybe the, the other thing was that sort of AI happened in between these last two companies and seeing all the excitement, which is maybe the biggest change in our industry, you know, in my lifetime, sitting on the sidelines, you know, was not really an option.
- [02:42]
B
Let's jump ahead to the fourth company. So what is the problem that you're solving? And then how did you decide on this? I'm sure if you're like most founders, especially serial founders, you have a notepad or something where you have a long list of all the different problems to solve or ideas to go out and build. What's the problem and why?
- [02:57]
A
Yeah, so Frugal is our latest company and we are focused on trying to reduce the cost of hosting your application. So most startups are probably spending at least 10% of what they bring in in revenue and paying that out to Amazon or Google or Microsoft to host their application. And so those costs are well known and painful to everybody. But what's kind of changing is that AI is making this really a lot worse. And so the gross margins of SaaS companies typically have been 70 to 90% is typical, with 80% being average. And the way you get to profitability is that you grow into it, right? Because you spend this money initially on the platform, and then each incremental customer is typically free or not meaningful. And so once you hit a certain levels of scale, you get to profitability. So what we saw was that with AI, this was going to be different in that the average gross margins of an AI native company are more like 50, 60, 70%. And so if software companies had a hard time getting the profitability at 80% gross margins, if you take away 20%, it's making life a lot harder. But also what was different is that the variable cost of serving a customer is actually meaningful now. And you know that the token cost of serving that next customer is material. And so what we saw was that cloud costs in the past have been painful, but now could be maybe an existential problem. And so there was going to be a greater need for solutions that would help fix this. And what the light bulb that kind of went off for us was that this problem actually kind of looked similar to other problems we'd solved in the past. And that, you know, we worked. For example, my first business was security products. We built one of the first vulnerability testing solutions for applications. We would find bugs in your software, right? So the way it used to work was that engineers would build software, they would be almost finished and then they turn it over to pen testers or some security wizards that would find all the holes, they would kick that back to developers and then tell them, you know, what needed to be fixed before they could go live, repeat the cycle a number of times. And then people got smart and they said, huh, wouldn't it be better if we built this into how we build software versus at the end of the process where it's disruptive, expensive and slows things down. And that's kind of the way everyone does it today. But that wasn't happening with cost in that most developers, they write their code, they ship it to production 30 days later or whatever, you get your cloud bill and the feedback loop is broken. Developers don't know what things cost when they make these code changes. And you know, by the time these bills show up, well, everybody's moved on to something else. And it's really hard to go back and actually get time from engineering to fix these things. So we said, okay, this looks familiar. Can we solve this by embedding cost into the software development lifecycle? And that's kind of what Fugal is working on, is basically a shift left play on cost to try to make cost visible and help engineers make better cost decisions in how they build things earlier in the process, whether you're an AI coding agent to a human, but kind of building cost into how we build things going forward.
- [06:11]
B
How do you think about the market category then? Is this a totally new category play?
- [06:16]
A
So it is and it isn't. So what exists today is there is a set of tools. You know, they're often called FinOps tools. So for people not familiar, FinOps is this kind of new role that's developed in the last five years. And it's sort of a merger of finance and engineering where all these cloud bills started to get out of control. And companies built said, hey, we need a focus point within the organization for someone to be owning this issue, to be accounting for what we're spending budgeting, making everybody aware of this and helping to rein in this out of control cost. So there's now almost 100,000 FinOps professionals and that's grown from almost zero like four or five years ago. And so there's a worldwide community. Probably every Fortune 500 company would have one Police one or a FinOps team. Inside startups, it's more common maybe to tag someone in your platform engineering team might own this problem. So anyways, there exists a category of software for finops people more finance oriented, that's we'll call them sort of dashboards and reporting tools that help you understand what you're spending and give you some clarity, you know, by department, by product, by something, you know, so you can see the trends of that. And what there isn't though, is tools for engineering to do what I was describing previously. So all the tools are really focused on trying to enumerate and track the cloud cost. So they tell you what you're spending, but they don't tell you why you're spending it and how to reduce that spend. And that's kind of the problem we're trying to solve. So they really are complementary. We're basically trying to attack it from an engineering standpoint, whereas there is an existing set of tools and products to attack it more from a finance and reporting standpoint.
- [08:00]
B
This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast, I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. When you think about the go to market playbook that you're running, is it the same playbook that you ran in the previous three companies or is it totally changed in this new AI world that we're in?
- [08:34]
A
Yeah, great question. I think there are some things the same and maybe some things different. Right? So what is the same is that you need salespeople and you know, products like this don't sell themselves. You need some actual salespeople to be interacting with customers, getting them through pilots, demos, through the sales process and, you know, getting orders. And our product in particular does not lend itself, at least now to a PLG motion because we need kind of top down authority in the organization to be able to do what we do. And the reason for that is that we need access to your source code, we need access to your AWS bill, we need access to your observability data and a bunch of other things and that inputs into our model which helps us do what we do. Those things are extremely sensitive and an individual developer is not going to have the authority to grant access to some other third party to do that. They're going to need approval secondly is that cost is more of an issue that resonates the hierarchy though, right? And that an individual developer may not be, you know, hugely concerned with the costs of their company, but the CFO cares, the head of engineering probably cares, the CTO cares like more senior folks. Right. And so we need to pursue a bit of a top down sales motion at least now. And so kind of coming back to your question, what similar salespeople are still important? And you know, I think we all read on Twitter or X, you know, about I replaced my entire sales team with a bunch of agents and bots. Okay. I don't believe that that works right now. At least I would not be comfortable doing that in our company. So I think you need salespeople. Secondly is you need to make those salespeople productive in that having salespeople doing outbound to cold leads is, you know, a huge time suck of their time. They're going to spend all their time calling people. And so you need to build an inbound motion to feed the pipeline and feed the salespeople. I think those things were true 30 years ago. They're still true. Maybe the question of what's different is sort of how we feed the machine and you know, how we operate and can use tools like AI to make ourselves more productive and efficient. And maybe where the leads are coming from could be different. But those sort of truths still hold that salespeople matter and warming them up with as much inbound as you possibly can makes them more productive.
- [11:02]
B
How have you approached building the go to market team?
- [11:05]
A
So the way we've approached this is we started with. So basically, you know, the founders spent quite a bit of time, you know, focusing on this, helping to build content, to build awareness, to basically leverage our networks. And we did that for the first kind of six months, you know, leveraging our own networks basically to feed the initial pipeline of customers. And then we hired our first growth person starting in November of last year. So we just for some history, we basically kicked off the company in May of 2025 and then sort of November of 2025 hired our first non developer as a, you know, as a first go to market person, sort of head of growth. And that person's you know, job was to sort of coordinate and warm up the inbound and to have them ready for, you know, three months of building the inbound machine in advance of hiring the first salesperson, which we're doing right now. And then we'll launch commercially the product, you know, in the coming month. So we're Very close. So basically that's how we looked at it was, you know, initially a lot of handheld work from the founding team and then hired a growth person to be the advanced party, warming up the engine and the brand and the inbound machine in advance of the first salesperson
- [12:27]
B
starting on the inbound side, is there anything that you spent money on that seemed like it was a waste, that didn't really move the needle in a meaningful way?
- [12:34]
A
Yeah, we've been pretty frugal to.
- [12:38]
B
You better be given the name.
- [12:42]
A
Exactly. So, you know, we've been spending quite a bit of time building our content engine and I think that stuff is timeless. But it's, as everybody knows, it's a. It's a long play in that you need to invest over a long period of time building content. And I think that's important for our category, especially because it's sort of a new thing. Nobody is doing what we're doing today, so nobody. So there's a lot of lift and evangelism and education that's going to be required to educate the market. And so we invest the time in building videos, in building content. And you know, that stuff is always hard to know how well it's working, but it's now beginning to show in that the organic traffic is building. And I think that that's working pretty well. You know, we did a little bit of advertising at the beginning and sort of realized that it's probably not a channel that's going to work for us. You know, Google Ads and things like that, just maybe validating our thesis. And, you know, we are working right now building an SDR engine as well. And that is actually surprisingly working and still kind of baffles my mind that cold calling still works in 2026, but it does. So again, some old channels that people would have thought were dead, you know, that we used 20 years ago are still valid today. And then there's a whole bunch of new tricks, obviously using AI and other things.
- [14:07]
C
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- [14:27]
B
i can't believe cold calling still works because I know, personally speaking, I react in a very hostile way when I get a cold call on my cell phone. But we just launched a program six months ago for cold calling and it works. And I were fighting with My co founder for a very long time. So I just was saying like, it doesn't work anymore. It's a waste of money. No one wants to receive phone calls. I was the idiot. I guess I was completely wrong there.
- [14:49]
A
Somehow I would totally agree with you. I was the same thing. And I had to be convinced again. I said, you know, because my personal experience is that I would never answer the phone for a number I didn't recognize. But you're right, it does actually still work. And you know, I think that maybe this is the lesson that we need to sort of take here is that I think, you know, the go to market practices need to evolve and obviously adapt and use the latest and greatest. But that doesn't necessarily mean we abandon everything, you know, that worked in the past. And there are some things that I think are continuing to be sort of tried and true methods as we chase the shiny new toys and hype, you know, that AI puts forward for us.
- [15:33]
B
Even one interesting thing that we saw when we brought in someone to run our SDRs, they were saying don't even view it as the goal of the SDR is to get meetings necessarily. Like that was historically the goal. But it's brand awareness. At the end of the day, I think you're right. And it's brand awareness. You give them links and then you can pixel them, then you can retarget them with ads, but don't just measure them alone. On how many meetings did they get booked? That's like the old way of measurement.
- [15:54]
A
I think that's a great point. And I think also that when you look at a new category, like for us, so we are building, we're, you know, we're building a brand new product and category. There's nothing else that exists like this. And so as I said, we need to do a lot of education. And when you call someone and then ask them at the end of this call from some unknown person I didn't know 30 seconds ago, to take some time, you know, to book a meeting and you know, even to sit through a demo, which is kind of innocuous, but it's still a lift, right, for that person. They're just not ready for that. And I think especially in the developer audience that we're targeting technical audience, I mean, they don't want to talk to humans and they don't have to, right? Especially some sales guy that's going to be annoying. So you have to educate them and provide something of value along the way and you know, that could be content, that could be A lot of things beyond just committing to a meeting.
- [16:47]
B
When you think about your 2026 strategy, what are the areas that you're really betting on and going big on in terms of growth?
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A
So we're brand new, right? So we're launching. We've been working with, you know, 10 to 15 design customers over the last year to build what we're building and we're launching it. And so, you know, our big focus is landing our first customers and launching the product, building awareness of the category and, you know, getting to sort of product market fit as fast as we can. And that's really about, you know, testing a lot of different go to market options and figuring out which one's going to be the best one that's going to work for us. And so we're doing a bunch of, you know, new things and we're doing, as I said, a bunch of old things. Like we'll go to our first trade show, you know, this year, which again, in 2026, you wonder, like, why does that, is that still relevant? But again, this old stuff, you know, tends to work. So for us, it's really this year is about launching the brand, building awareness, and I think launching the category. So an important part of what we're trying to do is educate the market that this other thing exists out there that people are not really addressing. And it's not so much competitive analysis, it's more like competitive positioning. There's a bunch of tools out there that, for example, measure stuff, but not a lot of products that help action cost optimization in your engineering workflows. And so what do you call that, you know, building a brand, but also building a category is part of what we're trying to do. And so as you said, it's a long game of education and brand awareness that we're embarking on right now.
- [18:22]
B
One of the things that I always think back to is I had Godard Abel on the pod a while back. So the founder of G2, so obviously not Gartner in terms of creating categories, but yeah, yeah, you create a lot of categories. And I asked him, what's your number one piece of advice for someone who's listening in that wants to create a category? And he said, you have to go lock arms with your competitors and come and make the case for you. Is there anyone to lock arms with to try to make that case? Or right now, is this really a category of one?
- [18:48]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think basically, as I said, it's more of the counter positioning which is complementary. And so it Turns out I actually was on the board of one of the first finops tooling companies called Cloud Checker, and they were acquired by, I believe, NetApp back, you know, some time ago. And so I was part of that first wave of these initial tools and saw, like, what they do and what they don't do. And so, yeah, really it's about, for us not necessarily saying why we're better than all those things. It's most important maybe why we're different than those things. And I'm sure we will have competitors coming in 2026 because, you know, it tends to happen, right, that everybody sees the problem at the same time and, you know, you think that they're copying you, but they just everybody saw the same signals in the same moment. And you tend to see a lot of companies starting at similar junctures.
- [19:40]
B
And final question for you, when you think ahead into the future, so we can go out 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, however far you want to go, what's the big picture vision for everything that you're building?
- [19:49]
A
I think the big picture vision is that right now, when software is being built today, you know, cost is not really in the discussion and we see an absolute truth and, you know, vision and that, you know, we know is going to be true is that that's going to be flipped in that every single engineering decision will have cost feedback, just like we do for security, quality, other issues. Cost is going to be an important part of that and we want to help make that happen so that every engineering decision has cost context built into it. You may obviously choose to do whatever you're doing, but at least now you know, you know, what's the cost of those things. And that seems inevitable that this is going to happen. We're seeing, for example, all the AI native companies, you know, that are our peers. Their AI costs are way higher than their cloud costs. And so I think that's going to be true for everybody pretty soon. And that is going to drive everybody to be really focused a lot more on their unit economics and on making engineering decisions with cost context. And that's the future that we want to help bring about.
- [20:56]
B
Amazing. I love it. Really enjoyed the conversation. This has been a lot of fun. You'll have to come back on in a year just to keep us updated before we wrap. For those listening in that want to follow along with you, where should we send them? Where should they go?
- [21:06]
A
Yeah, our website is frugal co, not.com co and yeah, come check it out there and you can see what we're building.
- [21:14]
B
Amazing. Michael, thanks so much. Appreciate it.
- [21:16]
A
Thanks, Brent.
- [21:18]
B
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO, where you'll find a library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers, and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcast as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show, and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.