Introduction

In this episode I spoke with Patricio Castillo, co-founder of Prodi, a SaaS tool that uses AI to create internal communication podcasts for big corporates. At the time we recorded the episode, they’d only been incorporeted for 5 months, but they’d already closed deals with some major customers such as Lineas and EntityData. The first customer they signed was Delaware, who chose them over Google’s Notebook LM. We talked about when to incorporate, when to switch to full time, how to talk to customers so that you get real feedback and the importance of just continuing to iterate and try, even when it looks like it’s not going anywhere, and where the inspiration for that attitude came from. Spoiler alert: it was a talk from YC, that I’ve linked in the show notes.

Patricio also walked through the many different Belgian accelerators and partners that helped him and his cofounder Alexandria take Prodi from idea to real business.

This conversation was a blast, I hope you enjoy it.

00:00 Introduction to Patricio Castillo and Prodi 05:42 The Journey from Idea to First Customer 11:13 Incorporation Decisions and Challenges 13:38 Transitioning to Full-Time Entrepreneurship 20:10 Getting into Start It KBC 24:04 Other Key Accellerators That Boosted Prodi 31:13 Onboarding Clients and Product Iteration 35:26 Overview of The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers 40:13 Vlaio Subsidies 42:13 Choosing Belgium for Entrepreneurship 45:33 Advice for Future Founders 48:04 Future Goals for Prodi

Claudia Colvin (00:00) Hello, I'm joined today Castillo who is the co-founder of Prodi you so much for joining me Patricio, how are you?

Patricio (00:07) Great, thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation and hello to everyone listening. Maybe I wanted to introduce a bit myself for those who don't know me yet. So I would like to think of myself as someone that likes a lot three things. I would say adventure, people and building things. And that actually led me to decide to do a bachelor and then a master in engineering and I specialized particularly in electronics and ICT. And this was in Belgium because I'm actually from Mexico. I came here for my studies. I studied in the KU Leuven And then after that, I decided to pursue a career as an engineer. I workdd in Nokia in the research and development department. And after that, actually, together with Alexandria, I decided to start Prodi

So currently I'm actually the CTO of Prodi. We're still an early stage startup and what we do is we are helping big corporates to be able to engage more with their employees. Currently they rely mainly in written communications. So for example they have newsletters or they have blog posts where they share their strategy, maybe some customer success stories.

or new people are joining the team. But more often than not, these things go unnoticed. So what we're doing is we help them to have a weekly podcast where in five to 10 minutes, the employees can actually get to know all what they need to know about the company. So now the employees can choose whether they want to read or just play.

Claudia Colvin (01:32) Super interesting. And where did the idea come from? Was one of you two part of a big company and just seeing newsletters coming in and nobody reading them?

Patricio (01:40) Yeah, it was a combination of two things in January one year and a half ago Wait January 2024 Yeah, so at that time Alexandria and I we were both working in big corporates and So she was working for Atlas Copco and I was working in Nokia. They're both multinationals that make 20 billion in revenue And at that time We really felt how when we were just starting our jobs, we really had the time to be able to keep up with the communication of the company. But as we started to gain more responsibilities, at some point, we just didn't find the time to read anymore. Or maybe even like the energy and the enthusiasm to read. I personally am very big podcast lover and I always was thinking, why could someone not just make a podcast for all this valuable content? So that's a little bit where the curiosity started. And at the same time, text to speech, so the ability to change text to highly human-like voices with AI was starting to become a thing. Like it was starting to sound scarily good. So at that time we were starting to explore, is there a way how we could like overlap this problem that we're seeing with the technology that is existing? And as I mentioned in the beginning, Alexandria and I, we both really like to build and try things. So that's a little bit from where everything began.

Claudia Colvin (02:55) And how did you meet your co-founder?

Patricio (02:57) We go way back. We met in university and when we both studied in Leuven, both are engineers.in beginning we were just, it's not that we really work together, but in our last year we had the opportunity to collaborate on a course for UX development, user experience development and web app development. And I remember I always knew that she was a very talented person. So I asked her if she wanted to work with me. The fun thing is actually she didn't want to work with me. She rejected me. And because she said like, no, because we're friends, I don't want this to get messed up. But I was like in my mind, yeah, but you're so good. And I think that we can do something really cool.

Patricio (03:42) Even more fun is actually turns out that for that project we couldn't choose the teams and we ended up together. So it was such a, I don't know, like coincidence in life. Long story short, the project went super well. And I think that we enjoy so much working that from there already we had like the seed.

Patricio (04:00) Later on we did a hackathon following that spark that we we love to work together and we won the hackathon and again, super good experience. So I think that then we went both in our own paths for our work, but from that point onwards I always knew I could really collaborate with this person if I want to do something. Definitely she will be in the top of my list on who to call.

Claudia Colvin (04:21) Interesting. And what is it that you think makes you work so well together?

Patricio (04:26) I think that's-