Stay ConnectedEvery founder has 1 goal: find product-market fit. We interview the world’s most successful startup founders on the 0 to 1 part of their journeys. We’ve had the founders of Reddit, Gusto, Rappi, Glean, Cohere, Huntress, ID.me and many more.
We go deep with entrepreneurs & VCs to provide detailed examples you can steal. Our goal is to understand product-market fit better than anyone on the planet.
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Copyright: © 2024 A Product Market Fit Show | Startups & Founders
When an employee unexpectedly quits, an investor backs out, or a big customer churns— fear of failure takes over. When you close a new round, land a big customer, or make a big hire— you feel pure excitement.
Every founder is on a fear-excitement spectrum. There's no way to prevent yourself from feeling the two extremes. But I've seen great founders use several tactics to help themselves operate out of excitement more often than out of fear.
Those founders also feel fear— but they use these tactics to spend more time closer to excitement. Because operating out of failure is playing not to lose—whereas operating out of excitement is playing to win.
Here are 3 ways to do just that.
Why you should listen
Keywords
founders, fear, fear of failure, excitement, validation, runway, partners, mindset, expectations
Pierce launched a consulting business that grew to millions in revenue and dozens of employees. But he noticed his customers kept asking for the same solution.
So he launched Knak, an email marketing and landing page builder that integrates to Marketo. Unlike most founders, he didn’t go all-in. He kept working on his consulting business full-time until Knak hit $1M in ARR.
After he transitioned over to Knak, he bootstrapped it to $5M ARR and then raised a $25M Series A. Here’s the story of how Knak found product-market fit.
Why you should listen
Keywords
patience, learning, building a company, failures, product-market fit, consulting business, marketing automation platforms, template product, creation platform, raising funding, urgency
Time Stamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:08:50) The Story of Knak
(00:11:04) Going from Zero to a Million
(00:16:16) Pivoting from SMB to midmarket
(00:19:42) Adding "obvious" features to get closer to PMF
(00:24:07) How to position against incumbents
(00:27:35) Turning Into a Enterprise Platform
(00:30:30) Finding True Product Market Fit
(00:33:34) Bootstrapping to Series A
(00:40:02) One Piece of Advice
There is no better storyteller in the world than Matthew Dicks. He tells stories for a living. He gets paid by the world's biggest brands to create stories for them. He's won Moth StorySLAM (a storytelling competition in NYC) a record 59 times.
Every founder knows storytelling is a critical skill. But 99% of founders I meet are terrible storytellers. They overcomplicate, they include too much information, they try to convince with data.
Like Matthew says, "Most of what people say in business is forgettable".
Whether you want to close customers, investors or employees, you need to stand out and be remembered. And the best way to do that is to tell compelling stories that resonate.
Here's how to do it.
Why you should listen
Keywords
storytelling, business, relatability, suspense, personal connection, Slack, Salesforce, communication, connection, simplicity, contrast, value proposition, trust
Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:52) A Story About Why Storytelling is Important
(00:11:18) Deconstructing the Story
(00:15:07) Keeping a Story in Present Tense
(00:16:58) Start With Location and Action
(00:20:41) When to Tell a Story Chronologically
(00:28:13) The Story for Slack
(00:35:33) Making a Pitch with No Data
(00:41:51) It's not B2B or B2C-- it's H2H
(00:47:57) The Goal is to be Remembered
(00:52:23) Use Truth in Your Story for Relatability
(00:55:11) Making up stories on the fly for portfolio companies
5 years ago, Shubham had just graduated college and had no network. He bootstrapped to $3M in ARR, then raised $200M & grew to $85M ARR.
But he started trying to sell AI for marketing to enterprises with no network.
So for 2 months, he'd go to the lobby of a bank and sit there for an hour. He'd wait for the CMO to walk by, just so he could say hi. He'd tell receptionists he was waiting for an interview.
Finally, one day the CMO had enough and asked him who he was. Shubham got his 15-minute moment. That turned into a free pilot.
That free pilot turned to $1.2M ARR.
2 years after he'd started the company, he bootstrapped to $3M ARR and was profitable— since then, the growth never stopped.
Why you should listen
Keywords
AI startup, product market fit, challenges, marketing, scaling, fundraising
Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:52) Origin Story of Pixis
(00:07:05) Getting the First Customers
(00:09:14) What is Pixis
(00:11:26) Video Generation
(00:14:54) Finding the Problem Going Top-Down
(00:19:55) The Pitch
(00:24:30) The First Pilot
(00:27:08) Scaling the Team
(00:31:57) Raising the First Round
(00:33:59) The AI Market
(00:35:54) Finding True PMF
(00:37:13) One Piece of Advice
Google is in talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23B (a 40x revenue multiple). Wiz is the company that in 2021 announced it grew from $0 to $100M ARR in just 18 months.
How did this cybersecurity company grow so fast in a crowded space?
How does it get a 40x revenue multiple when FAANG stocks trade at 5-15x?
Who are the exceptional founders that were able to create the largest venture-backed exit in history in just 4 years?
In this episode, we dive into the 3 ingredients that made Wiz into such a success: insane growth, insane team, and insane discipline.
Why you should listen
Keywords
Google, Wiz, acquisition, cybersecurity, growth, team, discipline, end-to-end risks, cloud infrastructure, COVID
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:00) Wiz's 3 Ingredients to Success
(00:01:09) 1. Insane Growth
(00:02:30) Jobs to be Done Framework
(00:03:30) What does Wiz do?
(00:05:36) 2. Insane Team
(00:07:54) 3. Insane Discipline
Paul built a startup that was acquired for $2.2B. He worked on AI at Uber and Oculus. But when a farmer told him about some of the problems he was facing, he quit and went all-in on farming.
He built a robot that attaches to the back of tractors, uses computer vision to identify weeds and lasers to shoot and kill them. He sells each robot for $1.5M. He's sold nearly 100 so far— & generated nearly $150M in revenue.
Whether you're working on a hardware startup or not, you'll want to listen to this episode to see how to do proper customer discovery, how to raise pre-product, and how to get millions of dollars in pre-sales without having to ship.
Why you should listen
Keywords
Carbon Robotics, deep tech, AI neural nets, deep learning, weed control, farming, manual labor, lasers, research and development, funding, seed round, prototype, Series A, pre-orders, manufacturing challenges, revenue
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:09) A Background in Deep Tech
(00:05:50) Problem and Solution Interest
(00:07:35) Find the Passion
(00:07:37) Get Behind the Mission
(00:09:39) Back to Seattle
(00:11:40) The Epiphany
(00:16:50) A Human Affair
(00:18:00) The Money Flows to the Best Storyteller
(00:21:45) A Farmer's Weed Control Dilemma
(00:25:56) Weed-Shooting Lasers
(00:28:11) Funding the Prototype
(00:30:13) Hardware is Hard But Rewarding
(00:36:46) Why Laser Weeding Works
(00:41:19) Series A
(00:42:51) Robot Autonomy
(00:45:42) Pricing
(00:48:12) Telling the Story After It Happened
(00:51:44) Fighting Through Disaster
(00:54:50) Finding True PMF
(00:55:41) One Piece of Advice
Elon Musk single-handedly took on the entire automotive industry. No one, including me, thought he would succeed. But he's built an $800B company. Whether sales are slowing down misses the mark: the punchline is it took well capitalized, professional automakers 15 years to catch up to a single founder.
Sure, Elon Musk is special. But this goes beyond just Elon Musk. It shows that founders today have more business power than founders have ever had. They can take on the most established industries.
The reason is that the pace of innovation is faster than ever. No business model is safe.
And founders are the only ones who can react.
Keywords
Tesla, EV market, car manufacturers, Elon Musk, disruptive innovation, business models, founders, rate of change
Last month, Ashby raised a $30M Series C. Ashby is used by customers like Notion, Ramp and Sequoia. Benji built Ashby as an end-to-end Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that would replace several point solutions. He had to build heads down for 18 months and couldn't launch a simple MVP.
Surprisingly, even though he raised $3.5M at seed, he didn't grow his team. He built the product with just 3 people. "We could spend time recruiting or we could spend time building"-- he decided to build.
When they launched, they grew to $200K in ARR within a year and then 10x'd a year after that. Here's the story of how they found product-market fit.
Why you should listen
Keywords
Ashby, all-in-one platform, recruiting, reporting, pain points, product market fit, Series A
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:29) No Website, No Problem
(00:03:08) A Viral Loop
(00:04:40) Origin Story of Ashby
(00:05:39) The Biggest Pain Point
(00:07:50) De-Risking
(00:09:26) A Sticky Product and Market Evolution
(00:10:50) A Hundred Conversations
(00:13:09) The Main Feedback and Key Learnings
(00:16:16) The Pitch
(00:17:20) Bundling and Unbundling
(00:20:50) Building a Great Engineering Organization
(00:22:26) Letter of Intent Stage
(00:24:45) Validation and Feeling Ready
(00:28:18) A Little Bit of Luck
(00:31:51) Finding True PMF
(00:32:44) One Piece of Advice
AI startups don’t necessarily have to beat incumbents. Some will start entirely new markets instead.
Like Canva to Photoshop, Shopify to Amazon or Pickleball to Tennis, many of these won’t even have to compete. They create 10x easier to use products and through that open up an entirely new space. They solve problems people didn’t even know they had. In many cases they expand the market for incumbents too— pickleball didn’t steal tennis players, it became a gateway and created even more.
We discuss the 3 factors a startup needs to be able to create a new market and why there is plenty of opportunity left in the AI space.
"I was technically homeless at the time. I was sleeping on my buddy's couch. I had declined $250,000/ year at McKinsey... I had no idea what I was doing." Now, Blake has $150M in ARR, growing 30% per year, with 80% gross margins. He's raised $400M and his startup ID.me is worth over $1B.
This is the story of how pivoted for a Groupon-like model to an identity verification platform. Blake talks about how he raised the initial round, closed the first few enterprise contracts, and why he thinks finding product-market fit is more of a science than most founders think.
After his pivot, ID.me doubled its user base every year. Now, over 40% of Americans have an ID.me account.
Why you should listen
•Learn how even successful founders are often much closer to failure than you'd expect
•How to get credibility as a founder and close enterprise deals.
•Why fear of failure can be a powerful motivator if used constructively.
•How to use a niche market to quickly find product-market fit
•Why staying close to customers is the best way to pivot into the right problem/solution set.
Keywords
ID.me, military, tech founder, product-market fit, startup, business model, capital raising, mentorship, scientific approach, user base, revenue growth
Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:56) The Origin of ID.me
(00:04:44) The Two Parts of Credibility
(00:11:16) To Win Big, Start Small
(00:14:53) Fear of Failure Can Be Positive
(00:20:54) Paypal for Identity
(00:23:59) Moving to DC and Raising 500k
(00:27:53) Belief in the Person Over the Business Model
(00:30:55) Pivoting to Identity Wallets
(00:41:07) The first big contract: Under Armour
(00:48:06) Getting to a Million
(00:49:39) One Piece of Advice
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