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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Here are the key lessons from the past 60 episodes that we've released to date. Each of the 5 steps to Product Market Fit is based on actual case studies with real examples you can use. It's a recap of everything I've learned over the last two years- you don't want to miss it.
As they say, "Experience is the teacher of all things"... and my last startup was a ruthless teacher. Today, my co-founder Lee Silverstone and ex-CEO Rob Woodbridge join me to go through some of the insane stories from Gymtrack, our last startup.
From strapping a whiteboard to the roof of Lee's Civic, to going to conferences with a 3D printed "smart" pin, to getting PR at the worst possible time, the stories are funny, engaging, and clear examples of what NOT to do.
This is the story of the emotional rollercoaster that was my last startup, Gymtrack. Hope you find it helpful as you navigate your own startup journey.
You can read the article here as well: https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/i-was-supposed-to-be-a-millionaire-at-25-instead-i-went-bankrupt-ef525370e353
Phil Knight, Nike's founder, might hold the all-time record for taking punches to the face. From giving up 49% of his company to a part-time advisor; to having Prefontaine, a famous runner and Nike's main ambassador, die unexpectedly; to getting blindsided with a $25M import tax when he could not afford it. Anything that could go wrong, did.
In this episode, multi-time founder Rob Woodbridge and Pablo Srugo go over Phil Knight's (founder/CEO Nike) road to product-market fit and why we believe he is the CEO all founders should imitate.
Nike was built backwards. Instead of building a product and taking it to market, Phil Knight first built a distribution machine for running shoes. Eight years later, he finally launched his own product (the Nike shoe) and did $3M in sales in the first year. This is not the full story of Nike. It's the story of how Phil Knight got to product-market fit.
Mark (CEO GoBolt) didn't set out to build a billion-dollar company. He just solved a problem other university students were facing. And then he constantly "made the best decision possible at each moment in time". To be honest, that's how most unicorns are made.
Everyone tells you that you need to start with a niche, a beachhead market, and then grow from there. But how does that actually work? What does that really look like? It looks like Mark's story starting and growing GoBolt.
Mark started off storing items for students over the summer. He expanded to storing all things for all people. He now provides logistics for enterprises. He's raised over $150M and has over 1,000 employees. But it wasn't pre-destined, it was 100% organic.
What really matters is finding a problem that you're acutely positioned to solve and then solving that problem. If you have real demand, and you stay close to your customers, things tend to take care of themselves.
Think of Product Market Fit as a pyramid. At the bottom you have vision, then value prop, then product and at the top is go-to-market.
As you go from 0 to Product Market Fit your job is to tweak the pieces of that pyramid, from top to bottom, until things click.
Founders are told to pivot when things aren't working. They're also told to never give up. So how do you know when to push through and when to completely change course?
Like most things in 0 to 1, it's more art than science. And unfortunately, most founders can't figure it out until after they experience it themselves. That's why on this episode we spoke with Andrew Tai, the founder and CEO of MotoInsight.
MotoInsight was acquired by Autotrader after it grew to tens of millions in revenue. But Motoinsight is the result of a major pivot. It took Andrew 3 years to realize that his initial marketplace solution was not going to work. We dive deep into the signs he saw that drove him to pivot to enterprise software and how doing so helped him go from 0 to $10M+ in just a few years
Weak customer discovery is the number one reason why most idea-stage startups fail. It usually leads to founders wasting months solving fake problems.
In my case, bad customer discovery cost me even more-- I ditched a startup idea that other founders built into several companies worth $10B+.
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