A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

Advice is free—actioning bad advice isn't. Early-stage founders are bombarded with advice. A lot of it from investors who have never operated a business, never ran marketing, never led sales.

And yet, many founders take VCs' advice as sacrosanct. And many VCs feel like they can and should opine on everything. If many people treat you like an expert, you must be one... right?

VCs have a lot to offer founders. But, like everyone, they have circles of competence. 

Be careful who you listen to.

Why you should listen

• Why power dynamics between VCs and founders can distort decision-making and advice-seeking.
• Why you should be skeptical of advice that is outside of a VC's circle of competence.

Keywords
customer needs, business problems, power dynamics, VCs, founders, advice

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Alex got the co-founder of a public company to join him and raised $6M out of the gate—but it took him 3 years to make his first sale. 

But after he shifted from selling to SMBs to selling to MSPs (Managed Service Providers i.e., outsourced IT), things took off:

April 2015 - $1K MRR
August 2015 - $10K MRR
June 2016 - $100K MRR
Nov 2018 - $1M MRR ($12M ARR)

And growth never stopped—soon, he'll cross $100M ARR.

Alex and his co-founder did many things differently. They came up with an idea by starting with markets, not customer problems. They raised a lot of money upfront and built a sophisticated product instead of an MVP. And they deliberated cultural values before making their first hire.

Clearly—it worked.

Why you should listen

• Learn why you should define culture before making your first hire.
• How to find market trends and customer problems top-down instead of bottoms-up.
• Why keeping your product unchanged but targeting a different market can have a massive impact and lead to product-market fit. 
• Why you should be willing to be bold and not hedge.
• Why you should only focus on one thing at a time.
• How to use constraints to do more things faster.

Keywords

Auvik, software company, networking, SMBs, mid-market, decoupling, control plane, hardware, software solution, automate, configuration, user research, product design, team, company values, SaaS, IT management, product-market fit, pivot, managed service provider, MSP, boldness, discipline, advice

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:47) The Origin of Auvik
(00:07:20) Finding a co-founder
(00:12:35)  It's People Who Build Companies
(00:14:10)  Finding the Concept for Auvik
(00:20:07)  Buikding the Product
(00:30:30)  First Customer Experiences
(00:34:40)  Feedback Loops
(00:39:08)  Getting to a Million
(00:41:33)  Finding Product Market Fit
(00:42:54) One Piece of Advice

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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

• How to use multiple plans to operate more freely and objectively
• Why runway and low burn are the keys to lower founder stress
• Why working with the right investors is more important than raising big rounds
• What Tobi Lutke (founder of Shopify) did to change his employees' mindsets 

Keywords
founders, fear, fear of failure, excitement, validation, runway, partners, mindset, expectations

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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

• How to transition from a consulting/services business to a scalable tech startup-- and why it might be more painful than you think. 
• What you need to do to shift from SMB to midmarket and from midmarket to enterprise. 
• How to use enterprise customers to scale to $10M+ without needing thousands of customers
• How to balance urgency and patience to build a successful startup 

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

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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

• Why the key being remembered is being different
• How to use stories to stand out and resonate with customers, investors and employees 
• Learn how to tell an effective story that is relatable, creates suspense, and includes personal connections.
• How to use personal stories to sell more product. 
• Why you often shouldn't start a story at the beginning.

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

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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

• How to start a startup top-down from a market vs bottoms-up from customer problems.
• Why doing insane things in the early days can lead to insane results.
• How Founder-led sales and tight feedback loops are the key for product development and customer success.

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

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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

• Why addressing a full 'Job to be Done' is key to fast growth
• Why having an A+ team is irreplaceable  
• Why you need several factors to come together to have exceptional, outlier results

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

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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

• Why hardware is hard-- but easier than it's ever been.
• How to tell a story to raise $10M pre-revenue
• How to set up milestones for fundraising
• How to generate $10M in pre-orders before shipping product
• How to get a sense of product market fit even before the product is fully developed

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

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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

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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

• Why keeping your team small helps you go faster.
• How to displace point solutions with an end-to-end platform
• How to  validate pain points.
• How to move up market from startups to enterprise companies.

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

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