A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

Re-releasing the best episode of Season 1.

Mike spent two years building a social search engine. It didn't work. So he and his co-founder took frontline customer service jobs at seven different companies at the same time, and did that for the better part of a year without writing a single line of code. He printed out a speech to read to his lead investor over lunch, telling him they had failed and offering the money back. That research became Ada: 350 people, over $200M raised, and a $1B+ valuation.

In this episode, Mike breaks down why doing the job manually beat shipping an MVP, how being committed but not attached is what makes a pivot possible, and how they proved the software worked by quietly replacing themselves with it.

Why You Should Listen

• Why they refused to write a line of code for almost a year.
• How working as agents at seven companies showed them what to build.
• Why telling your lead investor you failed is easier than you think.
• How to stay committed to the problem without getting attached to your solution.

Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, finding pmf, Ada, Mike Murchison, pivoting a startup, customer experience automation, AI chatbots, customer support software, lean startup, customer discovery, B2C to B2B pivot, enterprise SaaS

Chapters

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:28 Volley, The Startup Before Ada
• 00:05:42 Why Companies Talk to Customers Less
• 00:08:58 Becoming Agents at Seven Companies
• 00:13:22 Reading a Speech to Their Lead Investor
• 00:18:12 Committed But Not Attached
• 00:22:05 Refusing to Write a Line of Code
• 00:28:24 Research Mode Comes First
• 00:33:06 Replacing Themselves With Software

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I know most founders today are planning for the new year, so sharing the top 3 mistakes I've seen early-stage founders make when forecasting. If you're forecasting for 2024, you don't want to miss this.

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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.

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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. 

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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