A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

How do you launch a marketplace? How do you get beyond the chicken-and-egg problem? Derrick's answer: Fake it Till you Make it.

When launching Drop (a rewards app with millions of downloads), Derrick needed both consumers and brands to join. Instead of going after both at once, he found a way to seed supply and added brands' logos to his website, whether they had joined or not. It may have led to some Cease and Desist letters (or Conversation and Discussion letters, as he called them), but it also led to considerable growth.

If you're about to launch a marketplace or are struggling to get it off the ground, listen to this episode and see how Derrick did it.  

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When you're selling to consumers or small businesses, you can put up an MVP, generate traffic, and watch the money roll in. Not so for enterprise. Enterprise means long sales cycles, procurement departments, security audits, pilots, and many more hurdles. 

How do you get your first enterprise sale? How do you convince a company 1000x your size to take a risk and work with you? Corey, the founder of Sensibill, had to sell to one of the most complicated and heavily regulated enterprises of them all: banks. And he got it done, securing multiple pilots prior to getting funded.

If you're working on an enterprise product and are starting to speak with customers, this is the episode for you.

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Most startup founders recognize they need advisors. The question is who do you get, how do you get them, and how do you structure it all? In this episode, Darryl shares his framework for how to set up the perfect board of advisors.  

It starts by imagining that you're five years in the future once your startup is a huge success
and asking yourself- what are all the key pieces that are required? From there, Darryl methodically targets advisors that will help with each of the key pieces. He discusses how to get in front of them, how to convince them to join, and how to structure the advisory board.

As a startup founder you will need advisors to help on your journey. Listen to this episode to learn how to do it right.

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Running a startup is hard. Doing it alone, especially when it's your first time, can be downright tortuous. 

Lindsey started off on her own, without much of a network in the startup scene in Toronto. Not only that, as a business type she didn't have the skills needed to build a prototype, let alone the full product. On this episode, she discusses how she methodically set out to find her co-founder through three steps: networking, networking, networking.

If you're a solo founder looking for your second half, you'll want to give this a listen.

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For even the most successful startups, finding product-market fit is often a long journey and Klipfolio was no exception.

Founders often feel that one more feature, one more UI change will get them to product-market fit. The reality is that the path to PMF is more of a step function. If your first product doesn't quite get you there, a small change is unlikely to get you the results you're hoping for. You likely need to dramatically change your product or even your market.

In this episode, Allan shares the story of how Klipfolio went from consumer to enterprise and back to SMB before finally finding real product-market fit. He shares lots of clear details on what true product-market fit feels like. 

If you're a founder of a company that hasn't quite made it beyond PMF, you'll want to check this out.

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It’s one thing to work hard. It’s another to work hard with a well-researched destination in sight. 

In this episode of The Product Market Fit Show, Rob Boukine gets real about the mistakes he made in his early days as cofounder of Noibu and dives deep on how he pivoted his business. He discusses the importance of using customer discovery to ensure your products are “need to have” rather than “nice to have”. 

If you’re working hard but nothing is working out as expected, perhaps his advice on tracking down the right pain point will hit home. 

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Launching is often thought of as a huge event. Lots of noise, lots of PR. One big bang. For Ray, it's just a series of many small experiments. 

Ray realized that the number one value prop for a consumer was coverage: when a user opened the app, the majority of merchants that were walking distance needed to show up. So, he set up an experiment. He targeted a handful of office buildings and a dozen merchants, all located on the same block. He didn't need to onboard all the merchants in Toronto, just all the merchants on this one block.

If you're about to launch a consumer product or a marketplace, check out what Ray has to say. 

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"Ideas are a dime a dozen". Maybe. But executing on a mediocre idea won't get you very far. 

In this episode, Ray, a multi-time founder who sold his first company to Google, discusses how he came up with the idea for Ritual. It was not your typical aha-moment. Many ideas came together over a long time until the idea for a pick-up order app was born. Since then, Ritual has gone on to launch in over 40 cities and raise over $100M. 

If you feel you want to be a founder but are struggling to come up with a great idea, maybe Ray's story will help you out.

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If you want to validate an idea, the conventional wisdom is to build an MVP. But even an MVP takes time to build. What if you could validate not only your idea but your entire funnel, without writing a single line of code?

That's what Moe did. He built a landing page, found ways to advertise and generate traffic, and went so far as to convert traffic to paying members- before having any product to sell! (Of course, he immediately refunded those early customers and added them to a waiting list.)

If you have an idea and want to know if there is real demand - this is the episode for you. 

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After you've had an idea and validated the problem, it's probably time to build. But how exactly do you decide what to build, how to build it, and how to get end users to actually adopt the solution?

Carol is a multi-time founder and she has this process down to a science. On this episode, she shares how she built the first version of Axonify (now acquired for over US$350M). She explains how to find a champion, how to stay close to them throughout the build phase, and how to  get end users to adopt the product.

If you're starting to build out a product, especially in a b2b or b2b2c context, check out this episode. 

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