A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

To launch a startup you have to leave your job and spend considerable capital, with no guarantee of success. It involves considerable risk, right?

Not for Mike.

Mike started Rewind- a company now approaching unicorn status- fully on the side. It started off as a project, and neither Mike nor his co-founders took any salary cuts to get Rewind off the ground. Instead, they worked nights and weekends, steadily growing MRR and joined one at a time as the startup became self-sufficient.

If you have an idea but aren't ready to go all in, check out this episode and learn how to start it on the side. 

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Why do professional athletes have coaches, but professional entrepreneurs don't?

Dan thought this was odd. So many years ago, a long time before starting Koho - a company now worth over $250M- Dan started working with performance coaches. In this episode, he walks us through how to pick a coach, what exactly a coach is (hint: it's not an advisor), and how a coach can help your startup grow.  In fact, Dan is such a believer in coaching that Koho offers coaching to all of their 200+ employees.

If you're interested in performance coaching, or are looking for an edge, listen to what Dan has to say. 

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Ask most early-stage founders what they need most and you'll likely get the same answer: money.

Especially early on, before you have much traction, raising money can be daunting. If you don't have much of a network, it's hard to even know where to start. Who are these angel investors and how do you find them? How do you get them to take a meeting? And how do you get interested investors to actually close?

Marc walks us through his first fundraise at Unito. How he leveraged an accelerator to build a network, got other founders to get him investor introductions and used various tactics to build momentum and FOMO. 

If you're looking to raise one of your first rounds of funding, check out how Marc got it done.

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Many people say that hype leads nowhere, that instead you should keep your head down and focus on building. But hype- or raising the profile of your company, as Solon calls it- brings many benefits. It means more potential hires, more investors, and even more customers. 

As you'll see, Solon is the master of creating hype. 

Find out how Solon raised the profile of MindBridge to get a multi-time founder to join as CEO, to poach key technical talent and to raise money well ahead of building product.

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Launching a marketplace is hard. The chicken-and-egg problem often seems insurmountable. 

In 2021, Wattpad was acquired for over $600M. But it wasn't easy. Early on, Wattpad cofounder and CEO Allen Lau almost gave up. He discusses the virtues of starting with a small niche and allowing growth to come with time. He explains the ASSET framework he’s developed to help you launch and scale a marketplace. 

If you’re about to launch a marketplace or just launched one and are not seeing the traction you were hoping for, you might want to give this a listen.  

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Building a successful startup starts well before the first prototype is created or the first investor goes all in. 

It starts with customer discovery, and Mallorie Brodie has some unique insight into what that looks like. Now the cofounder and CEO of Bridgit, she started out as a college student eagerly chasing down construction cranes and listening to complaints. Today, she tells The Product Market Fit Show the secret to finding great startup ideas. 

If you think you already know your market’s pain points, you’re probably doing it wrong. 

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