Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast

6sense is an AI-powered ABM platform that is focused on arming revenue teams with the right information to engage with the right accounts. It aggregates buying signals like website visits, email opens, and product review hits. It then leverages machine learning to help revenue teams automate their workflows. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with 6Sense’s CEO Jason Zintak about their path to product-market fit.

Join us as we discuss:

(1:26) Jason’s background and he made the decision to join 6sense

(5:32) How early customer conversations informed the 6Sense product strategy

(8:15) 6sense’s early GTM strategy that got them to $5M ARR

(9:11) Jason’s first 90 days at 6sense as a new CEO

(10:56) 6sense’s early product-market fit signals

(16:12) How the advent of generative AI has impacted the product

(18:22) How 6Sense is thinking about building self-serve experiences

(24:06) How the recessionary macro-environment impacts the company’s GTM strategy 

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

Twitter - https://twitter.com/sandhya

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/

Jason Zintak is the CEO of 6sense. Previously, Jason was the CEO and president at Platfora. 

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Hex is a data platform that allows teams to streamline their entire workflow using collaborative notebooks, BI, and docs. Hex offers data scientists the ability to work together to deliver their insights and empowers both business users and data analysts to quickly find the answers they need to do their jobs. Today, the company has over 500 enterprise customers. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Hex’s co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel about their path to product-market fit. 

Join us as we discuss:

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

Barry McCardel is the co-founder and CEO of Hex Technologies. Prior to starting Hex, Barry worked at Palantir and TrialSpark.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

The space of enterprise search and knowledge management is on the cusp of being dramatically transformed by AI-native tools that can find, analyze and synthesize information instantly for knowledge workers. An emerging leader in this category is Glean. Valued at $1B and serving over a hundred enterprise customers today, Glean leverages an enterprise-grade knowledge graph and LLMs (large language models) to help companies find and use their institutional knowledge across hundreds of internal tools and SaaS applications.  

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde (GP at Unusual Ventures) interviews Glean CEO and co-founder Arvind Jain on their path to product-market fit. Join us as we cover:

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

Arvind Jain is the CEO of Glean. Prior to Glean, Arvind co-founded Rubrik, one the fastest growing companies in cloud data management, and worked at Google, where he spent over a decade leading various teams in Search, Maps, and YouTube.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Vercel is an open-source platform that helps front-end developers build and ship dynamic web applications leveraging Jamstack (https://jamstack.org/). Last valued at $2.5B, Vercel was founded in 2015 by CEO Guillermo Rauch and now serves over 30,000 companies. 

In this episode, guest host Wei Lien Dang (General Partner at Unusual Ventures) interviews Vercel CEO and Founder Guillermo Rauch about their path to product-market fit.

Join us as we cover:

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 

Wei Lien Dang is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in open source software, developer tools and cybersecurity. Previously the co-founder of Stackrox, Wei can be reached at [email protected] and 

Guillermo Rauch is the CEO and founder of Vercel. He was the CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013. He's the creator of several popular Node.JS open-source libraries like socket.io, mongoose and slackin. 

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Amplitude is the world’s #1 product analytics platform, currently trading at $1.6B. Launched in 2014, Amplitude started out as a mobile analytics tool, and eventually expanded to include all digital analytics, experimentation and personalization. The company now serves over 1900 customers.

In this episode, CTO Curtis Liu shares the story of how Amplitude was created after he and his co-founder, Spenser Skates, decided to pivot when their initial product idea didn’t find traction. They explored several options before landing on mobile analytics. Curtis walks us through their early prototyping and discovery process, as well as his approach to company-building as a technical leader and founder.

Join us as we discuss:

1:06: How Curtis and Spenser arrived at their first startup idea, Sonalight

4: 01: How they came to the conclusion that they need to pivot

6: 15: How they explored different options before landing on mobile analytics

9: 17: Their prototyping process which included doing interviews and creating mockups

15: 44: What Curtis’s learning process looked like as he was building Amplitude

22: 23: Curtis’s approach to doing research through both self-directed exploration and reaching out to experts

25: 15: How he approached his role as a founder and technical leader

36: 12: Amplitude’s core values and how the founders thought about creating a positive culture

38: 01: How Amplitude is expanding it’s product suite to support different types of datasets

41: 10: Curtis’s advice to new founders who are trying to find problems to solve

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and

Twitter - https://twitter.com/sandhya

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

Customer validation:

https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/customer-validation-going-from-idea-to-sellable-product

Tracking the user/buyer journey
https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/self-serve-user-buyer-journey

CEO/founder prioritization:
https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ceo-founder-prioritization

In this highlights episode, host Sandhya Hegde shares her framework for the three modes of product-led growth and how some iconic companies pursuing PLG found product-market fit: Snyk, Webflow and Nextdoor.

Join us as we discuss:

3.02: The three modes of PLG—fast-working (Snyk),  paradigm-shifting (Webflow), and habit-forming (Nextdoor)

6: 30: How Snyk challenged the way security products were traditionally adopted by focusing on developers

14: 47: How Nextdoor executed early interviews with users to build their first prototype

19: 05: How Webflow built for its initial beachhead persona and differentiated itself from other existing website builders

23:13: How Snyk added specific capabilities to their product to enable CISO buyers to embrace their dev-first solutions

27: 51: How Nextdoor recruited founding members who would become evangelists for the platform within their neighborhoods

31: 41: How Webflow engaged with customer feedback to build a first-of-its kind visual CMS

37: 33: How Webflow’s CTO led growth engineering to build organic and viral awareness for their product

41: 18: Lessons from how Nextdoor leveraged and cultivated community, and how to build successful communities organically

45: 30: How the Snyk team was oriented around growth and evolved with their product offerings

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and

Twitter - https://twitter.com/sandhya

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

-Introduction to Product-Led Growth:

https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/introduction-to-plg

-Nail your self-serve product:

https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/nail-your-self-serve-product

-Free plan vs. free trial in PLG

https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/free-plan-vs-trial-plan

Harness is an emerging leader in the CICD (continuous development) space. Last valued at $3.7B in a 2022 fundraise, this is Jyoti Bansal’s second enterprise software unicorn. His first startup Appdynamics was acquired by Cisco the night before their IPO in 2017.

In this episode, Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal and Unusual founder John Vrionis take us back 15 years to when Appdynamics first got started. They walk us through their learnings around customer discovery and the journey from having a unique product insight to finding product market fit. With stories from the early days of Harness, we cover:

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

LaunchDarkly is a pioneer in the feature management space. Founded in 2014, while the agile and cloud movements were still relatively nascent, LaunchDarkly was ahead of its time. They have now scaled to a $3 billion company, serving over 4,000 customers.

In this episode, LaunchDarkly Co-Founder and CEO Edith Harbaugh takes us back to her initial insight as an engineering manager and product leader at TripIt, deeply versed in the value of systematic feature flagging, and keenly aware of how underutilized it was by many other dev teams. She shares the conviction required to build a product that most buyers in Silicon Valley weren’t yet looking for, and how she engaged her network to gain initial design partners for the product that would come to define the feature management space.

Join us as we discuss:

Honing a founder insight and being early vs late to an emerging sector

Hypothesis testing and building with design partners

Community-building and marketing a movement

Fundraising when VCs are skeptical of a new sector

About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, and Vivun.

About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor.

She can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/).

Further reading:

Identifying initial customers — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ideal-customer-profile-and-personas

Early-stage pricing — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/pricing-your-product

TOOL: Founder prioritization heatmap — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ceo-founder-prioritization

Building a self-serve motion  — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/self-serve-user-buyer-journey

In this episode, Jasper Co-Founder Dave Rogenmoser shares his story of persistence, pivots, and market validation as he and his co-founders went from building a digital marketing agency to a hypergrowth AI unicorn. Join us as we discuss:

About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, and Vivun.

About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/).

Aurora Solar is a solar design platform that has accelerated small business growth in the solar energy industry. Through it, vendors and homeowners have instant access to crucial data about home solar projects.

In this episode, Co-founder at Aurora Solar Chris Hopper shares how he went from installing solar panels to managing a $4B climate tech unicorn that has powered over 10 million solar projects. Join us as we discuss:

• Building a product around ignored customer needs

About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, and Vivun.

About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/).

Further reading:

• How to raise Seed and Series A capital: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/fundraising-milestones-valuations