“Product-market fit” has been said so many times it means nothing. So try two plainer words: interest and demand. Interest is people telling you your demo is cool. Demand is people doing real work to get your product into their hands. Steven gets candid about what went wrong at Resonance Systems: high interest every time, and never enough real demand underneath it.

If people want your product but stop short of buying, you have interest, not demand. And if you don’t have demand, no sales team can fix that — a good one will hide the problem instead. If you do have demand, sales is there to help with awareness and to navigate the buying process; they don’t need to convince anyone they need your product. The founder’s job is to find demand. Until you find it, nothing else you do will make much difference.

You can spend a lot of time talking to customers, asking them what they want, but they probably can’t articulate it. Your job as a founder is to understand the industry you serve and the problems it faces, then have the vision to solve them in a way people can actually use. You find demand by making informed guesses and quickly abandoning the ones that fail.

Building a product has never been easier. Which may mean nobody can hear you. Derrick brings Trovio’s go-to-market problem: cold email is dead on arrival, paid social works but costs money you don’t have yet, and every tool that helps you personalize and target is a tool everyone else has too. Steven pushes on real-world stunts, the attention economy, and why the answer might just be more shots on goal.

Jakob Heuser teaches about building in the open and how to use AI to help AI write better code.

What if finding a job was more than listing out bullets on a one page document (a resume). Wes Hargrove is working on something really exciting for both job seekers and employers. Hear more about what he's building and how he got there all the way from his first job in tech as a sales engineer at Lynda.com.

Learn more at ⁠https://joinvire.com

Follow Unfinished Business

Instagram: ⁠@unfinishedbusiness_podcast⁠

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/unfinishedbusiness-podcast/

What if you could order landscaping supplies online AND support local businesses? Tyler Edsall shows us the future of the front (and back) yard. From running a lawn mowing business to pay for college, to selling rare books and "sushi bazookas" on Amazon, to cashing in on crypto, Tyler's is the winding journey of the entrepreneur.

Learn more at https://mulchmound.com/

Follow Unfinished Business

Instagram: @unfinishedbusiness_podcast

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/unfinishedbusiness-podcast/

Steven Foote joins us to talk Resonance Systems, the simplest way for growth teams to tailor the product experience without begging for engineers. We get into a Steven's journey from limo driver to Pearl developer to an accountant to a career at LinkedIn. Because this is Unfinished business, we also chat about the early wins and misses, what he's most proud of, and what excites him the most about the future.

In the premiere episode of Unfinished Business, we flip the mic over to co-host Derrick Showers for a deep dive into his journey leading up to his current startup, Trovio. We begin with his days on the radio, and move to discussing his time at Disney, LinkedIn, Calm, and Apple. Derrick opens up about the hard-earned lessons, the pivots, and the personal moments that shaped the path to building Trovio, a SaaS platform redefining how creators scale and monetize their knowledge. It’s more than just a startup origin story, it’s a look at what it really takes to chase something unfinished.

Unfinished Business is a podcast about real founders building real businesses, before the success story is written. Hosted by Derrick Showers (Trovio) and Steven Foote (Resonance Systems), it’s for anyone living, dreaming, or just curious about the life of a founder.