Claim OwnershipA Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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© 2025 A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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Every founder has 1 goal: find product-market fit. We interview the world's most successful startup founders on the 0 to 1 part of their journeys. We've had the founders of Reddit, Gusto, Rappi, Glean, Cohere, Huntress, ID.me and many more.
We go deep with entrepreneurs & VCs to provide detailed examples you can steal. Our goal is to understand product-market fit better than anyone on the planet.
Rated one of the world's top startup podcasts.
227 Episodes
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Alex had $2,000 in his checking account when Microsoft acquired his last company. For years, he paid himself $30K while his friends made six figures at corporate jobs. He had only 2 months of runway for 18 straight months. Then retail media exploded and everything changed—he went from grinding against the current to riding a wave. After selling to Microsoft, he took 6 months off, got bored, and started Bluefish AI with the same team. This time they called Fortune 500 CMOs before buildin...
Brett had a drug dealer's car for 13 days. By day 11, the death threats started coming. This is the reality of building ServiceUp, the "DoorDash for auto repair." Brett literally stole DoorDash's entire playbook—city launches, three-sided marketplace, everything—but discovered even if he got 90% right, 10% of B2C customers can end you. He raised from Tiger just as the firm exploded. The DoorDash partnership that seemed like salvation turned into their worst nightmare. But then th...
Doug Scott and the Ethic team spent years building technology before landing real customers. While other startups were growing fast, Ethic was focused on building, and after two years had only a modest amount of AUM. Until he and his team found a way to help his customers help them WIN new clients they couldn't land before. That shift took them to ~$250M AUM in one year. He reveals why he left investment banking in Australia, sold everything, and moved to the Bay Area within three weeks with...
Arnold Schwarzenegger mastered three completely different fields—bodybuilding, acting, and politics—with one simple philosophy: reps, reps, reps. This solo episode reveals why speed of execution is the only real moat for early-stage founders. One founder takes an idea from conception to signed customers in three weeks. Another takes six months. They both had equally good ideas, but one got 100 reps in a year while the other got 10. Even Twitter, an established app, became top 5 in the A...
Aviv spent months walking construction sites carrying tools for managers just to understand their problems—speaking to customers is "bullsh*t"—you need to work beside them to see reality. His company Buildots had a working AI product that tracked construction progress perfectly, but 90% of users got zero value from it. Until he made one key change that took them from barely surviving to 3-4X yearly growth. He reveals why his first customers had negative margins, how he accidentall...
Shensi cold messaged 50,000 engineers to build Merge. She worked 9am-9pm every day, gave her first customers two months free to prove herself, and refused to hire anyone remote—even during peak COVID. She purposefully didn't collect a single dollar of revenue until she knew she could hit $1M in a months. "Startups are all about momentum." She lost their biggest deal to a competitor who copied them, then won that customer back years later. She outbounded her way from zero to $10M t...
Eldon put a $150K line of credit on his house to start eSentire in 2001. No VCs would touch him—they didn't understand services businesses. He worked 12-hour days, 7 days a week for 7 years to hit $1M in revenue. His co-founder coded while he flew to New York on $99 JetBlue flights from Buffalo to save money. Then something clicked: they brought in an experienced CEO who transformed their scrappy cybersecurity consulting into a managed service. Revenue grew from $1M to $10M in jus...
Soham spent 6 months building AI that would auto-generate integrations between any software. He locked down Glean as an early customer because he had friends there. And it failed completely. So he pivoted. This time, he refused to work with friendly customers who knew him. Instead, he did 10-20 calls per day with strangers who would tell him his product sucked. He posted on Discord communities at 3am, wrote technical blogs that went viral on Reddit, and created fake landing pages to see what ...
Sahil was 18 when TechCrunch published a hit piece calling him a copycat. His co-founder Aaron was 16. They'd just raised $6 million from YC and top VCs for their crypto startup, then got subpoenaed by a state government and watched their business implode. So they fired everyone, moved back to their parents' homes, and spent months cold-calling dentists and lawn care companies to find a real problem. What they discovered: 80% of SMBs still use community banks from 1995. Now Affiniti has...
Jon spent 3 years building Gamma with barely any traction—just a few hundred users after burning millions. Then ChatGPT dropped. In desperation, he pivoted to AI-powered presentations in March 2023 with one year of runway left. What happened next was insane: Paul Graham publicly mocked their launch tweet calling it worthless—then it went viral. They went from 2,000 signups a day to 60,000. Their servers crashed for three days, but when they came back online, panicked users threw $50K at...
Soham co-founded Rubrik by taking what he learned from building Google's data center tech to enterprises desperate for cloud migration. Two quarters later, he hit $1M ARR. And a few years later, a $16B IPO. Soham breaks down why paid pilots beat free trials, how to sell enterprise hardware before it works, and why early customers become your biggest champions when you solve real pain. Now building WisdomAI after watching the ChatGPT moment unfold, he shares what's different about ...
Stéphan bootstrapped AODocs to $55M in revenue and 250 employees without taking a dime of VC money—while competing directly with venture-backed competitors. Starting as a services company in 2012, he spotted the cloud migration wave early and built document management for enterprises moving to Google Workspace. In this episode, Stéphan breaks down why doubling every two years beats hypergrowth, how to win enterprise deals with zero funding, and why touching business-critical documents m...
Andrew bootstrapped Wrike and grew it from 0 to a $2.2B exit by doing the exact opposite of what every startup book tells you. No pivots. No talking to customers before launch. No narrow niche. Just 17 years of relentless focus on one problem while everyone else was pivoting every 18 months. In this episode, he breaks down exactly why bootstrapping saved his company (and why VC would have killed it), why he ignored customer development and just built in a bunker, and how manning the sup...
Peter Walker from Carta drops the hard data every founder needs. Based on actual cap table data from 1000s of startups, this Q2 update reveals the brutal new reality. It takes 2+ years to go from seed to A (up from 1.6), you need 3X the revenue you used to, and if you're not AI, you're getting half the attention. But there's good news too—teams are finally getting leaner, exits are picking back up, and the worst of the funding winter might be behind us. If you're raising in 2025, ...
Hedra CEO Michael Lingelbach breaks down how his generative video app went from zero to millions of users and an eight-figure run rate in months — then deliberately slowed down to rebuild a V2 that enterprises would pay for. We dig into the prosumer-to-pro upsell, why free users are a false signal, and how a creator-seeded launch can outpull ad spend. Michael shares the GTM that signs enterprise contracts every few days with no outbound, the exact moment he killed feature churn to ship ...
Ross went from lawyer to self-taught engineer to CTO at a 1,600-person unicorn—then quit to build Wordsmith AI. In 18 months, he's raised $30M and grown to mid-single-digit millions in ARR by doing everything differently. He tested co-founders by starting fights. Built in Slack for 10 months before adding a web interface. Kept his team at 8 people while competitors hired dozens. This episode breaks down his exact playbook: how to test co-founders before committing, why attacking s...
Rick built Persona into a $100M+ ARR unicorn, but he never thought it would work. In fact, Rick started Persona believing it would probably fail, and that mindset might be exactly why it succeeded. In this episode, Rick reveals how a casual project with zero expectations turned into a billion-dollar business, why early-stage startups should avoid hyper-optimization, and the secrets he learned at Square about identity fraud that became his breakthrough. If you want to challenge the...
Neil Patel just flipped everything you know about startups upside down. He says product-market fit is overrated, giving away your software for free can make you rich, and the real secret to scaling isn’t charging customers—it’s monetizing the leads your free product generates. Neil breaks down his playbook on how startups can leverage free products to grow exponentially, why your churn doesn’t matter if you monetize correctly, and the reality about brand building that most founders comp...
Roy Lee went from getting kicked out of Harvard and Columbia to building Cluely, one of the fastest-growing AI startups ever—going from 0 to $5 million ARR in just 3 months. We go deep on Roy’s playbook for using controversy, virality, and content to get millions of views—and millions in ARR. You’ll learn why Roy intentionally designs content to spark outrage, how he leveraged Twitter to raise millions from top VCs within 24 hours, and his tactical advice for mastering the short-form al...
Mary Beth Snodgrass shares the raw and real story behind Healthiby—an innovative healthcare startup that succeeded in delivering measurable health outcomes but ultimately didn't take off. Hear firsthand what went wrong, from unclear payer dynamics and sales friction, to macroeconomic shifts and storytelling gaps. This episode pulls back the curtain on why having a working product isn’t enough and why mastering the market dynamics is crucial to your startup’s survival. Why You Should Listen Le...
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this is a great podcast. in my journey as an early entrepreneur, such fundamental concepts and viewpoints shine a light at the end of those dark corners you will encounter. keep going!