Claim OwnershipA 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.
249 Episodes
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For the holiday break we are resurfacing some of our best episodes so far. Here is the best episode of season 3. Kyle left his job as a hacker at the NSA to launch Huntress. He bootstrapped for 3 years and burned all his savings. One of his co-founders quit. He got into an accelerator program, but had to sleep in his car for 16 weeks because he couldn't afford a hotel. Finally, 3 years in he'd hit $1.5M ARR. So he pitched 60 VCs for a Series A—and got 60 'no's. He was forced to raise a smal...
They were building a Segment competitor. It was working—customers were paying. But every sales call, prospects kept asking about the backend tech instead of the product. So they killed the roadmap and pivoted. It took them 18 months to hit $1M ARR. Then they started growing. And so far, they've raised $350M. Viraj walks through exactly how he validated the pivot, landed the first 10 customers, and why being outside Silicon Valley forced him to show more traction than everyone else...
For the holiday break we are resurfacing some of our best episodes so far. Here is the best episode of season 2. Here are the key lessons from the past 60 episodes that we've released to date. Each of the 5 steps to Product Market Fit is based on actual case studies with real examples you can use. It's a recap of everything I've learned over the last two years- you don't want to miss it. Chapters: (00:00:45) Mistakes Are Unavoidable But Avoidable Mistakes Are Unaffordable (00:04:41) ...
David had a consumer app with 50,000 users and viral traction—and he shut it down. The retention metrics weren't as good as what he'd seen at Snapchat. That difficult decision cleared the path for Juicebox, AI for recruiting that grew to $10M ARR in 2 years. In this episode, David reveals how he pivoted to AI recruiting, generated millions of views with a simple LinkedIn demo, and ground through months of brutal churn to unlock 10x growth. If you want to know how to execute a flawless P...
Jennifer went from VC to founder and immediately broke every rule in the book. When she pivoted Scribe from an automation tool to a documentation platform, her investors told her she had just killed the company. She ignored them. Instead of polishing her product, she launched a "janky" offline MVP on Product Hunt to test for real market pull. Scribe is now used by 95% of the Fortune 500. In this episode, Jennifer reveals the brutal truth about ignoring "smart" money, why you shoul...
Eric spent 30 years in cybersecurity. Built and sold an MSSP to private equity for hundreds of millions. Then he started Tenex and hit $43 million in revenue in ONE YEAR. This isn't theory. This is a founder who's done it multiple times breaking down exactly how AI-native companies are about to eat every services industry alive. If you're building anything that touches AI, services, or enterprise sales, this is the episode. Why You Should Listen Why selling outcomes beats selling produc...
Carta's Peter Walker is back with the freshest data on what's actually happening at the early stage—and it's not what you're reading on X. While headlines scream about record-breaking rounds, the reality on the ground tells a different story. Seed deals are down. Time between rounds is stretching. And there's a brutal divide between the companies getting all the attention and everyone else. We dig into the exact valuations, graduation rates, team sizes and revenue you need for See...
Alex and his co-founders spent 2018 pitching parking lot owners on computer vision tech. Every meeting ended the same way: "Cute startup, come back in 30 years." So they did something else—they bought the parking operators and implemented the AI themselves. VCs called them delusional. But today, Metropolis has 20 million members and adds 1 million new members every month. Every 1-2 seconds someone signs up. Alex's biggest lesson? When enterprise customers won't adopt your tech, don't co...
Amit walked away from being President of 1-800-Flowers after scaling it from $500M to $2B because he saw smart people trapped in dumb systems. His insight: half of global GDP is 90% manual work—salespeople entering data instead of selling, technicians reading manuals instead of fixing. He started Instalily in Spring 2023 when everyone said AI agents were impossible. Instead of replacing workers, he built AI that finds signals in noise—telling each salesperson exactly which deal to focus...
Wayne tested flight insurance over a single weekend with a WordPress site and Google ads. When people tried to pay, he showed a fake error message. The result: 15.9% conversion. That validation led to Sure, now powering insurance for Tesla, Toyota, and MasterCard. But the journey was brutal. Wayne worked solo for a year, burning through savings in San Francisco. Flew to South Africa for 7 weeks to land his first insurance partner. The real breakthrough came 4 years later, in 2019,...
Matt sold his first company at 19 and made $100K. He sold his second at 21 and made $800K. A couple years later, he launched Clover and grew it to $8M ARR in 6 months. His secret? Insane distribution. His formula is to ignore quality—and engineer quantity instead. While everyone obsesses over viral content, Matt posts 1,000 videos across 333 accounts daily, guaranteeing a million views through pure math. No luck required. He applies the same "volume negates luck" philosophy to eve...
Russ has started and sold multiple companies over 30 years, but his Dynamic Signal journey will change how you think about product-market fit. They had $5M ARR selling influencer marketing software. Then Russ told investors to pretend the $5M didn't exist and bet on a $200K pipeline instead. That pivot led to 600 Fortune 2000 customers and an exit at $50M ARR. Now building his AI measurement startup Larridin, Russ shares why being a repeat founder creates a different problem—every...
Harish spent 9 months building Deliver and could barely get 10 customers. The product worked. Merchants liked the fast delivery promise. But nobody was signing up. Then he made two changes—and scaled to $100M in revenue in 2 years. Shopify acquired them for over $2B. Harish says it wasn't about finding product-market fit. It was about finding product-PRICE-market fit. The product was fine. The pricing model was killing them. This episode breaks down why pricing often isn't just a busine...
Dheeraj built Nutanix into a $20B public company—then walked away to start DevRev. He just raised a $100M Series A. This episode breaks down why most founders "sell and run" (chase new logos instead of delivering value), why that strategy fails, and how Dheeraj thinks about building platforms with use cases instead of just features. He explains why the biggest opportunities come from bundling and why you need to hit 130%+ NRR to scale in B2B. Dheeraj also shares the two near-death experiences...
Amar is a 5x founder who helped birth Tinder (it was the 10th project—after the first 9 failed), then sold his next company to Ford for putting a platform in every single vehicle they make. But the wildest part? He got Ford to commit in under a year by doing something most founders would never do: he asked for SO MUCH money that only the CEO could approve it. That one move made him "part of the transformational change" instead of a vendor they could ignore. In this episode, Amar breaks down t...
Ben Alarie spent 8 years building Blue J with "partial product market fit"—real customers, real revenue, but no real market pull. Then he made a bet that would either kill the company or 10x it: he put the existing product in maintenance mode and gave his team 6 months to rebuild everything from scratch using a technology that barely worked. Two years later, Blue J went from $2M to $25M in ARR. They're adding 10 new customers every single day. NPS went from 20 to 84. This isn't a story about ...
Dean thought he'd have to bootstrap Axonius because no investor would fund a solution to a problem that had existed for 20 years. He was wrong—they've raised $500M. The breakthrough came when a Fortune 500 company was actively being hacked by Chinese state actors. Their first customer almost said no—they had 20 bugs during the POC. But Dean's team fixed each one within 48 hours while their competitors took quarters to respond. That speed changed everything. They went from zero to ...
Casey turned hackers into a marketplace and built Bugcrowd to $180M+ raised. But the real story isn't about cybersecurity—it's about how he validated a two-sided marketplace with almost no product, refined his pitch by literally testing it on Uber drivers until it clicked, and cracked the code on category creation when everyone thought hackers were the enemy. You'll learn about the exact moment he knew he had product-market fit, why he blew every pitch to top VCs until he reframed...
Zach spent 8 years at Google leading engineering for Google Docs, then left to build a photo sharing app with zero go-to-market plan. Reality hit hard: "At Google, anything you launch gets millions of users. At a startup, the challenge isn't building—it's getting anyone to care." After writing a brutal postmortem documenting everything that went wrong, he started Warp with strict principles: only hire product-obsessed people, document every process, build pure software not services.&nbs...
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...
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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!