Claim OwnershipA Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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© 2024 A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
Description
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, Rappi, Cohere, Glean, 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.
134 Episodes
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Rob founded Outpoint in 2020 to help marketers optimize their ad spend. He was a growth marketer and his founder a data scientist. He had team-market fit, a solid thesis, and paying customers. But when the recession hit and ad spend dropped, growth ground to a halt. Nothing he did could revitalize growth. Ultimately, he decreased expenses and exited. He was able to return some cash to investors, find a home for his team and keep the product going. You tend to hear about what happens to t...
Cameo is one of the best-known recent consumer startups. You've either used it or know someone who's used it to get famous people to create personalized videos. And, for a while, they were a total rocket ship. Year 1: $300K GMVYear 2: $4MYear 3: $20MYear 4: $100MThey were backed by Jeremy Liew, the VC who seeded Snapchat in 2012. Cameo became a unicorn in 2021. But as the markets turned, revenue decreased, investor interest waned, and their valuation dropped from $1B to $100M. After the restr...
Q3 startup data just dropped. We chat with Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta about valuations at pre-seed, seed and Series A. Why the current fundraising environment is the new normal and not about to get much better. We also talk about trends in founder vesting, and why some founders are choosing to vest for longer.Finally, we go through what to do if you’re stuck with some product-market fit but mediocre growth, and why more exits are happening now than anytime in the fast couple of y...
Lior is the Elon Musk of VC. In just 8 years, his venture fund went from 0 to $4B under management. And while doing that, he founded Bright Machines, which to date has raised over $400M. He's both the CEO of Bright Machines and the Managing Director of Eclipse Ventures. And he's not building "easy" software startups either. Bright Machines is looking to automate the entire manufacturing process with robots. He launched it with a $179M round and a 100-person team. Lior is not n...
Parker quit his job as VP Finance at a late-stage startup in mid 2021. He raised $4M out of the gate because, well, it was 2021. But he didn't ramp up sales, he didn't hire 15 developers. He kept the team to 5 people for the first year. He worked with a dozen design partners until the value prop was perfect. He even refused to let customers pay upfront in annual contracts. He wanted monthly payments to light a fire for him and his team. This month, just 3 years after quitting his job, he clos...
Mike started selling SaaS before SaaS was a thing. PointClickCare is the Salesforce of healthcare. For the first 7 years, they raised just $600K from friends and family. With that funding, they grew to $50M in ARR. Through that time, they went through the 2000 Dotcom crash and nearly went bankrupt in 2004 as they chased too many markets too soon.Since then, the company has continued to grow at over 20% compounded rate and hit $500M in ARR in 2024 and a $5B valuation. Mike shares how...
Apple sold only 370,000 VisionPro headsets-- much fewer than it expected. Meanwhile, Meta Ray-Bans are the top-selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban stores. The outcome of their AR/VR products couldn't be more different, even though they both have as much awareness as you could possible buy.There are 3 reasons:1. Price.2. Killer feature vs cool product.3. Destination vs always-on.Check this episode out if you want to understand the where mixed reality is going and what you need to do to make sure...
1Piotr met his co-founders at a party in Coachella. He built them an app for influencers to post online. That simple idea evolved into one of the world's first influencer marketplaces. While so many other tried and failed, Piotr and his team targeted marketing agencies with big budgets. They grew to $150M in revenue over a 10 year period. This summer, they were acquired by Publicis Groupe for $500M. This is the story of how it all started, where the idea came from and how partnering with IBM o...
New Carta data shows that 30% of seed-stage startups used to raise a Series A within 2 years of their seed. Now, only 15% do. The bar for Series As is as high as it's ever been. And the number of seed extensions that I see is going up as a result.But for founders, this is NOT a bad thing. I remember as a seed-stage founder I was obsessed with raising a Series A. But now I've seen startup after startup that raised $8-12M Series A when they didn't truly have product-market fit. Most of those st...
Liran quit a cozy job at IBM to launch Fusic, a TikTok-like app back in 2011. He raised over $10M, acquired tens of thousands of users, and failed.So he went back to what he knew: deep tech and enterprise. He launched WEKA in 2013 to improve the efficiency of GPUs. He was operating on hard mode: building deep tech and selling to large enterprise customers. It took him 5 years to build a commercially-ready product. In that time, he raised over $35M from strategic investors, since VCs didn't ge...
This episode is going to piss you off. Most founders struggle to raise their first few million. Many have to bootstrap for years. Even once there's revenue, many get rejected because they're "too early". Dan had dozens of VCs asking to invest before he even quit his job. He raised his first $5M with no deck, no story, and no product idea. All it took was two founders who wanted to build something in the security space. To add fuel to the fire, 6 months after he incorporated, he raised a...
It was “really slow in the first couple of years...really, really slow.” GoHenry was an app and debit card for kids to help parents teach their kids about money. Dean started over a decade ago in 2012, when mobile was just truly taking off. And yet, it took multiple years to get off the ground. Once he found the right channels and repeatable growth, he and his team started pouring fuel on the fire. In total, they raised over $100M. He ultimately grew to 2 million paying customers. E...
Jaspar graduated YC & closed a $11.5M seed round this week. He launched Artisan just 8 months ago. And this is the first venture-backed startup he's ever ran. He started with product-led-growth but struggled. In May, he moved to a sales-first go-to-market & scaled from $200K ARR to $1.3M ARR by September. We go deep and tactical to figure out exactly what he did to grow so fast: from hiring a Chief of Staff as one of his first hires, to living in the same house as his employees, ...
Cody started a ride-share business in 2017 with no capital. He focused exclusively on small towns (population <100K) where Uber/Lyft weren't available. I know as a VC I would've passed if he'd pitched me when he started—and I would've been dead wrong.So far he's raised only $2.1M, compared to Uber's $30B+ raised. And yet, he built a business doing $20M+ in annual revenue that is live in a dozen markets and multiple countries. At one point, he came weeks away from bankruptcy when ride-...
I tried to pay my employees as little as possible. I thought I was being resourceful—& it seemed to work. Until it totally backfired. I learned my lesson the hard way.No founder wants to hire B-level or C-level talent. Everyone is looking for A-players. But most founders don't put in the work. And they end up with B-level teams. If you're serious about getting and keeping A-players there's only one way to do it. You need to have a coherent strategy, you need to be intentional, and y...
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 small, $1M inside round. But then things changed:2018: $1.5M ARR2019: $5M ARR2020: $10M ARR2021: $20M ARR2022: $40M...
MrBeast's 36-page framework leaked this week. It's how he built a $1B+ company and became the #1 YouTuber in the world. His channel is worth over $1B. For the first time ever, we get to see how MrBeast operates. We go through the 7 most important things that startup founders can learn from MrBeast. From what maniacal obsession looks like, what it means to be an "A player", to how to teach employees to never take 'no' for an answer. In the leaked document called "How to Succeed at M...
Andres Bilboa is one of the co-founders of Rappi, the highest-valued app of LATAM ($5B valuation). Now he runs an incubator called Makers and has invested in dozens of startups. In this episode, he shares how Rappi started with no funding and no network. They added restaurants into their platform without permission and gave cash to couriers to buy meals. Demand was through the roof. But just as they started closing funding and scaling, Uber and UberEats came to compete.Here's the story o...
Douglas has been in media and PR for over two decades. He’s the founder of Betakit Inc and has been running Betakit, Canada’s TechCrunch, for nearly 10 years. He understands what startups need to do to leverage PR, and how PR can help startups hire, fundraise and sell. On this episode, we get tactical and go deep on exactly when it makes sense to use PR and how founders can get the most from it.Why you should listenWhy you should treat PR like a subset of inbound marketingPR is all abou...
In this episode, I sit down with Nick Frosst, Co-Founder of Cohere, the $5.5B AI startup that’s targeting the enterprise landscape. We go through the origin story of Cohere, the challenges of building foundational models, and why he believes large language models (LLMs) won’t lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI). We also explore the fierce competition in AI, what sets Cohere apart, and Nick’s advice for founders building in AI today. Why you should listenLLMs are powerful b...
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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!