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As the founder of an early-stage startup you have one goal: find product-market fit. The Product Market Fit Show is a weekly podcast about the 0 to 1 journeys of the world's most successful tech startups. We go deep with entrepreneurs & VCs to provide detailed examples you can steal. Our goal is simple. We want to understand product-market fit better than anyone on the planet.
94 Episodes
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Every startup needs to compete with incumbents. But it's different with AI.AI startups need to create websites or apps from scratch and drive traffic. Incumbents can just add AI as a feature. They have distribution built in.AI is not like previous tech revolutions. Unlike mobile, the internet, or the PC revolution, AI is not a new distribution channel. Startups are at a much bigger disadvantage than they've ever been.In this episode, we discuss the 3 key elements you need to consider to answe...
Andrew spoke with 120+ VCs to raise a $1.5M pre-seed round. He closed $2.7M and had demand for many millions more. He devoted 90% of his time to fundraising, but only took weeks from the first meetings to close. 99% of founders I meet do not fundraise at this level. It takes them longer to close, they have fewer choices and raise less. This is a specific, detailed and tactical guide to closing a round. If you're ever going to raise, you need to listen.Why you should listenWhy talkin...
Zoom was THE work-from-home stock. It's down 90% from peak. The same hype that fuelled work-from-home stocks is now fuelling AI. What happened to Zoom will happen to many AI companies. AI startups today need to carefully position against foundational models and incumbents. Here's how to think through it.Why you should listen:Learn why what happened to Zoom will happen to many AI companiesHow to position yourself against the two AI giants: Foundational models & incumbents.How to...
Chris shares the story of how he grew Refine Labs to $22M ARR, what he did to grow so fast, and also why he regrets spending so much on growth instead of focusing on profitability.He goes exceptionally deep on sales and marketing and provides tactical advice you can steal. Chris is the founder of Refine Labs & Passetto. He's also a LinkedIn Top Voice with 150K followers. Why you should listen:Learn when to switch away from founder-driven sales Why sales velocity is the key metr...
Sam Altman is playing chess not checkers. He partnered with Microsoft. He partnered with Apple. He grew to $3B in ARR in 2 years. Hate him or love him, he's a strategic genius.You'll recognize a pattern: Sam has an idea, positions correctly, lets the bets play out, and goes all-in on what works. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat.In under 2 years, he has over 10M paying subscribers.A brand name the average 60-year-old recognizes. And, of course, his company OpenAI has $3.4B in ARR.Ke...
We interview Chris Slow the CTO and Founding Engineer at Reddit. Reddit is now a ~$10B company, with nearly $1B in revenue. Their 1B+ monthly active users are so powerful they can move markets. This is the story of how it all began.On this episode, we interview Chris Slowe, Reddit's current CTO and Founding Engineer. Chris was in YC's first-ever batch with Steve and Alexis. He was their roommate. When Chris's own startup failed, he moved over and joined them to build Reddit. This was al...
Wardah was a PhD graduate working at a biomedical imaging startup. But all it took was two different dentists giving her two totally different diagnoses for her to quit her full-time job.She was unemployed with no idea what to build.All she knew was that something was broken—and she had to fix it. Her startup Overjet is now the #1 dental AI platform, valued at $550M.Why you should listen:- Why founder obsession is a key trait- Why learning speed is the main KPI early on- Why staying close to ...
Dane was the CEO of Squarespace from 2007 to 2011. He grew the company from ~$2M in revenue to ~$15M. He's a multi-time founder with multiple exits. His current startup, Odeko, raised $227M.He takes us through his long journey as a founder of multiple companies and shares the key startup lessons he's learned.Why you should listen:- Why 7-day trials led to higher conversion than 30-day trials at Squarespace- Why you should talk to customers every single day.- Why SMB usage doesn't always...
His first startup was a cool idea: Uber for Valet Parking. Investors loved it. But the unit economics didn't work out. So he had to pivot. He ended up selling it, but decided to do things differently the second time around.“It’s the boring stuff that makes money. Sometimes the sexy, interesting things are really great ideas, fun to use, but aren’t money makers. They aren’t durable businesses.”With Argyle, he didn't start with a cool idea. He replaced a product customers already paid for. His ...
His travel startup crashed 90% overnight. Here’s how he used AI to grow past $2M/year—to $2M a month:For a while, Andrew was crushing it. Accelerator -> $750K pre-seed -> $2M ARR -> $2.5M seed round. Then COVID hit. He was selling to events like CES, SXSW, etc. Revenue dropped from $160K/month to under $10K... overnight. Investors from his seed round refuse to wire funds. After nearly going bankrupt, he finds a way to pivot. A year later, his business takes off.2020 -...
Poojan is a multi-time successful founder. He raised $60M for his first startup and exited. He just raised a $75M Series D at his current startup. But it wasn't always easy.- In his first startup, he had to hover beside conference booths for hours to land his first customer.- He gave his product away for free to the first several customers.- It took him 6 years to cross $10M in ARRWhy you should listen:- Learn exactly how a successful repeat founder thinks about team structure in the early da...
Arvind founded 2 billion-dollar startups—by doing everything lean startup tells you not to do. - He didn’t focus on launching an MVP. - He ignored early market feedback. - He didn’t charge beta users anything— for 2 years. And it worked. He went from $0 to $3M in revenue the year he launched publicly. He tripled to about $9M the year after. And tripled every year since. Two months ago, Glean raised $200M at a $2B valuation. Why you should listen:- Learn exactly how outlier founder Arvin...
Snapchat got 0 downloads the day it launched. 5 months in, it had only 127 users. Today Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. Evan Spiegel noticed what even Zuck missed: daily communication is meant to be ephemeral, not recorded for all time.In this episode, we dive deep into how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit. Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M val...
If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M. But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him. So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backe...
While Voice AI is all the rage now, it wasn't a hot sector in 2017. After Dylan graduated from YC, VCs rejected him. He couldn't raise a round. They all assumed Google would do it. So he raised what he could from angels and made it work for the next 3 years.He's now built the world's most accurate Speech AI model. He's grown to 5,000 customers and raised $115M in venture capital. Last quarter, he raised a $50M Series C from Accel. Just this week, Assembly launched Universal-1, thei...
Andrew is the founder/CEO of Enable. And he is riding a rocket ship:2020: $17M Series A2021: $45M Series B2022: $94M Series C A few months ago he raised $120M at a $1B valuation. But it took him five years from the time he started Enable in 2015 until he was able to raise his first round in 2020. Andrew was running a profitable development shop as he built the first version of Enable. He often had to chase down customers so he could make the next payroll. He had to balance serv...
Alex started Apt2B in 2010. He sold couches online before IKEA did. It took him over 3 years to make as much money as he used to as a furniture salesperson. But it paid off. After growing the business to $6M in revenue, he sold the company.Post-acquisition he grew the company to $40M in sales. In this episode, we dive deep into what Alex did to get started, how he closed his first few customers and what he did to grow to $1M in revenue.From landing a Super Bowl ad to selling couches at Costco...
Every founder wants to build the next $1B+ company. So it’s normal to get inspired by what companies like Apple, Shopify and Microsoft do. But it’s also a huge mistake. In this episode, we look at what Shopfiy, Fullscript and Spellbook did to find product-market fit. In many ways, it’s the opposite of what they do now, as big succesful companies. Big companies are operating in a post-product-market fit world. Pre-product-market fit startups are in a different world entirely. Th...
Spellbook is ChatGPT for lawyers. They've raised $30M in the last 6 months. They now have over 2,000 law firms as customers. But it wasn't a straight line-- it took Scott 6 years to get here.For the first 5 years, Scott worked on a legal tech platform called Rally. During that time, Scott along with his co-founders and their small team ran hundreds of experiments, pushed dozens of landing pages and built a process to test feature after feature.In this episode, Scott goes through his pro...
Kyle Braatz is the founder of Fullscript, a $900M revenue company that started by helping health practitioners recommend supplements to their patients. It's like the Shopify for doctors, nurses and nutritionistsEven though he captured 50% of the Canadian market in one year, early-stage VCs didn't see the opportunity. So he bootstrapped his way to success. He cracked open the US market and quickly scaled from $0 in 2012 to $25M in revenue by 2016.Today, Fullscript has grown to a profitable com...
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