The Product Market Fit Show

Early-stage founders are bombarded with advice. A lot of it from investors who have never operated a business, never ran marketing, never led sales. And yet, many founders take VCs' advice as sacrosanct. And many VCs feel like they can and should opine on everything. If many people treat you like an expert, you must be one... right? VCs have a lot to offer founders. But, like everyone, they have circles of competence. Be careful who you listen to. Listen to the full episode here:

Alex Hoff quit the company he'd been working at for 9 years. He gave himself 6 months to launch a startup. Even though he got the co-founder of a public company to join him and raised $6M out of the gate—it took him 3 years to make his first sale. But after he shifted from selling to SMBs to selling to MSPs (Managed Service Providers i.e., outsourced IT), things took off: April 2015 - $1K MRR August 2015 - $10K MRR June 2016 - $100K MRR Nov 2018 - $1M MRR ($12M ARR) And growth never stopped—soon, he'll cross $100M ARR. Alex and his co-founder did many things differently. They came up with an idea by starting with markets, not customer problems. They raised a lot of money upfront and built a sophisticated product instead of an MVP. And they deliberated cultural values before making their first hire. Clearly—it worked. Listen to the full episode here:

Big milestone alert!

When an employee unexpectedly quits, an investor backs out, or a big customer churns— fear of failure takes over. When you close a new round, land a big customer, or make a big hire— you feel pure excitement. Every founder is on a fear-excitement spectrum. There's no way to prevent yourself from feeling the two extremes. But I've seen great founders use several tactics to help themselves operate out of excitement more often than out of fear. Those founders also feel fear— but they use these tactics to spend more time closer to excitement. Because operating out of failure is playing not to lose—whereas operating out of excitement is playing to win. Here are 3 ways to do just that. Listen to the full episode here:

Pierce Ujjainwalla launched a consulting business that grew to millions in revenue and dozens of employees. But he noticed his customers kept asking for the same solution. So he launched Knak, an email marketing and landing page builder that integrates to Marketo. Unlike most founders, he didn’t go all-in. He kept working on his consulting business full-time until Knak hit $1M in ARR. After he transitioned over to Knak, he bootstrapped it to $5M ARR and then raised a $25M Series A. Here’s the story of how Knak found product-market fit. Listen to full episode here:

Storytelling is one of the most important founder skills. So we asked the world’s best storyteller how to do it. He’s worked with Slack & Salesforce. He's won Moth StorySLAM (a storytelling competition in NYC) a record 59 times. There is no better storyteller in the world than Matthew Dicks. Every founder knows storytelling is a critical skill. But 99% of founders I meet are terrible storytellers. They overcomplicate, they include too much information, they try to convince with data. Like Matthew Dicks says, "Most of what people say in business is forgettable". Whether you want to close customers, investors or employees, you need to stand out and be remembered. And the best way to do that is to tell compelling stories that resonate. Here's how to do it. Listen to the full episode here:

5 years ago, Shubham A Mishra had just graduated college and had no network. Now he's raised $200M and grown to $85M ARR. But he started trying to sell AI for marketing to enterprises with no network. So for 2 months, he'd go to the lobby of a bank and sit there for an hour. He'd wait for the CMO to walk by, just so he could say hi. He'd tell receptionists he was waiting for an interview. Finally, one day the CMO had enough and asked him who he was. Shubham got his 15-minute moment. That turned into a free pilot. That free pilot turned to $1.2M ARR. 2 years after he'd started the company, he bootstrapped to $3M ARR and was profitable— since then, the growth never stopped. Listen to the full episode here:

Google is in talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23B (a 40x revenue multiple). Wiz is the company that in 2021 announced it grew from $0 to $100M ARR in just 18 months. How did this cybersecurity company grow so fast in a crowded space? How does it get a 40x revenue multiple when FAANG stocks trade at 5-15x? Who are the exceptional founders that were able to create the largest venture-backed exit in history in just 4 years? In this episode, we dive into the 3 ingredients that made Wiz into such a success: insane growth, insane team, and insane discipline. Listen to the full episode here:

Paul Mikesell built a startup that was acquired for $2.2B. He worked on AI at Uber and Oculus. But when a farmer told him about some of the problems he was facing, he quit and went all-in on farming. He built a robot that attaches to the back of tractors, uses computer vision to identify weeds and lasers to shoot and kill them. He sells each robot for $1.5M. He's sold nearly 100 so far— & generated nearly $150M in revenue. Whether you're working on a hardware startup or not, you'll want to listen to this episode to see how to do proper customer discovery, how to raise pre-product, and how to get millions of dollars in pre-sales without having to ship. Listen to the full episode here:

Milestone alert: The Product Market Fit Show hit 10,000 followers this week. Thank you for the support!