A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:35:30 · Alex Halliday
[00:35:30] S0: I will say that selling to your audience is not like a static challenge. Your buyers are getting more sophisticated all the time. Especially if your category is just evolving and so there is a need to identify the gaps in the sales team, both from a training and skill set standpoint, and just evolve that as you grow. So I think the hiring point, being really good at hiring, but also identifying the problems you're trying to solve with each new tranche of talent. In our space, for example, a year ago, people had no idea how to evaluate a tool like ours, to be honest. And now, we get people showing up with really sophisticated RFPs and different evaluation questions. And they want to try the product, they want to do bake-offs. It is just the nature of the sale if you're successful, it will shift pretty dramatically as the market evolves.
00:36:15 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:15] S1: Here’s another question on competition because like I compared to Claude Code, but that's kind of the beginner premium kind of thing. There's also a lot of players that do something very similar to what you do like, you know, GEO and whatever. How much does that matter? It's kind of a broad question, but it's the concern of every VC right now that these areas get competitive and the fallout of that is that. Therefore, you know, no one's going to win or the market is going to be split like fifteen ways and it's just going to be small. You're actually living that competition. You're in a place that you're certainly not the only one and yet obviously you're getting a lot of traction. How does that really play out in the day to day? How much does that really matter? Or is it just one of these worries that it's just not that important.
00:36:51 · Alex Halliday
[00:36:51] S0: It matters a lot and I think, to be honest, we are in more competitive processes than we were a year ago and that was part of my comment about kind of maturing our sales muscle to still thrive in that environment. I think VCs grew up in a world where there were like nice, neat Gartner squares for categories, and those squares would be relatively durable. I think AI is like a bowling ball going down the middle of all of that. Not because there aren't going to be categories. Categories are very real. I just think that most categories that are emerging now are like Pokémon that haven't found their final form yet. Because the way we work is shifting, and agents are kind of a thing, but not quite yet and the data story, and what really matters, and how ChatGPT is reading content. It's all just kind of evolving. I think what's really important as a founder is, use that competitive energy for excellence. It's like we've got to go, this is ours to win. But having a clear line of sight to what you think the category and more importantly, the buyer's life, a week in the life of the buyer is going to look like eighteen months, two years from now, and shoot for that. Otherwise you over rotate to this present day kind of feature fight. I think it's really unproductive. But to the extent that buyers of our customers have budget line items that say something on the left and a dollar figure on the right, and they allocate that. You know, you do have to fight it out. You do have to kind of be successful in the world of today in competitive processes while keeping a firm eye on what you want to bring into the world two years from now. Given how fast everything's changing and honestly, it's like the challenge of a lifetime. Building right now and being a founder as your listeners are probably experiencing too right now is unlike anything I've seen in twenty years and, you know, we will look back and think these are the good old days in many ways. Because it is the best time ever to be building a company. But it's also the most challenging as well. Because things like that that were set in stone, worked a specific way, just don't play out that way anymore, in my view.
00:38:45 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:38:45] S1: Perfect, so let’s stop it there. Let me ask the last few questions we always end on. When was the moment when you felt you’d found true product-market fit? [00:38:51] S0: I think when I stepped away from the business for a week and we closed like $300k or $400k in ARR. And I came back, and I had nothing to do with any of those processes. I think we went from $1.1 to $2 million in ARR in a quarter. So it was really, really, really crazy. [00:39:12] S1: Incredible, what would be your top piece of advice for an early stage founder that's looking for product market fit today? [00:39:18] S0: I think find the highest taste representative buyer you can and become their best friend. Live in their office if you can and just really attach yourself to their mental model of work, what they value, what good looks like to them, and observe all the non-consensus, non-obvious points of friction that you can solve. Consensus software is everywhere. Everyone can build a CRM, a task tracker, but what are the non-consensus things that you can observe that exist in the real world for your buyer that you can go solve that they will really appreciate? [00:39:50] S1: And high taste is what? Is that an early adopter or is that just someone very opinionated about the product? How do you think about defining that?
00:39:50 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:39:50] S1: And high taste is what? Is that an early adopter or is that just someone very opinionated about the product? How do you think about defining that? [00:39:57] S0: You don't want to build off a cliff by following someone that's just not very good at what they do, in my view. Again, you don't want to also build for the world's most sophisticated practitioner, but it's finding someone that has good instincts and reactions to the products you put in front of them. And is representative of the kind of customer you think you want to have a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand of. [00:40:17] S1: Perfect. Well, Alex, thanks so much for jumping on the show, man. It's been great. [00:40:21] S0: So great to see you, Pablo. This was a ton of fun. [00:40:23] S1: Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.