A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders – Details, episodes & analysis

It's the first time I see a candidate BS his way through interviews with multiple people, impress each one of them, and ultimately end up being a complete fraud. But the biggest learning wasn't that you should watch out for fraud-- it was that you shouldn't trust interviews nearly as much as you'd think.

While fake candidates are rare, candidates who are 10x better at interviewing than they are at the job are quite common. In fact, the only thing you know about candidates with great logos is that they know how to interview. Otherwise, they wouldn't have worked at Google in the first place.

What you don't know is if they're truly great. Here's how to find out.

Takeaways

• Don't rely solely on interviews when hiring
• Hire based on referrals and conduct thorough reference checks
• Former founders are often the best hires
• Logos and impressive resumes don't mean as much as you think

Keywords
founder, hiring, fraud, interview skills, backdoor reference checks, referrals, former founders

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Ashutosh is one of those rare founders who founded not just one, but two unicorns. He worked at Google for 4 years, left and started Bloomreach, which was last valued at $2.2B.  

Halfway through that journey, he left to do it all over again.  He started Eightfold AI which is the one we're talking about today. In 2021, he raised $220M from Softbank at a $2.1B valuation. 

When he left Bloomreach, he didn't even have a clear idea of what he was going to build. He just knew he wanted to have more impact and go from 0 to 1 again.

It took him about 2 years to figure it out— then he grew from $1M ARR to $3M ARR in a year & to $12M ARR the year after that. 

Why you should listen

• Why founders need to validate ideas with an open mind to not have tunnel vision.
• Why even unicorn founders don't get it right and often need to pivot to success. 
• How to address problems that are not just today problems, but likely to be problems for a long time. 

Keywords

unicorn founder, Bloomreach, Eightfold, product-market fit, pivot, HR space, digital marketers, talent, hiring, market need, scaling

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:01:41) His first unicorn - Bloomreach
(00:05:22) Starting Eightfold AI
(00:08:50) Not Marrying Yourself to One Idea
(00:11:55) Finding real customer problems
(00:14:46) Solving Today's Problems vs Future Problems
(00:16:47) Hiring From Already Rejected Candidates
(00:22:50) Fundraising
(00:24:40) Building a V1
(00:27:00) Pivoting and then Reverting Back
(00:30:43) First Customers
(00:32:59) Finding Product Market Fit
(00:35:04) One Piece of Advice

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There is no better storyteller in the world than Matthew Dicks. He tells stories for a living. He gets paid by the world's biggest brands to create stories for them. He's won Moth StorySLAM (a storytelling competition in NYC) a record 59 times. 

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 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.

Why you should listen

• Why the key being remembered is being different
• How to use stories to stand out and resonate with customers, investors and employees 
• Learn how to tell an effective story that is relatable, creates suspense, and includes personal connections.
• How to use personal stories to sell more product. 
• Why you often shouldn't start a story at the beginning.

Keywords

storytelling, business, relatability, suspense, personal connection, Slack, Salesforce, communication, connection, simplicity, contrast, value proposition, trust

Timestamps
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:52) A Story About Why Storytelling is Important
(00:11:18) Deconstructing the Story
(00:15:07) Keeping a Story in Present Tense
(00:16:58) Start With Location and Action
(00:20:41) When to Tell a Story Chronologically
(00:28:13) The Story for Slack
(00:35:33) Making a Pitch with No Data
(00:41:51) It's not B2B or B2C-- it's H2H
(00:47:57) The Goal is to be Remembered
(00:52:23) Use Truth in Your Story for Relatability
(00:55:11) Making up stories on the fly for portfolio companies

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For even the most successful startups, finding product-market fit is often a long journey and Klipfolio was no exception.

Founders often feel that one more feature, one more UI change will get them to product-market fit. The reality is that the path to PMF is more of a step function. If your first product doesn't quite get you there, a small change is unlikely to get you the results you're hoping for. You likely need to dramatically change your product or even your market.

In this episode, Allan shares the story of how Klipfolio went from consumer to enterprise and back to SMB before finally finding real product-market fit. He shares lots of clear details on what true product-market fit feels like. 

If you're a founder of a company that hasn't quite made it beyond PMF, you'll want to check this out.

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It’s one thing to work hard. It’s another to work hard with a well-researched destination in sight. 

In this episode of The Product Market Fit Show, Rob Boukine gets real about the mistakes he made in his early days as cofounder of Noibu and dives deep on how he pivoted his business. He discusses the importance of using customer discovery to ensure your products are “need to have” rather than “nice to have”. 

If you’re working hard but nothing is working out as expected, perhaps his advice on tracking down the right pain point will hit home. 

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Launching is often thought of as a huge event. Lots of noise, lots of PR. One big bang. For Ray, it's just a series of many small experiments. 

Ray realized that the number one value prop for a consumer was coverage: when a user opened the app, the majority of merchants that were walking distance needed to show up. So, he set up an experiment. He targeted a handful of office buildings and a dozen merchants, all located on the same block. He didn't need to onboard all the merchants in Toronto, just all the merchants on this one block.

If you're about to launch a consumer product or a marketplace, check out what Ray has to say. 

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"Ideas are a dime a dozen". Maybe. But executing on a mediocre idea won't get you very far. 

In this episode, Ray, a multi-time founder who sold his first company to Google, discusses how he came up with the idea for Ritual. It was not your typical aha-moment. Many ideas came together over a long time until the idea for a pick-up order app was born. Since then, Ritual has gone on to launch in over 40 cities and raise over $100M. 

If you feel you want to be a founder but are struggling to come up with a great idea, maybe Ray's story will help you out.

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If you want to validate an idea, the conventional wisdom is to build an MVP. But even an MVP takes time to build. What if you could validate not only your idea but your entire funnel, without writing a single line of code?

That's what Moe did. He built a landing page, found ways to advertise and generate traffic, and went so far as to convert traffic to paying members- before having any product to sell! (Of course, he immediately refunded those early customers and added them to a waiting list.)

If you have an idea and want to know if there is real demand - this is the episode for you. 

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After you've had an idea and validated the problem, it's probably time to build. But how exactly do you decide what to build, how to build it, and how to get end users to actually adopt the solution?

Carol is a multi-time founder and she has this process down to a science. On this episode, she shares how she built the first version of Axonify (now acquired for over US$350M). She explains how to find a champion, how to stay close to them throughout the build phase, and how to  get end users to adopt the product.

If you're starting to build out a product, especially in a b2b or b2b2c context, check out this episode. 

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To launch a startup you have to leave your job and spend considerable capital, with no guarantee of success. It involves considerable risk, right?

Not for Mike.

Mike started Rewind- a company now approaching unicorn status- fully on the side. It started off as a project, and neither Mike nor his co-founders took any salary cuts to get Rewind off the ground. Instead, they worked nights and weekends, steadily growing MRR and joined one at a time as the startup became self-sufficient.

If you have an idea but aren't ready to go all in, check out this episode and learn how to start it on the side. 

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