.jpg)
A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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, Gusto, Rappi, Glean, Cohere, 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.
Episodes
247 episodes
Solo Episode: The Five Steps to Product Market Fit
For the holiday break we are resurfacing some of our best episodes so far. Here is the best episode of season 2.Here are the key lessons from the past 60 episodes that we've released to date. Each of the 5 steps to Product Market ...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 100
•
30:45
He killed a viral app with 50k users. 2 years later, he hit $10M ARR and raised $30M from Sequoia. | David Paffenholz (Juicebox)
David had a consumer app with 50,000 users and viral traction—and he shut it down. The retention metrics weren't as good as what he'd seen at Snapchat.That difficult decision cleared the path for Juicebox, AI for recruiting that grew to ...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 99
•
51:58
.png)
Her VCs said she killed the company. 6 years later, it's worth $1.3B. | Jennifer Smith, Founder of Scribe
Jennifer went from VC to founder and immediately broke every rule in the book. When she pivoted Scribe from an automation tool to a documentation platform, her investors told her she had just killed the company. She ignored them. In...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 98
•
1:05:09
He exited to Snap for $166M— built an AI video startup, then raised $50M. | Alex Mashrabov, Founder of Higgsfield AI
Alex built the original Snapchat filters-- and sold his company to Snap for $166M. Then he left to start Higgsfield. The company just raised a $50M Series A to help brands create AI-generated video ads at scale. We go de...
•
45:40
How his AI-first services company grew $0 to $40M ARR in one year. | Eric Foster, Founder of Tenex
Eric spent 30 years in cybersecurity. Built and sold an MSSP to private equity for hundreds of millions. Then he started Tenex and hit $43 million in revenue in ONE YEAR. This isn't theory. This is a founder who's done it multiple t...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 96
•
1:11:43
Q3 2025 w/Carta: What you need to raise a Series A. | Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta
Carta's Peter Walker is back with the freshest data on what's actually happening at the early stage—and it's not what you're reading on X. While headlines scream about record-breaking rounds, the reality on the ground tells a different story.&n...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 95
•
45:37
.png)
He added AI to parking lots—then raised $3.5B. | Alex Israel, Founder of Metropolis
Alex and his co-founders spent 2018 pitching parking lot owners on computer vision tech. Every meeting ended the same way: "Cute startup, come back in 30 years." So they did something else—they bought the parking operators and imple...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 94
•
39:30
He left a $2B ARR company to build AI agents—then hit $1M ARR in < 6 months | Amit Shah, Founder of Instalily
Amit walked away from being President of 1-800-Flowers after scaling it from $500M to $2B because he saw smart people trapped in dumb systems. His insight: half of global GDP is 90% manual work—salespeople entering data instead of selling, tech...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 93
•
40:37
He tested his idea in one weekend—then raised $120M. | Wayne Slavin, Founder of Sure
Wayne tested flight insurance over a single weekend with a WordPress site and Google ads. When people tried to pay, he showed a fake error message. The result: 15.9% conversion. That validation led to Sure, now powering insurance for Tesla, Toy...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 92
•
50:02
At 21 he made his 1st million. At 23, he grew his startup to $8M ARR in 6 months. | Matt Espinoza, Founder of Clover
Matt sold his first company at 19 and made $100K. He sold his second at 21 and made $800K. A couple years later, he launched Clover and grew it to $8M ARR in 6 months. His secret? Insane distribution. His formula is to ignore qualit...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 91
•
51:57
He walked away from $5M ARR—then built a $50M company. | Russ Fradin, Founder of Larridin
Russ has started and sold multiple companies over 30 years, but his Dynamic Signal journey will change how you think about product-market fit. They had $5M ARR selling influencer marketing software. Then Russ told investors to prete...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 90
•
46:44
He made 2 key changes —then grew to $100M ARR in 2 years & exited for $2B. | Harish Abbott, Founder of Deliverr & Augment
Harish spent 9 months building Deliver and could barely get 10 customers. The product worked. Merchants liked the fast delivery promise. But nobody was signing up.Then he made two changes—and scaled to $100M in revenue in 2 years. Shopif...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 89
•
52:12
He built a $20B public company, left—then raised a $100M Series A. | Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix & DevRev
Dheeraj built Nutanix into a $20B public company—then walked away to start DevRev. He just raised a $100M Series A.This episode breaks down why most founders "sell and run" (chase new logos instead of delivering value), why that strategy...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 88
•
49:07
He built a new database in his bedroom—now he powers Cursor, Notion and Anthropic. | Simon Eskildsen, Founder of turbopuffer
Simon spent 10 years at Shopify scaling databases to millions of requests per second. Then he discovered vector databases were so expensive that companies couldn't launch AI features. So he solved it. When Cursor emailed about their...
•
53:27
He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | Guy Podjarny, Founder of Snyk & Tessl
Guy spent 2 years and $4M building Snyk to $100K ARR. Thousands of developers loved the product. They just wouldn't pay.Then he figured out the problem: he had product-user fit, but not product-buyer fit. Developers loved Snyk. Security ...
•
50:43
5x founder asked Ford for a contract so large—they acquired his company instead. | Amar Varma, Founder of Mantle
Amar is a 5x founder who helped birth Tinder (it was the 10th project—after the first 9 failed), then sold his next company to Ford for putting a platform in every single vehicle they make.But the wildest part? He got Ford to commit in u...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 85
•
42:18
He "kind of" had PMF for 8 years—until, after a rebuild, he raised $100M | Ben Alarie, Founder of Blue J
Ben Alarie spent 8 years building Blue J with "partial product market fit"—real customers, real revenue, but no real market pull. Then he made a bet that would either kill the company or 10x it: he put the existing product in maintenance mode a...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 84
•
40:43
They failed every POC—then grew their cybersecurity platform to $100M ARR in 5 years. | Dean Sysman, co-founder of Axonius
Dean thought he'd have to bootstrap Axonius because no investor would fund a solution to a problem that had existed for 20 years. He was wrong—they've raised $500M. The breakthrough came when a Fortune 500 company was actively being...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 83
•
48:37
He tested his pitch on Uber drivers—then built a cybersecurity platform to $180M raised. | Casey Ellis, Founder of Bugcrowd
Casey turned hackers into a marketplace and built Bugcrowd to $180M+ raised. But the real story isn't about cybersecurity—it's about how he validated a two-sided marketplace with almost no product, refined his pitch by literally testing i...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 82
•
49:19
He quit Google & his 1st startup failed—but his 2nd grows at $1M ARR every 10 days. | Zach Llyod, Founder of Warp.dev
Zach spent 8 years at Google leading engineering for Google Docs, then left to build a photo sharing app with zero go-to-market plan. Reality hit hard: "At Google, anything you launch gets millions of users. At a startup, the challe...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 81
•
49:14
He tried to return $200K to investors 30 days in—then exited to Microsoft 5 years later. | Alex Sherman, Founder of Bluefish AI
Alex had $2,000 in his checking account when Microsoft acquired his last company. For years, he paid himself $30K while his friends made six figures at corporate jobs. He had only 2 months of runway for 18 straight months. Then reta...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 80
•
44:39
A drug dealer threatened to kill him—then he grew 50x in 3 Years to $50M ARR. | Brett Carlson, Found of ServiceUp
Brett had a drug dealer's car for 13 days. By day 11, the death threats started coming. This is the reality of building ServiceUp, the "DoorDash for auto repair." Brett literally stole DoorDash's entire playbook—city launches, three...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 79
•
33:28
He pitched 100 VC and spent 3 years building— then grew to $7B AUM. | Doug Scott, Founder of Ethic
Doug Scott and the Ethic team spent years building technology before landing real customers. While other startups were growing fast, Ethic was focused on building, and after two years had only a modest amount of AUM. Until he and his team found...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 78
•
45:14
PMF Observations: Speed is the only startup moat—& why most founders lose it.
Arnold Schwarzenegger mastered three completely different fields—bodybuilding, acting, and politics—with one simple philosophy: reps, reps, reps. This solo episode reveals why speed of execution is the only real moat for early-stage founders.&n...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 77
•
11:01
He spent 5 months working with customers before building—then grew to $10s of millions ARR. | Aviv Leibovici, co-founder of Buildots
Aviv spent months walking construction sites carrying tools for managers just to understand their problems—speaking to customers is "bullsh*t"—you need to work beside them to see reality. His company Buildots had a working AI produc...
•
Season 4
•
Episode 78
•
48:10
