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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
156 episodes
1st time founder completely pivots after YC—then grows 30x in a year to $2.2M ARR. | Pablo Palafox, Founder of HappyRobot
Pablo is the first guest that has the same name as me-- so you KNOW this episode will be great. Pablo hustled for months just to get to $70K in ARR. He got rejected from YC, re-applied, and finally got in.But after months in YC, he real...
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Season 4
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Episode 9
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56:37
He exited for $200M— then bootstrapped his next startup to $100M in revenue. | Alex Hawkinson, Founder of BrightAI
Alex sold his last IoT startup for over $200M to Samsung. He felt the needed to build something much bigger, so he started BrightAI. The goal was to use AI and IoT to solve big problems for enterprises. A few years later, he bootstrappe...
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Season 4
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Episode 8
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43:19
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The early-stage fundraising playbook—here's how to raise your first few rounds. | Nathan Beckord, Host of How I Raised It
Nathan has interviewed 100s of founders on how they raised their first few rounds. In this interview, we go through some of the most compelling stories he's heard. We go through step-by-step what you should do to raise a round, how to get meeti...
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Season 4
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Episode 7
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29:24
He lost his only 2 customers & was ready to quit—then he grew to $1.5M ARR in a year. | Josh Domingues, Founder of Flashfood
A few years into building Flashfood, Josh was $35K in debt with no money in his account. Just a few months earlier, he'd lost both the pilot customers he'd worked so hard to lock in. He'd worked for months to land them and had delivered what he...
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Season 4
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Episode 6
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50:00
He raised $250K, had thousands of users, but failed— because he didn't pivot fast enough. | Darius Vaillancourt, Founder of Howdy
Darius started an EdTech startup to help users of online courses collaborate with each other. It blew up during COVID when everyone felt isolated. It gained thousands of users. They were engaged. They came back to use the platform. And, most im...
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Season 4
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Episode 5
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27:50
Stripe bought his startup for $1.1B—just 2.5 years after he quit his job. | Zach Abrams, Co-Founder of Bridge
Zach was burned out after a decade of working at top roles in Coinbase, Square and Brex. He quit with no startup idea-- and then, he went right back in. Given their background, Zach and his co-founder quickly raised an $8M seed round to build a...
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Season 4
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Episode 4
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55:25
The 5 Steps to Product-Market Fit w/ Chris Saad, ex-Head of Product at Uber, Host of The Startup Podcast
We took examples from the last 100 episodes and built a clear, 5 step path to finding product market fit:1.Before Startup Mode, There’s Research Mode —> Become an expert to find problems worth solving. 2.Only the Insanel...
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Season 4
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Episode 3
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51:03
How Gusto’s $10B founder raised $6M, built a team of 5—& hit $5M ARR in just 2 years. | Josh Reeves, Founder of Gusto
Gusto is a $9.5B startup that does $500M ARR. Josh built an absolute monster of a company-- and it all started with payroll software for SMBs. Not just that, he started by servicing only new tech startups that were based in California. It was e...
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Season 4
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Episode 2
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56:33
The top 5 early-stage startup lessons for 2025
We go through the top 5 product-market fit lessons I've learned from speaking to well over 100+ founders on this show over the last 3 years.These are the top 5 things you should keep top of mind going into 2025.Why you should...
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Season 4
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Episode 1
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12:02
He raised $1.3M, hit $100K ARR—but failed. Here's the lesson every founder needs to hear. | Tolga Ermis, Founder of PromiseQ
Tolga stumbled upon a problem in the security monitoring space. Motion cameras generated way too many false alerts. So he decided to solve it using AI. He raised over a million dollars and got several customers.But he always felt he was...
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Season 3
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Episode 81
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30:24
24 ways to get your first customers—based on real examples from the last 100 episodes.
There are a few things harder when building startups than getting your first few customers. When you're on a standstill, getting momentum is incredibly hard. Going from zero to one takes an incredible amount of effort—you have absolutely no cre...
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Season 3
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Episode 81
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24:10
He bet on voice AI when no one else did. Now he has $1M+ customers & $100M raised. | Ankit Jain, Founder of Infinitus
Ankit left his job as a VC to launch a Voice AI platform—back in 2018! It wasn't the voice AI of today. The first demo sounded like a robot. But still, he convinced large enterprise customers in the healthcare space to try it out. He found a hi...
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Season 3
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Episode 80
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39:44
YC said his idea "would never work". So he lived in his office for months—then raised $17M from a16z in 14 days. | Marty Kausas, founder of Pylon
Marty and his co-founders lived full-time in their office for several months. They worked on their startup 24/7. To come up with the idea, they messaged 120 potential customers every day for 3 months. Originally, when they pitched YC th...
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Season 3
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Episode 79
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1:07:26
He built a $4B unicorn & crossed $100M ARR—here's why it took 10 years of 100-hour weeks. | Martin Basiri, Founder of Passage & Applyboard (SaaS North Keynote)
I interviewed Martin on the keynote stage at the SaaS North conference. Here is the audio version. Martin built Applyboard into a $4B unicorn doing $100M+ in ARR. He left and started a new startup called Passage— and raised a $40M seed round.
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Season 3
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Episode 78
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30:02
His sports betting app went from $0 to $10M ARR in a year—& to $150M ARR in 4. Here's how he did it. | Jon Robin, Founder of Dabble
Jon started a sports betting app 4 years ago-- now he does $150M in revenue and $1B in betting volume. AND he's profitable. In his first year alone , he did $10 million in revenue. He took a year to build the app and as soon as he launc...
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Season 3
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Episode 77
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44:26
He grew to $90M ARR, was about to exit for $1.5B—and then, it all fell apart. | Yanni Giannaros, Co-Founder of Wyre
Yanni started building in crypto back in 2013, when you could buy one Bitcoin for $20. At one point, he was playing poker games and betting 1 bitcoin each round!He built an extension that let people use bitcoin to buy anything, anywhere ...
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Season 3
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Episode 76
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55:58
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How to build great products—lessons from Amazon, Facebook, Twitter & Deel. | Aaron Goldsmid, Head of Product at Deel
Aaron was Director of Product at Amazon, VP Product at Twilio, PM at Facebook and Twitter. Now he’s head of product at Deel where he reports directly to the CEO. Deel was founded in 2019— now, just 5 years later, it’s worth $12B and raised over...
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Season 3
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Episode 75
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37:54
He made his first loan at 16. Now his fintech startup does $50M+ ARR—here’s how. | Tate Hackert, Co-Founder of ZayZoon
DescriptionTate started doing commercial fishing at 16. He took that money and started lending it— on Craigslist! By 23 years old, he’d lent out $250,000. Then he found out about cash advances, and decided to start ZayZoon, a platform to...
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Season 3
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Episode 74
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1:03:24
After I passed, this startup grew 30x in 3 years to $10M+ ARR. Here's how he did it—& what I missed. | Francois de Kerret, Co-Founder of Zeffy
Zeffy is one of my biggest misses so far. I met Francois 3 years ago when he was raising his $3M seed round. But I passed.They were at ~$500K in revenue at that point. In the last 3 years, they've grown 30x. Clearly, I missed out.
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Season 3
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Episode 73
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30:36
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He hit $40M ARR, exited for over $100M—& raised only $1.5M. Here's how | Ian MacKinnon, Co-Founder of Later.com
In 2014, Ian launched a simple product: it let social media marketers buffer Instagram posts. It was originally a hackathon project. But it quickly gained users. So he and his co-founders went all in.They raised just one small seed roun...
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Season 3
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Episode 72
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56:01
He raised $16M, hit $1M ARR—& failed. Here are the top 3 lessons he learned. | David Anderson, Founder of Tandym
David's startup failed. But he had everything going for him: a solid thesis, $16M in funding across 3 rounds, $1.5M in ARR. At a high-level it seemed like everything was going the right way. And yet, it didn't work out.This is what happ...
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Season 3
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Episode 71
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54:13
He sold his 1st startup for 8 figures, grew his 2nd to $3M in a year—while battling panic attacks from the pressure. | Justin Adams, Founder of Aiwyn
Justin sold his first bootstrapped startup for over $10M. He raised $2M out of the gate for his second and then grew from $250K to $3M ARR in one year. He raised $40M in total, including a Series B from Bessemer. And yet, just a week be...
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Season 3
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Episode 70
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46:00
He raised $1.5M, hit $400K ARR in 9 months— but had to Exit Early. Here’s the top 3 lessons he learned | Rob Palumbo, Co-Founder of Outpoint
Rob founded Outpoint in 2020 to help marketers optimize their ad spend. He was a growth marketer and his founder a data scientist. He had team-market fit, a solid thesis, and paying customers. But when the recession hit and ad spend dropped, gr...
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Season 3
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Episode 69
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39:08
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His startup Cameo was a unicorn—until it crashed 90%. Here's how he went from near-bankrupt to profitable again. | Steven Galanis, Founder of Cameo
Cameo is one of the best-known recent consumer startups. You've either used it or know someone who's used it to get famous people to create personalized videos. And, for a while, they were a total rocket ship. Year 1: $300K GMVYear ...
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Season 3
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Episode 68
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57:47
VC funding is not popping back. THIS is the new normal—here's how to adjust. | Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta
Q3 startup data just dropped. We chat with Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta about valuations at pre-seed, seed and Series A. Why the current fundraising environment is the new normal and not about to get much better. We also talk about t...
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Season 3
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Episode 67
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41:57
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