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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
233 episodes
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 ...
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 85
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 84
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 83
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 82
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 81
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 80
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 79
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 78
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 77
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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...
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Season 4
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Episode 78
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48:10
She cold messaged 50,000 engineers—then grew to $10M+ ARR. | Shensi Ding, Founder of Merge
Shensi cold messaged 50,000 engineers to build Merge. She worked 9am-9pm every day, gave her first customers two months free to prove herself, and refused to hire anyone remote—even during peak COVID. She purposefully didn't collect...
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Season 4
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Episode 75
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40:16
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He bet his house on a startup—took 7 years to $1M, then hockey stick to $100M+ ARR. | Eldon Sprickerhoff, Co-Founder of eSentire
Eldon put a $150K line of credit on his house to start eSentire in 2001. No VCs would touch him—they didn't understand services businesses. He worked 12-hour days, 7 days a week for 7 years to hit $1M in revenue. His co-founder coded while he f...
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Season 4
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Episode 74
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40:58
He quit his job, went all-in on AI agents—then grew to 100K users & a $30M Series A in a year. | Soham Ganatra, Founder of Composio
Soham spent 6 months building AI that would auto-generate integrations between any software. He locked down Glean as an early customer because he had friends there. And it failed completely.So he pivoted. This time, he refused to work wi...
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Season 4
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Episode 73
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58:20
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TechCrunch called this YC founder a fraud at 18—then he built a $10M ARR fintech. | Sahil Phadnis, Founder of Affiniti
Sahil was 18 when TechCrunch published a hit piece calling him a copycat. His co-founder Aaron was 16. They'd just raised $6 million from YC and top VCs for their crypto startup, then got subpoenaed by a state government and watched their busin...
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Season 4
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Episode 72
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59:59
Paul Graham Said His Startup Was Worthless—2 Months Later He Hit $1M ARR. | Jon Noronha, Co-Founder of Gamma
Jon spent 3 years building Gamma with barely any traction—just a few hundred users after burning millions. Then ChatGPT dropped. In desperation, he pivoted to AI-powered presentations in March 2023 with one year of runway left. What happened ne...
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Season 4
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Episode 71
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1:00:08
He quit Google, launched Rubrik—then grew to $1B ARR & a $16B market cap. | Soham Mazumdar, Co-Founder Rubrik & Wisdom AI
Soham co-founded Rubrik by taking what he learned from building Google's data center tech to enterprises desperate for cloud migration. Two quarters later, he hit $1M ARR. And a few years later, a $16B IPO. Soham breaks down why pai...
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Season 4
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Episode 70
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53:55
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He Bootstrapped to $55M in Revenue—without ever having to hit 100% YoY growth. | Stéphan Donzé, Founder of AODocs
Stéphan bootstrapped AODocs to $55M in revenue and 250 employees without taking a dime of VC money—while competing directly with venture-backed competitors. Starting as a services company in 2012, he spotted the cloud migration wave early and b...
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Season 4
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Episode 69
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43:23
He Bootstrapped Wrike to $10M ARR—then exited for $2.2B. | Andrew Filev, Founder of Wrike & Zencoder
Andrew bootstrapped Wrike and grew it from 0 to a $2.2B exit by doing the exact opposite of what every startup book tells you. No pivots. No talking to customers before launch. No narrow niche. Just 17 years of relentless focus on one problem w...
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Season 4
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Episode 68
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1:08:13
Q2 2025: The new Series A Bar is $3M ARR—& only 20% of seed startups make it. | Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta
Peter Walker from Carta drops the hard data every founder needs. Based on actual cap table data from 1000s of startups, this Q2 update reveals the brutal new reality.It takes 2+ years to go from seed to A (up from 1.6), you need 3X the r...
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Season 4
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Episode 67
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57:09
His Video AI app hit $10M+ ARR in Months—with 0 outbound sales. | Michael Lingelbach, Founder of Hedra
Hedra CEO Michael Lingelbach breaks down how his generative video app went from zero to millions of users and an eight-figure run rate in months — then deliberately slowed down to rebuild a V2 that enterprises would pay for. We dig into the pro...
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Season 4
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Episode 66
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1:05:53
He grew to millions in ARR in 18 months—by fighting with his co-founders on purpose. | Ross McNairn, Co-Founder of Wordsmith AI.
Ross went from lawyer to self-taught engineer to CTO at a 1,600-person unicorn—then quit to build Wordsmith AI. In 18 months, he's raised $30M and grown to mid-single-digit millions in ARR by doing everything differently. He tested ...
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Season 4
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Episode 65
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49:57
He thought his startup would fail—then grew to $100M ARR. | Rick Song, Co-founder of Persona
Rick built Persona into a $100M+ ARR unicorn, but he never thought it would work. In fact, Rick started Persona believing it would probably fail, and that mindset might be exactly why it succeeded. In this episode, Rick reveals how ...
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Season 4
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Episode 64
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59:57
Forget PMF—Neil Patel says to give your product away for free instead. | Neil Patel, Co-Founder of Neil Patel Digital
Neil Patel just flipped everything you know about startups upside down. He says product-market fit is overrated, giving away your software for free can make you rich, and the real secret to scaling isn’t charging customers—it’s monetizing the l...
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Season 4
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Episode 63
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31:01
He got kicked out of Harvard—then grew to $5M ARR in just 3 months. | Roy Lee, Co-Founder of Cluely
Roy Lee went from getting kicked out of Harvard and Columbia to building Cluely, one of the fastest-growing AI startups ever—going from 0 to $5 million ARR in just 3 months. We go deep on Roy’s playbook for using controversy, virali...
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Season 4
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Episode 62
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52:45
