A Product Market Fit Show | Startups, Founders, & Entrepreneurship
Every founder has 1 goal: find product-market fit. We interview the world's most successful tech founders on the 0 to 1 part of their journeys. We go deep with entrepreneurs & VCs to provide detailed examples you can steal.
We want to understand product-market fit better than anyone on the planet.
Episodes
117 episodes since 2021
He took on Uber & grew Rappi to $5B—here’s why the craziest founders often win. | Andres Bilbao, Co-Founder of Rappi
Andres Bilboa is one of the co-founders of Rappi, the highest-valued app of LATAM ($5B valuation). Now he runs an incubator called Makers and has invested in dozens of startups. In this episode, he shares how Rappi started with no ...
September 16, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 53
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52:56
How to Get Free PR for Your Startup—Tips from the Editor-in-Chief of Canada’s TechCrunch. | Douglas Soltys, Editor-in-Chief of Betakit
Douglas has been in media and PR for over two decades. He’s the founder of Betakit Inc and has been running Betakit, Canada’s TechCrunch, for nearly 10 years. He understands what startups need to do to leverage PR, and how PR can help startups ...
September 12, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 52
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46:37
He built Cohere into a $5.5B AI startup; How to Win in AI; & Why LLMs won't lead to AGI. | Nick Frosst, Co-Founder of Cohere
In this episode, I sit down with Nick Frosst, Co-Founder of Cohere, the $5.5B AI startup that’s targeting the enterprise landscape. We go through the origin story of Cohere, the challenges of building foundational models, and why h...
September 09, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 51
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46:42
The ONLY guaranteed way to find Product Market Fit
Even if founders do everything right, they may still fail to find PMF. That's why even repeat founders have only 1.5% chance of building a unicorn.We talk about product-market fit constantly in this podcast. Hopefully, we learn from wha...
September 05, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 50
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16:08
They hit $100M ARR—in a "crowded market". Here's how they got to $1M ARR in just 18 months. | Don Mal, Co-Founder of Vena Solutions
Don co-founded Vena & was CEO for 8 years. Last month, Vena became a Centaur crossing $100M in ARR. Don & his team launched Vena in a crowded market, where everyone else was trying to replace excel. So they built a budgeting and...
September 03, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 49
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40:42
This founder was hours from hiring a VP Product—turns out, he was a total fraud. Here’s what he learned.
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 ...
August 29, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 48
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10:48
He quit his cozy Google job & founded not 1 but 2 unicorns— then grew from $1M to $12M ARR in 2 years. | Ashutosh Garg, Founder of Eightfold AI
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 ov...
August 26, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 47
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36:22
Q2 Early-Stage Venture Report w/ Carta’s Head of Insights: Valuations, Round Sizes, Graduation Rates & more. | Peter Walker, Head of Insights at Carta
Carta is the backbone of most venture-backed startups. They have access to specific information about every single round, not just what's reported in TechCrunch. Today, Peter Walker, Carta's Head of Insights joins us to share the f...
August 22, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 46
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40:39
He built in stealth with 1 customer for a year—then grew to 1M paid users across 60,000 locations. | Sanish Mondkar, Founder of Legion
Last quarter, Sanish raised a $50M Series D. His company has raised over $130M. They have enterprise customers across 14 countries including Dollar General, Aldo, and CircleK. It all started because Sanish was working out of coffee...
August 19, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 45
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42:21
Sean Ellis led growth at Dropbox—& invented growth hacking. Here's his step-by-step growth guide. | Sean Ellis, creator of the PMF test & best-selling author of Hacking Growth.
Sean Ellis created THE test for PMF. He led growth teams at Dropbox, Eventbrite and LogMeIn, which sold for $4.3B. He coined the term Growth Hacking and wrote the best-selling book Hacking Growth. Today we go deep and tactical with...
August 15, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 44
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47:07
He sold AI robots to Walmart & raised $150M. His #1 advice to founders? "Trust your gut." | Daniel Theobald, Founder of Vecna Robotics
Daniel's been building robots for 20 years. He's sold 100s of AI robots-as-a-service to Walmart, FedEx, & DHL amongst others. Last month, he raised a $40M round.6 years ago, he realized why robots weren't getting massively ado...
August 12, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 43
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38:04
VCs give a lot of advice— & a lot of it sucks. Be careful who you listen to.
Advice is free—actioning bad advice isn't. Early-stage founders are bombarded with advice. A lot of it from investors who have never operated a business, never ran marketing, never led sales.And yet, many founders take VCs' advice as sa...
August 08, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 42
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7:32
He took 3 years to make his 1st sale—then grew 1000x to $10M ARR 3 years later. | Alex Hoff, Founder of Auvik
Alex got the co-founder of a public company to join him and raised $6M out of the gate—but it took him 3 years to make his first sale. But after he shifted from selling to SMBs to selling to MSPs (Managed Service Providers i.e., ou...
August 05, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 41
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46:34
If you wake up with your heart pounding out of your chest— do this.
When an employee unexpectedly quits, an investor backs out, or a big customer churns— fear of failure takes over. When you close a new round, land a big customer, or make a big hire— you feel pure excitement. Every founder is on a ...
August 01, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 40
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12:42
He refused to quit his job until $1M ARR—then grew to $5M ARR & closed a $25M Series A. | Pierce Ujjainwalla, Founder of Knak
Pierce launched a consulting business that grew to millions in revenue and dozens of employees. But he noticed his customers kept asking for the same solution. So he launched Knak, an email marketing and landing page builder that i...
July 29, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 39
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43:31
99% of founders SUCK at storytelling. Here's the pro who taught Slack & Salesforce how to do it. | Matthew Dicks, professional storyteller & bestselling author of Storyworthy.
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....
July 25, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 38
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1:17:39
In 2019, he went all-in on AI, grew to $3M ARR in 2 years—then to $85M ARR in 5. | Shubham Mishra, Founder of Pixis
5 years ago, Shubham had just graduated college and had no network. He bootstrapped to $3M in ARR, then raised $200M & grew to $85M ARR.But he started trying to sell AI for marketing to enterprises with no network.So for 2 m...
July 22, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 37
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39:26
How Wiz grew to $500M ARR in 4 years—& could exit to Google for $23B (largest VC-backed exit in history)
Google is in talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for $23B (a 40x revenue multiple). Wiz is the company that in 2021 announced it grew from $0 to $100M ARR in just 18 months. How did this cybersecurity company grow so fast in a crowde...
July 18, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 36
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11:11
He built a farming robot that shoots weeds with lasers— then closed $10M in pre-sales before shipping a single one. | Paul Mikesell, Founder of Carbon Robotics.
Paul built a startup that was acquired for $2.2B. He worked on AI at Uber and Oculus. But when a farmer told him about some of the problems he was facing, he quit and went all-in on farming. He built a robot that attaches to the bac...
July 15, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 35
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58:20
Tesla’s EV market share (finally) falls below 50%. Good news for founders— incumbents took 15 years to match 1 founder.
Elon Musk single-handedly took on the entire automotive industry. No one, including me, thought he would succeed. But he's built an $800B company. Whether sales are slowing down misses the mark: the punchline is it took well capitalized, profes...
July 11, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 34
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6:58
YC founder raises $3.5M, keeps team to 3 people—then grows 10x to $2M ARR in 1 year. | Benjamin Encz, Founder of Ashby
Last month, Ashby raised a $30M Series C. Ashby is used by customers like Notion, Ramp and Sequoia. Benji built Ashby as an end-to-end Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that would replace several point solutions. He had to build heads down for 18...
July 08, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 33
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34:46
Pickleball grew 3x in 4 years to 14M players. Not by competing with tennis— but by creating a new market instead.
AI startups don’t necessarily have to beat incumbents. Some will start entirely new markets instead. Like Canva to Photoshop, Shopify to Amazon or Pickleball to Tennis, many of these won’t even have to compete. They create 10x easi...
July 04, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 32
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9:01
He fought Al Qaeda in Iraq, turned down $250K at McKinsey—& built a $150M+ ARR unicorn. Here’s how it happened: | Blake Hall, Founder of ID.me
"I was technically homeless at the time. I was sleeping on my buddy's couch. I had declined $250,000/ year at McKinsey... I had no idea what I was doing." Now, Blake has $150M in ARR, growing 30% per year, with 80% gross margins. He's raised $4...
July 01, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 31
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52:41
Each Google/OpenAI update kills more startups. Here’s how to make sure you're not next.
Every startup needs to compete with incumbents. But it's different with AI.AI startups need to create websites or apps from scratch and drive traffic. Incumbents can just add AI as a feature. They have distribution built in.AI...
June 27, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 30
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10:33
1st-time founder meets 120 VCs— closes $2.7M in 5 weeks, 10x oversubscribed. Here's the step-by-step guide to close a round. | Andrew Rea, Founder of Taxwire
Andrew spoke with 120+ VCs to raise a $1.5M pre-seed round. He closed $2.7M and had demand for many millions more. He devoted 90% of his time to fundraising, but only took weeks from the first meetings to close. 99% of founders I m...
June 24, 2024
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Season 3
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Episode 29
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51:53