A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

Once you have clear traction, once revenue is up and to the right and growing quickly, investors come to you. But what about early on? How do you get people to invest millions of dollars when all you have is an idea? Stephany, the founder of Tealbook, has raised over $70M. She got her first cheque from an angel investor she met during her kid's soccer game. In this episode, she dives into how...

How do you launch a marketplace? How do you get beyond the chicken-and-egg problem? Derrick's answer: Fake it Till you Make it. When launching Drop (a rewards app with millions of downloads), Derrick needed both consumers and brands to join. Instead of going after both at once, he found a way to seed supply and added brands' logos to his website, whether they had joined or not. It may ha...

When you're selling to consumers or small businesses, you can put up an MVP, generate traffic, and watch the money roll in. Not so for enterprise. Enterprise means long sales cycles, procurement departments, security audits, pilots, and many more hurdles.  How do you get your first enterprise sale? How do you convince a company 1000x your size to take a risk and work with you? Corey, the foun...

Most startup founders recognize they need advisors. The question is who do you get, how do you get them, and how do you structure it all? In this episode, Darryl shares his framework for how to set up the perfect board of advisors.   It starts by imagining that you're five years in the future once your startup is a huge success and asking yourself- what are all the key pieces that are require...

Running a startup is hard. Doing it alone, especially when it's your first time, can be downright tortuous.  Lindsey started off on her own, without much of a network in the startup scene in Toronto. Not only that, as a business type she didn't have the skills needed to build a prototype, let alone the full product. On this episode, she discusses how she methodically set out to find her...

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'...

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 “nic...

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 d...

"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...

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 produ...

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...

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...

Why do professional athletes have coaches, but professional entrepreneurs don't? Dan thought this was odd. So many years ago, a long time before starting Koho - a company now worth over $250M- Dan started working with performance coaches. In this episode, he walks us through how to pick a coach, what exactly a coach is (hint: it's not an advisor), and how a coach can help your startup gr...

Ask most early-stage founders what they need most and you'll likely get the same answer: money. Especially early on, before you have much traction, raising money can be daunting. If you don't have much of a network, it's hard to even know where to start. Who are these angel investors and how do you find them? How do you get them to take a meeting? And how do you get interested inves...

Launching a marketplace is hard. The chicken-and-egg problem often seems insurmountable.  In 2021, Wattpad was acquired for over $600M. But it wasn't easy. Early on, Wattpad cofounder and CEO Allen Lau almost gave up. He discusses the virtues of starting with a small niche and allowing growth to come with time. He explains the ASSET framework he’s developed to help you launch and scale a mark...

Many people say that hype leads nowhere, that instead you should keep your head down and focus on building. But hype- or raising the profile of your company, as Solon calls it- brings many benefits. It means more potential hires, more investors, and even more customers.  As you'll see, Solon is the master of creating hype.  Find out how Solon raised the profile of MindBridge to get a multi-ti...

Building a successful startup starts well before the first prototype is created or the first investor goes all in.  It starts with customer discovery, and Mallorie Brodie has some unique insight into what that looks like. Now the cofounder and CEO of Bridgit, she started out as a college student eagerly chasing down construction cranes and listening to complaints. Today, she tells The Product Mark...