A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

This is one of the wildest founder journeys you’ll ever hear. Dmitry Gurski went from growing potatoes and picking mushrooms on a farm in Belarus to building Flo—a billion-dollar company with 75M monthly users that dominates the health and fitness category worldwide. He started Flo in a market already controlled by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s startup , which had $30M in funding from a16z. Toda...

Saurav started a Groupon-like offering for SMBs in 2011. He quickly learned it wasn't going to work. He and his team pivoted and started driving leads to suppliers using Facebook ads. It worked and they generated revenue—but they were becoming a digital advertising agency. It wasn't at all what they wanted to build. So they pivoted again.  They used the cash from that business and built...

In 2005 most people didn't even have cellphones yet. Those who did used flip phones. That's when Noah started Olo, a webapp to let people pre-order coffee from nearby shops. Users had to login on web, add a credit card, create pre-made orders and then send a text to a preset number when they wanted to pre-order. It was way, way ahead of its time.  Noah and his team 7 years to hit $1M in...

Frankie lost $10K in a crypto transaction—so he started Staging Labs to find a way to help others prevent crypto scams. He was head of an incubator called Entrepreneurship First and had seen dozens and dozens of founders build startups. He knew exactly what to do—and he did everything right. He found a co-founder, built an MVP, did customer discovery, checked willingness to pay—but he still failed...

Hussein's travel startup was doing $10s of millions when COVID hit. His revenue didn't just go to zero, it went negative. There were more customers asking for refunds than new sales. He was 4 months from running out of money. He ended up making a complete pivot, he changed the company's name from SnapTravel to Super.com. He went from travel to fintech and launched a banking card. It...

When Amplitude launched Mixpanel was the big game in town. They were first to market, had raised more money, and had a well-known brand. VCs passed on Amplitude because it seemed like just another Mixpanel. Today, Amplitude is a $1.5B public company—they're about 2x bigger than Mixpanel. Mixpanel's marketing spend helped educate the market. But before buying an analytics solution most bu...

This first time founder just raised a $38 million Series A. The crazy part is that for all of 2021, 2022, 2023, he had almost no revenue. He spent all that time building and pivoting. Finally he launched in 2024—and it blew up. I saw his LinkedIn post and his revenue chart doesn't look like a hockey stick... it looks like straight a vertical line. He built a health benefits platform—it doesn&...

Carta just released their report for Q4 2024. Peter is Head of Insights at Carta, and the person who owns their data practice. We sit down to talk about the largest trends he saw across fundraising, industries, graduation rates and even hiring practices.  Carta data shows that graduation rates from Seed to A are much lower for companies that have raised a bridge round. We analyze why that might be...

Alon was a hacker for the Israeli Defence Forces' cyber department. There he saw the most advanced methods used in cyber warfare. So when he left, he started IntSights-- a company that helped enterprises defend themselves from cyber attacks. He was a first-time founder who didn't even know the word 'unicorn'. He made all the mistakes you could make. But he had real, undeniable...

Ned had a chance to run Robinhood Asia but he turned it down. Instead, he launched a competitive product. He decided to go B2B and sell to banks and other financial institutions. He locked down a $400K revenue sale before writing a line of code. It seemed easy at first. Overtime, he grew to $3.5M in revenue, billions in assets under management and hundreds of thousands of users. He raised $20M in...

Jason built a data center company in the 2013. When he exited in 2019, it was the third-largest exit in Canada that year. He'd sold his previous startup and invested 100% of his capital into ROOT. He grew to 10s of millions and exited for 100s of millions. Now he's invested in over 20 angel-stage startups. He shares the story of ROOT and what he looks for in the startups and founders he...

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 realized his first product was not going to work. He had some traction, but not nearly enough customer pull. So he shut it down. He went back to square one. He did cus...

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 bootstrapped to $100M in revenue across just 7 customers.  Last quarter, he raised $15M in venture funding. He shares how he closed million-dollar enterprise projects before b...

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 meetings, how to tell stories, and every other piece of the fundraising puzzle. If you're planning to raise a round anytime this year-- check this epis...

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 promised. But both retailers told him the problem he was solving was not important enough. And then, he met Loblaws-- one of Canada's l...

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 importantly, they dramatically improved completion rates for online courses. Darius thought he had it. But it turned out universities didn't want to pay....

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 an NFT-related product in Web3. One month later, they completely abandoned their idea. They realized it was never going to work. Then, the floor fell from un...

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 Insanely Focused Survive —> Focus all your resources to do more with less.   3.You have to be in the market to win the market —> Use niche markets to discover unique insights....

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 exceptionally niche, and it worked. After YC, he raised a $6M seed round from tier 1 angels, back when large seed rounds were not at all common. But, unlike...

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 listen: Small teams outperform larger ones in early stages. Paying employees well is needed to build A+ teams. Go all-in on fundraising to do it faster.  Mind your bur...

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 pushing a boulder up a hill. At one point, one of his large customers churned and went with a competitor. Tolga pivoted, but it was too late. Now, thinking back,...

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 credibility, no proof points. So to help you out I went through 24 ways of getting your first customers using 24 different examples from this show. Why yo...

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 highly manual, call intensive workflow in the back office and autoamted it using AI. Years later, he's raised $102M and has dozens of large $1M+ ent...

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 they were told their idea would never work. YC said they'd seen it several times and it was destined to fail. So in 2 weeks Marty landed a customer and built a p...

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. He talks about 100-hour weeks, hiring exceptional talent, why smaller teams can outperform—and why he decided to start all over again. Why you should listen:...