A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders

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 launched it, it took off. He did $10M in revenue in his first year. Honestly, it sounds too easy. But the reason it worked is because, as he shares on the episode,...

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 on the internet. Then he pivoted to building the first on ramp for bitcoin. And finally, pivoted into Wyre, which was like Stripe for Crypto, a platform to let de...

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 $650M.  We go deep on what it takes to build world-class products, how early-stage founders can balance customer feedback, vision and data, and how the bes...

Description Tate 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 help employers pay their employees faster. Tate was one of the early pioneers of the entire Earned Wage Access space. By partnering with payroll companies and em...

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. But it's been a long road for Francois. Before he got to the current idea, he had to make 3 pivots, including building a marketplace and selling to schools. ...

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 round. His main competitor, HootSuite, raised over $300M. In spite of that, he built a $40M ARR business that sold for well over $100M. Here's the story of how it...

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 happens to 95% of startups. On thhis show, we mainly speak with the top 5%-- the ones where things went right and everything worked out. But you tend to lear...

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 before recording the episode, he shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent panic attack that left him frozen for 15 minutes. It turns out, the sheer pressure of runnin...

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, growth ground to a halt. Nothing he did could revitalize growth. Ultimately, he decreased expenses and exited. He was able to return some cash to investors, f...

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 GMV Year 2: $4M Year 3: $20M Year 4: $100M They were backed by Jeremy Liew, the VC who seeded Snapchat in 2012. Cameo became a unicorn in 2021. But as the markets tur...

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 trends in founder vesting, and why some founders are choosing to vest for longer. Finally, we go through what to do if you’re stuck with some product-market...

Lior is the Elon Musk of VC. In just 8 years, his venture fund went from 0 to $4B under management. And while doing that, he founded Bright Machines, which to date has raised over $400M. He's both the CEO of Bright Machines and the Managing Director of Eclipse Ventures.  And he's not building "easy" software startups either. Bright Machines is looking to automate the entire man...

Parker quit his job as VP Finance at a late-stage startup in mid 2021. He raised $4M out of the gate because, well, it was 2021. But he didn't ramp up sales, he didn't hire 15 developers. He kept the team to 5 people for the first year. He worked with a dozen design partners until the value prop was perfect. He even refused to let customers pay upfront in annual contracts. He wanted mont...

Mike started selling SaaS before SaaS was a thing. PointClickCare is the Salesforce of healthcare. For the first 7 years, they raised just $600K from friends and family. With that funding, they grew to $50M in ARR.  Through that time, they went through the 2000 Dotcom crash and nearly went bankrupt in 2004 as they chased too many markets too soon. Since then, the company has continued to grow at o...

Apple sold only 370,000 VisionPro headsets-- much fewer than it expected. Meanwhile, Meta Ray-Bans are the top-selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban stores. The outcome of their AR/VR products couldn't be more different, even though they both have as much awareness as you could possible buy. There are 3 reasons: 1. Price. 2. Killer feature vs cool product. 3. Destination vs always-on. Check this...

Piotr met his co-founders at a party in Coachella. He built them an app for influencers to post online. That simple idea evolved into one of the world's first influencer marketplaces. While so many other tried and failed, Piotr and his team targeted marketing agencies with big budgets. They grew to $150M in revenue over a 10 year period. This summer, they were acquired by Publicis Groupe for...

New Carta data shows that 30% of seed-stage startups used to raise a Series A within 2 years of their seed. Now, only 15% do. The bar for Series As is as high as it's ever been. And the number of seed extensions that I see is going up as a result. But for founders, this is NOT a bad thing. I remember as a seed-stage founder I was obsessed with raising a Series A. But now I've seen startu...

Liran quit a cozy job at IBM to launch Fusic, a TikTok-like app back in 2011. He raised over $10M, acquired tens of thousands of users, and failed. So he went back to what he knew: deep tech and enterprise. He launched WEKA in 2013 to improve the efficiency of GPUs. He was operating on hard mode: building deep tech and selling to large enterprise customers. It took him 5 years to build a commercia...

This episode is going to piss you off. Most founders struggle to raise their first few million. Many have to bootstrap for years. Even once there's revenue, many get rejected because they're "too early". Dan had dozens of VCs asking to invest before he even quit his job. He raised his first $5M with no deck, no story, and no product idea. All it took was two founders  who wante...

It was “really slow in the first couple of years...really, really slow.” GoHenry was an app and debit card for kids to help parents teach their kids about money. Dean started over a decade ago in 2012, when mobile was just truly taking off.  And yet, it took multiple years to get off the ground. Once he found the right channels and repeatable growth, he and his team started pouring fuel on the fir...

Jaspar graduated YC & closed a $11.5M seed round this week. He launched Artisan just 8 months ago. And this is the first venture-backed startup he's ever ran. He started with product-led-growth but struggled. In May, he moved to a sales-first go-to-market & scaled from $200K ARR to $1.3M ARR by September.   We go deep and tactical to figure out exactly what he did to grow so fast: fro...

Cody started a ride-share business in 2017 with no capital. He focused exclusively on small towns (population <100K) where Uber/Lyft weren't available. I know as a VC I would've passed if he'd pitched me when he started—and I would've been dead wrong. So far he's raised only $2.1M, compared to Uber's $30B+ raised. And yet, he built a business doing $20M+ in annual...

I tried to pay my employees as little as possible. I thought I was being resourceful—& it seemed to work. Until it totally backfired. I learned my lesson the hard way. No founder wants to hire B-level or C-level talent. Everyone is looking for A-players. But most founders don't put in the work. And they end up with B-level teams.   If you're serious about getting and keeping A-player...

Kyle left his job as a hacker at the NSA to launch Huntress. He bootstrapped for 3 years and burned all his savings. One of his co-founders quit. He got into an accelerator program, but had to sleep in his car for 16 weeks because he couldn't afford a hotel. Finally, 3 years in he'd hit $1.5M ARR. So he pitched 60 VCs for a Series A—and got 60 'no's. He was forced to raise a sm...

MrBeast's 36-page framework leaked this week. It's how he built a $1B+ company and became the #1 YouTuber in the world.  His channel is worth over $1B. For the first time ever, we get to see how MrBeast operates.  We go through the 7 most important things that startup founders can learn from MrBeast. From what maniacal obsession looks like, what it means to be an "A player", to...