Karri Saarinen: belief

Transcript context

…I think this is such a good way and smart way of thinking about product market fit. A lot of people see product market fit as this binary, "I have it or I don't," and, "When am I going to really feel product market fit?" What you're describing is what I often hear, it's more of this spectrum of more and more confidence that there's product market fit and, even more specifically, it's product market fit with segments of the market. It's this map of the world and you're just slowly acquiring territory in the market with specific elements and then, over time, it grows and grows. Yeah, I think a spectrum is a good way to think about it, too. I feel like there's this blog post written in the past where you know when you have product market fit and I think it probably... It's like that for some, I don't know, social consumer apps. If it's taking off or not, then you don't really have a lot of different segments, or you don't really think about it, you have millions of users and then you see it's taking off, so you have a product market fit. I think in more like a B2B world. I think there's always... You can have different sizes of customers, you can have different domains the customers are in, or there's different categories where you might be doing really well in one category and then not that well another. I think maybe the countering to do things is that, actually, if you're doing really well in some category, just double down on that. This is something I talked to the Zoom founder, Eric, at some point in the company's lifecycle, and this is also what he said. When they were building Zoom in the early days, they would get this one type of customer. I don't know, maybe it's a university and then it worked really well for them. Then they're like, "How do we get more of the universities?" They would always focus on a certain customer rather than, "Let's just try to get everyone, so let's focus on everything," which is not possible. Again, it's about the focus. If you see that something is working really well, then it's almost like you should focus on doing that more until you hit some point. It's like, "Okay, now we do have that category captured or handled as much as we want," and we should expand to new area. Essentially, look for pull and just follow that and pay attention to that.…

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