Todd Jackson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I feel like we could have a whole other podcast episode on why you decided to move into venture versus staying in product. We can do it. But we're going to stay focused. So the reason we're here is that for over a year, you've been working on a product-market fit framework, essentially, a framework to help founders and product teams find product-market fit, which we should talk about this. But this is the most important thing you've got to get right as a founder in a product team is finding product-market fit. I got a peek at this framework. I love it. I love the way you've structured it, the way you're thinking about it. So what we're going to do today is walk through this framework in depth. First, I just want to spend a few minutes on setting a little context just so people understand who this is for and how to think about this. So maybe a first question is just why do you believe people need a framework for finding product-market fit? And just also, if you want to touch on why is product-market fit so important? Why is that something people should even be thinking about? The thing about product-market fit is that I find it's mysterious to a lot of people, and people tend to think about it purely as an art rather than a science. And all the advice that you find out there on the internet is very general when it comes to product-market fit. You'll know it when you see it, you'll know it when you have it. It's not specific. And there's so many other startup topics where there is good content on the internet like hiring your first salesperson, running board meetings, stuff that is specific and tactical. But there isn't that much content around product-market fit that is that specific. And so I think that's actually why Rahul from Superhuman is well-known for his approach to finding product-market fit. That was published on the First Round Review in 2018, and it was immediately popular and interesting to people. And I think the reason is because it was specific and because it was tactical and it brought a little bit of the science to something that people thought was just an art. And I think it's why your content is really popular too, Lenny. You and I worked on this product validation article together a little while back, and the seven part series that you did on B2B SaaS companies and the PMF benchmarking data that you had, I think it was how long it took to get to a product and a customer and to product-market fit, that was super well-read. And there just isn't that much good specific content about this. But like you said, product-market fit is the single most important thing that your startup does in the first three years and it's just underexplored, it's underexplained as a topic. So we felt this was a very important thing to do, something worth focusing on. And I've personally talked to hundreds of founders about this topic. We've published dozens of articles on the First Round Review. We call this our Paths to Product-Market Fit Series where we interview founders about the early days. And I'm just always interested in what are the patterns. If you talk to enough successful founders, and in this case, it can be enterprise founders, and you ask them, "What did you do in the first six to nine months of running your company, of starting your company? What patterns emerged from that?" And we have found a very consistent set of patterns, and that's what we decided to base our framework around. Amazing. And I think you're at such an interesting Venn diagram of exposure to develop something like this. One, you have a deep product background, you started a company, you see tons of startups going through the journey, many succeeding, many not. So I get why one, you wanted to do this and why I think this is going to be so valuable to a lot of people. You talked briefly about why product-market fit is so important, and maybe it might be helpful just to share a little bit more just why is this something people should be so obsessed with and why did you spend so much time developing this?…

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