Timothy Davis: evaluation

Transcript context

…Some people use paid ads to drive early growth to bring customers, to help them figure out what to build kind of pre-product market fit growth. Is that something you recommend? Is that something you'd advise against? Is that strategy that you've seen work? Yeah. Product market fit is a huge thing. We've run into some of this at Shopify, and we definitely ran into this at IBM. So, for the longest time, IBM is, "We're a global company, we should be everywhere." But when we started looking at the data, it was, "Should we be everywhere?" For example, Africa, we were in the whole continent. We weren't just in, say, South Africa, or Egypt, or something like that. And the more we dug into it, the more we realized the biggest issue wasn't necessarily that users weren't interested in our product and weren't purchasing it, it was because we didn't have a product market fit mainly from an operation standpoint. In Africa, there are multitudes of different types of currency. There's the franc, there's the rand, there's the shill, and we were just, "Hey, USD, thank you." So, of course, they weren't converting unless they were going out of their way to make a way to convert that. So, when we took a step back and we said, "Okay, where do we want to start?" It was South Africa. That's really where we were trying to get, quote, unquote, "stronghold" in, so we had to make sure we had the rand available. Once we did that, we started doing tremendously better because we had a product market fit. They had demand for our product, and now we were able to serve them, meet them where they were. So essentially, you're saying probably not smart to run a bunch of ads if it's not working, if you don't have something people actually want yet in that market?…

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