Todd Jackson: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? I think as a founder, there are so many things you have to do. You have to pick a market, you have to find a co-founder, you have to hire a team, you have to raise funding, you have to build a product, you have to sell a product. And so sometimes it gets lost that actually, the only thing that matters in the first couple years is finding product-market fit and actually, what we define as extreme product-market fit, and I'll go into that. Because if you find extreme product-market fit, the momentum just carries you, and the market pulls you along. And it's easy to know what to build because you're building the thing that your customers want and it's motivating as a team. It's easy to hire people, everything becomes easier if you find product-market fit, it is the thing that propels the company. And so we are a seed stage venture firm. We tend to work with very early founders who are pre-product-market fit. And the hard truth about it is that most of them don't get past the first couple levels of it. The majority of startups do not get past, what we call, level one product-market fit or level two product-market fit. And I'll go through and define all that stuff. They get stuck at one of those first couple levels. And if they can unlock the right product and the right way to explain it to a customer and make a customer deeply satisfied, and there's enough customers out there like that, it just pulls the whole thing along. Who is this framework for specifically? And for people that are listening, how do they know if this is for them or not?…

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