Research desk / claim search
Search the transcript-backed claim ledger—not a generated answer. Each result identifies the speaker, episode, publisher, and source.
Published evidence
50 results
01 / belief
“On the product market fit piece, I think even more important there is the network effects of a Twitter, which you spend a lot of time thinking about building marketplaces.”
02 / commitment
“And I would say there's so many paradoxes in this and one that I've had to learn over and over again is if we're too ambitious at the outset and too ambitious and visionary about the product we want to build, then we will probably miss product market fit because we won't start at a small enough, humble enough place because it might ...”
03 / commitment
“I'm going to go and build all these businesses that really matter right now. And we're finally getting traction because people are like what AI and oh, more robotics and now, all of a sudden, we're in vogue, and we've been here really working on our product-market fit, working on our marketing, working on version 3.”
04 / evaluation
“There's a line that this venture capitalist, whose name I will not mention, said, which was that product market fit is a sort of thing where you absolutely know it when you see it, and therefore if you don't absolutely know it, you don't have it.”
05 / recommendation
“I think like if I had to distill it into advice for founders, one thing I've realized is that I spent a lot of time trying to force product market fit.”
06 / belief
“Obviously that's the only way, in my opinion, to create that magical product market fit in the first place.”
07 / preference
“I think the first criteria is having tremendous product market fit, which is really important because you're throwing fuel on the fire, and you might be throwing different types of fuel on your particular fire.”
08 / evaluation
“Essentially, the reason that people are downloading it, the way that it's spreading, the way that it's distributing, the way that it's inviting friends or sending Snaps or whatever it is, that product market fit can be so strong sometimes that it can be hard to actually build something because you actually can't tell if what you're building is what's responsible for growing the thing or if it's actually hurting it and it's growing despite what you're doing basically. And I think because of that, it actually sometimes teaches people the wrong things.”
09 / prediction
“The second one, which is even more significant, is that you lost product market fit. And that might happen, it might happen because of regulations, because of competition, because of something dramatic happened that there is no more value into your product.”
10 / evaluation
“Now, we all knew we need one salesperson, one SE and [inaudible 00:45:59] what's now called product market fit, I don't know that the term even existed there, and we're like, nah, you know what, investors told us you got to hire more people. So, we hired, I don't know, 20 salespeople, all of them failing miserably, because A, we didn't have a true product market fit, but even what's worse, we didn't have a true focused ICP with a very, very repeatable product market fit.”
11 / preference
“I avoid the phrase product-market fit with this stuff, and we can talk about that because I think that's kind of interesting.”
12 / evaluation
“I also love your point about how a lot of growth teams get a lot of credit for growing a business when really in many ways it could have done really well even without that team potentially because product-market fit was so strong.”
13 / evaluation
“You want to make sure that you have a compelling enough value proposition on both sides of the marketplace, and very often at the beginning you find product market fit on the demand side, but you realize it's not compelling enough for your suppliers because your margins are too high or something like that.”
14 / prediction
“I think if you just do the latter, then I think you just don't have enough conviction to see through hard things, and if you just do the former, then you probably don't get to product/market fit or optimize what you do because you're not focused enough on your customers.”
15 / recommendation
“Of course, I've recommended hundreds, but right now what I recommend is Creative Destruction, and I'm going to give your listeners the link to the right book, it's by a group of French economists. It's a little bit academic, but it's so important. It's so important for product people to understand. It is so important. More jobs get created because of creative destruction. There's not net job loss. There's more jobs created. AI is going to create more jobs, not destroy. Everybody got that wrong. Almost everybody, except the people who understood creative destruction. But you have to be close to the frontier. That's where the job creation happens. And product people, you got to be close to the frontier. You got to do whatever you can. If you're at a company that's not close to the frontier, do stuff at... I was working at Moody's Investor Service and I built one of the first 2,000 websites back in the early nineties, Lenny. I was doing all this stuff outside of work. That was bringing me closer to the technical frontier and was changing my candidate market fit. So I recommend that book. I also, of course, I recommend Marty's books. Now, I want to just say again, I don't want you to just read Marty's books, listen to his podcast, the great interview you guys did here at Lenny's. I want you to read and reread those books as if he's your mentor. And rereading is important, Lenny. And people say, "Oh, I listened two or three times speed on the audiobook." You are not going to have that deeply inform your decision making. Now what I'll do is I'll read a book and then I'll listen to it as a reinforcement, or I'll read it and listen to it at the same time. For the important books, Lenny, you got to read them more. And Marty's books are important. The last book I'll recommend is The Manual. It's a short introduction to Stoicism. People misunderstand Stoicism. They think Stoicism means repressing your feelings. That is not what Stoicism means. It means understanding and accepting your feelings, but not necessarily always being driven by them. Incorporating them. Your feelings are an important part of your decision-making system, but they shouldn't rule you. And it's a really important book. I have driven a lot of sales with that book because I really hammer it home in my book. So if you go on to Amazon, you'll see the book that's most bought along with my book is that book, right? I have other books I recommend that are on my website, but those are two or three.”
16 / evaluation
“We want this product to be for everyone, but we've learned with product market fit that doesn't work.”
17 / belief
“Once you have product-market fit, not everyone's going to be a good executor. But before that, I think getting to product-market fit, obviously there's a lot of methodology for doing it today that might make it a bit easier for people, but I still think it's fairly random and pretty dang hard.”
18 / evaluation
“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.”
19 / uncertainty
“What was the moment you felt product market fit with Waze? I don't know if I've ever heard that story.”
20 / recommendation
“In my conversation with Uri, we chat about many of my favorite chapters, including why falling in love with the problem is so important, how to find product market fit, a really clever tactic for firing people who aren't a fit for your company, a ton of really genius tactical advice for improving your fundraising pitch and so much more.”
21 / preference
“I don't believe we have product market fit unless 50% of Brazilians are telling us they would be very disappointed, because Brazilians are inherently polite.”
22 / commitment
“If you're listening, if you're a B2B founder in those early days of starting your company, or you know anyone who fits that description, and you have an appreciation for just how hard it is to find product-market fit and you don't want to go it alone, then please apply to this program or share the application. Like we promise, we will review every single application.”
23 / belief
“I think the trap is not doing enough to realize that you're actually not progressing to product-market fit in the way that you need to and just starting to burn money and not make progress.”
24 / belief
“I think if you know what the path looks like and you know what the levers are at your disposal and you know what you need to aim for, I think we can get more of these companies to level three and level four product-market fit, which is where you really want to be and where you have a very valuable company.”
25 / belief
“I think if you told many, many pre-seed founders that they'd be able to get to 100 million and not know whether they had product-market fit, they'd probably take that.”
26 / evaluation
“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.”
27 / preference
“That was 2015 to 2018. So I have always loved product, and that's actually the reason now that I love being a seed stage VC because I love investing at the early stage founders who are pre-product-market fit and then helping them get there.”
28 / preference
“So actually when Retwelf first started, we started mostly by doing sales, actually. And the reason we started by doing sales was mostly because we weren't sure whether we had product-market fit and sales seemed to be the best way of proving whether we had product-market fit out.”
29 / preference
“A few other things we've got up our sleeve, I think the goal is to be able to continue to work with these recent product/market fit, Series B-ish companies that we've always worked with.”
30 / preference
“Because going earlier, as I talked about, the importance of thinking about things as a journey, so what's happening in the marketing side, what's happening in this aspect of the product and seeing how all these pieces really fit together, that has been absolutely one of the things I will take wherever I go, whatever I do, because it has just been a very, very useful tool.”
31 / recommendation
“They were all disasters. And we had so many smart people around the table who had gone through these processes before, but I think when you're in that incredibly fast-growing stage, or you're in the earliest stage where you're landing a bunch of new bets that are a bit ambiguous and it's more like product marketing fit mode, kind of closer to that end of the spectrum, I think you're much better served by incredibly light planning processes where 80 to 90% of the assets produced are actual visuals of the experience.”
32 / recommendation
“Pretty simple way to determine or to distill product market fit. And what product market fit has come to mean is, we're a brew pub, you and I want to start a craft beer place like everybody else on the West Coast, and we're going to make a bunch of samples and shit, and we're going to feed those samples to our friends and to our ideal customer profile that I learned from Lenny.”
33 / belief
“Along those same lines, I saw an interview with Dylan talking about product market fit, and he had this interesting quote about how he realized first that they had product market fit a year later, which is when Microsoft, I think, was like, "Take our money.”
34 / preference
“One of the quotes I always like to say, and I say this now too, when we're doing stuff, because we're launching new products [inaudible 00:23:40] and it comes up a lot, is you can't optimize your way to product market fit.”
35 / prediction
“I think of product market fit is almost like you keep stacking these S-curves where you get product market fit in a small group and then you suddenly reach exponential growth because you can crack that coal group, that type of audience, but then you start declining because you start hitting the ceiling of, we've got in, I don't know what it might be every development team in the US to be using this product.”
36 / evaluation
“It makes me think of something Shishir, the CEO of Coda, shared about how he's like, "I don't really buy this idea of product market fit because you have product market fit with your existing users that love it and know about it, and you always don't have product market fit with the people you want to be used the product.”
37 / evaluation
“My bottom number is because there's this early stage of product market fit where the founder and the company are trying to figure out who their real ideal customer profile is, and can they sell to them consistently?”
38 / evaluation
“Then when you start scaling the company because you found product-market fit, it's the first time that founders run into this classic problem of what got you here won't get you there.”
39 / recommendation
“First, I think if we're talking about PLG and the story with Snyk, I actually like that definition of product-led acquisition from Julian Shapiro when you spoke with him, and beyond that maniacal focus on finding product market fit for your product, founders really should be thinking about how their product is going to grow, and that's important of course as you think about taking that next step.”
40 / preference
“Will they let me change the name was my criteria for joining. And I would say in general, the sooner, the better, but obviously after you know that you have product market fit and you have something to scale, so you don't want to invest too much in a brand that isn't going to get you as far as you want to get if you're going to obviously scale.”
41 / evaluation
“The third is related to growth, but I think is slightly different, which is what we call product market fit expansion. So it's not exactly feature work, which is like, "Hey, now that I use your product more, I have this thing I need in order to keep using it because I'm a power seller," those kinds of things.”
42 / belief
“I think there was this conventional wisdom to just focus on building until you found product market fit and then you can worry about growth.”
43 / commitment
“Left as senior product lead, I believe was my title. And forever grateful for that experience because I learned a ton about product market fit and also product quality.”
44 / evaluation
“What does it mean to have strong product market fit is that you, A, have retention, obviously. So it takes some time to actually measure retention, and I would say at least six months to almost a year post the initial offering, that's when you truly know whether customers are retaining with you, and number two, that you actually have some ability to acquire and monetize your customers potentially from the beginning.”
45 / belief
“We may be overly quoting Gurley here, but I think I saw a recent tweet, something along the lines of there is an infinite amount of product/market fit for selling dollars for 90¢.”
46 / evaluation
“By the time we're talking about here in 2008–2009, the Series A has really become this catbird seat from the venture capitalist because they can outsource all the real early-stage risk to the seed stage with way less capital—have these companies get going—and then once they start to show product/market fit and a lot of the risks has been removed, then the Series A venture firms can come in, lead around, and they're still all these hangover baggage with the round where it's like the norm that whoever leads your series A is going to get a huge ownership percentage in your company—25%–30% ownership—and it turns into this total bonanza for the venture firms who aren't really taking that much risk.”
47 / belief
“You're going back to the original macaroon shop, Chloe at Chantal Macarons. That's not a full meal, but I suspect what happened was just that the meal delivery became so big and clearly had a product/market fit that just became all-consuming.”
48 / evaluation
“From my experience, you don’t need them unless you hit product-market fit. Sometimes, the E is totally off base.”
49 / evaluation
“They just go in and they buy this huge asset and they get this incredible data asset out of it and they learn how to optimize every single experience for every single customer based on exactly their wants and needs. And I think that also with the availability of cloud computing, like you start your two-pizza team inside Amazon and it’s small and you work on a thing and then suddenly if it’s working and you find product for market fit, you get the power of Amazon’s cloud behind it.”
50 / belief
“Then all these great cloud platforms where you can really quickly build technology, build MVPs, get it to market and really see if you've got product market fit and you got something that can be viable, and that’s what’s so fun I think then about what we're both doing and coming up with new ideas and launching ideas is you can go from idea to MVP and proof of concept really, really quickly.”