In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin interviews Alina Vandenberghe, co‑founder of Chili Piper, about the evolving nature of product‑market fit (PMF). Alina explains that while a strong brand generates curiosity and initial interest, PMF never truly ends; every new feature must be tested for fit, adoption, and engagement. She stresses the importance of identifying the right persona—those who do the most work solving the problem—and gathering feedback from them, rather than seeking generic advice from unrelated industry leaders. Alina shares lessons from early challenges, warning against asking “smart people” who lack relevant experience. As Chili Piper moves from PMF to scaling revenue, she describes building autonomous processes, frameworks, and a culture that emphasizes experimentation, employee fulfillment, and rapid decision‑making, all aimed at preparing the company for a future public offering. The conversation also touches on the interplay between culture and product fit, the need for continuous experimentation, and the balance between retention and personal growth for team members.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. Chili Piper day one, finding product market fit without a brand, without clients, that's one thing. And y'all did a phenomenal job with that. Now you have a brand, you have clients, and you're still evolving and improving your product constantly. And that's why people love and respect the brand and use it. They're excited for what's next. Has finding product-market fit changed or evolved along with your brand? Like, is it easier now? Is it faster? How do you do it? How's it different?
So the fact that we now have a brand definitely helps in people being more curious about what Chilpiper does and how has it been used by all these companies in the space that are using it and what kind of results they're achieving. So, it does help at least in the initial phases where people are curious, for sure. And the more people get exposed to it, the more likely they are to hear about you. But I don't sit on the laurels and say, okay, this is awesome, this is the end. Because it's— every day is a product-market fit day. For every feature that we launch, for every piece of the platform that we go up there, you always ask yourself, is this feature going to have product-market fit? How are we going to get adoption? How are we going to get people engaged? So it never really ends. It's never really easier. So one would better love this process and be excited by it because— Even if you, you have, um, the right, uh, momentum, the right momentum at one particular time, it doesn't mean that you stop.
Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking in my head, like, being devil's advocate, it might get harder because there's so many more voices talking, saying like what they want and all this. And it's just like, do you really want it? Do you need it? Thank you for your feedback.
Well, our existing customers for sure never get happy if we change something on them. That's for sure.
This is fascinating. Any other learnings that, that you think are, are super relevant, um, that folks can get a lot out of that, that you went through to find product market fit either here or, or maybe like some early, but before you rinse and repeated it so many times and made it like part of your DNA, um, what were some like early career challenges that maybe people that are going with their first product to market should look out for?
It's very tempting to seek advice from smart people. So if you've seen that somebody has done something that is amazing in a specific industry, so in my case, if I would have seen an entrepreneur doing amazingly well in, I don't know, fintech or healthcare, and would have asked them for advice for my company, It's very tempting to go, but nobody really can have a specific formula or secret that they can really share for what's needed. However, there is a bunch that— there is someone that advice matters a lot in product-market fit, and that is identifying the persona that you're addressing. in a way that allows you to talk to the persona that does the most work to solve for that problem currently. So let's say that I'm going to make this up, but let's say that I want to build an inbox. And instead of going to people that have done it successfully in, I don't know, healthcare, what I should really be going is to, after those people that have tried 10 different inboxes and they've never quite find their perfect fit because they found that one piece from this works, and then one piece from this, and one piece of this. And usually those are people that are more active on social media as well, or in the review sites. And you definitely want to talk to them because they're going to have information that's very useful in identifying those smaller things that might make your product more stronger than, than anybody else. Um, so the that persona is a lot more valuable in giving you feedback for the work that you're doing to get you on the right track with the exploration.
Yeah, I've personally fell into that trap of just asking smart people stuff instead of the right smart people, so to speak, or the people that have gone through it before. Had many conversations, but You know, the good news is you learn from those too, and that's exciting. So I want to take some time to take any questions that come from the audience. And, you know, what's next for Chilly Piper as well? Anything you could share or care to, like with the evolution or any new products right now that you've launched?
A lot of things have changed for me personally as Chilly Piper has grown. And I had this kind of hacker mentality to make sure that we do things really fast in a certain way to make sure that we solve for customer problems and we make them more successful. And I was striving to give as much value back to the customer. And now that we have a larger enterprise and we have all these customers, it forces me to change a lot my processes and my way of thinking to be able to create, as I was telling you earlier, a process and a framework where everything happens at scale without me, and that the teams can be self-sufficient and can operate fast on all sorts of tracks with the right velocity and the right decision-making process. And ideally, we would be so prepared that we can go public one day with, with the team in its current state. And we're doing all sorts of crazy experiments with our team that might not be seen in other companies. And that also occupies my time, because once you go from market fit to revenues, and those revenues are in the right spot, the scaling of the company becomes one's focus. And it's a lot of fun to do that as well, how to make sure that our employees get the right recognition and the right career path and the right help from a coach perspective and the right tools to communicate with each other. And that's the part that is now taking all my mindshare, almost all my mindshare these days.
Yeah. I want to give you a lot of credit for building such an amazing culture that, one, people want to work at, but two, help rinse and repeat the operational prowess needed for bringing product to market, but then scaling it, as you said, right now. This has been a wonderful conversation.
I think there's a lot of product-market fit in creating a culture that works and that creates a company that works as well, because there's a lot of experimentation and you're getting a lot of feedback and you're seeing it live as well. And there's a lot of beauty in that. And everybody's a little bit different, right? So our culture kind of emulates through like myself and my co-founder as well. So there's parts of our DNA in it, and then there's some parts of the ideal company that we want to create.
That is fascinating. Once you find— and for everyone still here, find product-market fit with a product, but why stop there? Find it with how to develop the best culture to get folks happy, performing well, staying for a long time, and getting promoted as well.
Yes, we don't aim for retention, but we aim for full fulfillment and full growth of oneself. And sometimes that means that we help other people, we help people to find other opportunities somewhere else. But for sure, there's a lot of trial and error on company culture, and there's a lot of trial and error in forming a community, and that experimentation is It happens everywhere.
This has been an awesome conversation, Alina. I'm so happy that we went in multiple directions with it. Thank you so much for joining us and, I mean, for building such an amazing organization in Chile.
Thank you, Jared, for having me and for having created this beautiful community.
Thank you. And thank you everyone for watching us today. Have an awesome rest of the day. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like two seconds. And you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
