Traction Conf 2018 Highlight Video

So fall in love with the problem, not the solution and watch what customers do, not what they say. And those are my two best pieces of advice around finding product market fit.

Listen to your users.

Like in our case, our users are particularly loud but even in the cases of most sites, listen to their feedback. Don't always give them what they ask for, but at least listen to them.

Done is always better than perfect. So getting things out the door, shipping things, getting them out to customers, getting feedback is so important. And working entrepreneurially in this cycle of testing and iterating, measuring, improving is really, really helpful.

It's all learning from your users. I mean we have this wonderful repository of data. We can see how users engage and interact with the app. We now have the data science down to such a science that we can predict someone who's going to become a payer within about 12 hours of their engagement.

A strong business. We were profit profitable for a long.

Time before the ipo.

So it wasn't like we were flirting with it. We had like proven solid profitability and.

We had a lot of visibility in the future. And that's, that's when you go public.

And your job as a marketer is not to sell at them to get them to buy your stuff, it's to help them accomplish their goal.

This thinking is not all that unorthodox actually, because part of the reason why your profitability grows in a public company even is that once you acquire a customer, you are able to sell multiple products into them. We have that exact same strategy and it's working. Now.

If you're building a lifestyle business or a company that you'd be happy to sell for $50 million, it probably doesn't make sense to take the VC route. If on the other hand, you're trying to build a half a billion or a billion dollar plus company, then VC money can accelerate that.