How to Position your Startup with Rob Kaminski

But if the product doesn't do what it says it does, and you see this in SaaS, you'll hear the terminology like a leaky bucket. It means you don't have all the way fit. You found, you found a real market problem. You found a real way to sell, but your solution's off. And so you, that's where you start to fix, fix the leaky bucket. And there's a ton that you start to get into a bunch of stuff. Okay. So super excited to be here. Um, just to kind of set the stage a little bit for those of you who don't know, I'm a co-founder of Fletch. We are a product marketing consultancy for early-stage B2B startups. We really focus, we have a productized service that we focus and deliver for early-stage founders to focus on positioning and messaging. And then we help them translate that messaging into clear homepage copy as a reflection of that positioning. We've had the opportunity to work with about 150 B2B SaaS startups, most of them horizontal. And so today, I'm really excited. I wanna share with you guys a bunch of stuff that we've learned along the way. The topic areas that I wanna cover, I first wanna get into product market fit in B2B. There's tons of definitions out there. We of course have our own definition that we think is a little bit more useful to help early stage founders think through the different pieces of what it takes to find fit. And so we'll start there and then translating off of our product market fit model is really, I wanna share some insights around how to approach positioning, especially for the early stage when it's really squishy, really difficult to think through. And so I wanna, we'll introduce some key principles for that. And then I wanna share something that my co-founder Anthony Pieri and I have developed that we call the Minimum Viable Positioning Framework. It's pretty much our guide when we work with founders to help sort through all the different positioning options as a way to find the one that's the most clear and the most compelling for the stage that they're at. And then we'll wrap up with really how to put that positioning into work, into messaging. In other words, like, what are the supporting arguments of a positioning and how should you think about that as an early-stage founder? So that's what we're gonna cover. Hopefully we'll stay around the 20-minute mark, leave a lot of time for Q&A, and we can double-click into this as we go. So the first thing I wanna introduce is our product-market fit model. And for us, we think product-market fit is made up of 4 key pillars that really represent 2 different kinds of fit. And you can see the definition at the bottom really sums this up, and then I'll kind of walk through each piece. But we believe you have product-market fit when you can repeatedly find, sell, serve, and retain customers across the same use case. And we'll double-click on like, what is use case as it relates to segmentation, all those things. And so what we hope this model serves as, you can see sort of these core questions here across these pillars, as more of a litmus test of how doing and even how you're thinking about the different parts of fit. In the very, very early stage, you won't have good answers to any of these questions to start with, and that's okay. Um, what we believe is that it's usually best to start to seek out some version of the go-to-market fit first because you're just closer to the customers. It's going to give you a better view into the problem. Um, but there is no specific order to solve for these things. But from that conceptual standpoint, and so we're not gonna walk through this whole detailed image, you can go check this out on my LinkedIn. What I wanna highlight here is what we found working with all these different founders is really the pieces at the bottom here. There's two core approaches to finding fit, and we see these patterns show up across a lot of different startups. One of them is starting with a market problem or an insight into the market. And then trying to figure out, well, what do we build to best capture that opportunity? We, we're big believers in this approach because you basically by default are already vetting that the market exists. And it's more of an exercise of like, how do I solve for that third pillar of that delivering value that I shared on the first model? How do I build the right product to capture the problem in the market that I know is there? And so we see this a lot when people are subject matter experts in an area already, or they're solving their own problem. The other side of the equation, and we do see a lot of this, especially now with generative AI and these new technologies, which you can even pattern match this back to like when the internet became, started to kind of emerge as this adopted technology, is folks just start building cool stuff and it is cool, but they don't really know who it's for. And this creates a lot of issues even tied into like how exactly did they build it? So oftentimes we see folks building their product to be flexible, to do anything, but that creates a real challenge, a real issue when you actually try and move into like, how do I go to market? How do I actually sell this to people? And so these two fundamental approaches, I'm going to speak mostly from the market problem in search of a product, but these principles will apply across the board. There's another key thing around product market fit that I think gets lost in the shuffle a lot, especially in B2B and especially in horizontal markets, is that they are incredibly fragmented. And I have some visuals to guide this. And so when you're early stage, it's important to understand this because the issue we see, especially with a lot of venture-backed founders or founders that think they wanna raise money, is they go paint this picture of a huge market problem, but then when they move into the operational piece of actually finding fit and going to market, they drastically underestimate how fragmented that market is and all the required pieces. And so what we like to say is that Product-market fit at scale is actually a collection of product-market fits, and there's a lot of ways that this shows up. It kind of depends on the product and the market that you're in. The example here is obviously for Airtable, big flexible platform product, can do a lot of different things. They have found fit to varying degrees of success across each of these for specific users, by specific teams. From a B2B standpoint, they have industry focuses that they're delivering solutions for. And so this is the thing that we try and drill into when we work with early stages, like, can we get specific? So taking that a little bit further, this is really representing the fragmentation that we see. And so the piece I just hit, usually if you're raising money or even just putting together your thoughts, this is probably how you're thinking about your market today. And what we encourage is to think about your market from a much more detailed standpoint. I brought up the concept of slices. The biggest slices that you wanna make sure to nail, and by the way, there's more slices. So this is a visual, we call this our cube, it's in 3D. The dimensions of markets actually go into 4D and 5D and 6D, but we can't visualize those. And so this is the best we're gonna get for now. And so the idea here, even if we take a company like Loom, is that horizontal product, they can slice up the way they build their product and market their product, it really into these smaller cubes. And what we see is that as you move into the smaller cube, the more effective your positioning's gonna become, the clearer your message is gonna be, and the more effective your go-to-market programs and your likelihood of finding one of these small pieces of fit are, are. And so it's really important when you're, when you're thinking about building your product to really think in terms of specific details. We'll share another example here for Asana, and there's another point I want to get across. So very similar example here in terms of how we're slicing these up. Again, Asana can be used for a lot of different, even horizontal use cases, and even these are big and can be broken down into smaller cubes. Why this piece starts to become important is because this unit here, as you'll see, we use this unit as an approach for a specific segment positioning. It's the guiding light for how you're gonna do all your marketing. And right now I'm showing it just for all the assets you need to create, but it also is gonna impact the channels that you use. And it's also then gonna impact not only how you're building your product, but how do you price your product? Does it actually fit based on the channel that you need to use and the assets you're gonna need to sell it? And can you get all this to fit together? And so this is where we start to move down layers of detail in specifically on that left side of that product market fit model, that go-to-market fit. Of can I, can I repeatedly get in front of this group? In this example, HR folks in healthcare that are doing project management, can I repeatedly get in front of them? And then do I have all the assets and things I need to say to sell them and get them into my product? And so this is really important. The takeaway here is that B2B markets are incredibly fragmented. Product market fit is actually made up of multiple fits and you have to start small. The last component of this from a fit level, I, I brought up channels. This starts to get us into marketing motions as well. This is another way to view how to be specific. And so the tricky thing to kind of hit on the same concept I introduced is that most folks who raise especially seed stage venture capital usually fall into one of these buckets in their story where they are leveraging some new technology. They basically sum like all these different use cases that the product could be for and they say, look how big that market could be if we figure this out. The issue is, again, different visualization, is that in order to penetrate this market, we actually first have to penetrate a single use case or a single segment and then sequence and stack all of those to either become a horizontal suite or to become a platform. And so, um, when we're working with founders, we're often trying to get 'em to shrink their positioning, shrink their messaging. Uh, and I have some examples here to kind of walk you guys through and some good principles to think about that. But this is how we think about fit in B2B markets. And so now leveraging that understanding of fragmented markets and smaller segments and product market fits, multiple, let's talk a little bit about key principles for positioning and then we'll unpack this into messaging. Positioning often gets overcomplicated. It's often what we see a lot, a lot happen with early stages. There's this analysis paralysis that happens where you're looking for the perfect way to slice and dice and capture multiple segments and all these different things. When you boil positioning down, it's really just answering a couple key questions. And this is like the ultimate boiled down version, but it's basically who are you for and what does the product do? And then what's unique about it, right? So I've added 3, but this is, this boils it down to 2. And so if we look at these examples, customer segmentation and product differentiation, DuckDuckGo, a search engine for privacy-conscious individuals, Canva, a design tool for non-designers. Mercury, basically a bank for startups. Like it really can be this simple. And it's funny when we do this work, we can often uncover options for startups positioning in as quick as a few minutes, a few hours. But they, they tend to wanna look for the perfect approach. And the truth is, is that, that answer you can't come up with in a room. You actually have to put your positioning out into the world, see how it gets engaged with, see what the reflection of feedback is back as you're testing your messaging to smoke test some of this stuff. And so don't overcomplicate positioning. That's number one. Um, the other piece for early stage, I know we got a lot of folks who are idea stage, MVP stage, even those with paying customers, and this is also valid for, but you have to start small. Even when you look at some of these huge successful startups, some of the biggest ones here today, their very first markets and their very first positioning was hyper-focused. And the idea here is you want to be able to Dominate your early markets, not just be a, oh, that's nice, we're making progress, but absolutely dominate. And so like these examples should stand out. Obviously the Facebook's an obvious one, but like the eBay and the PayPal ones are really interesting. Like eBay, just going to people who sell collector's items. Sure, they wanted to sell everything. They wanted to get the, you know, the moms and dads who were doing garage sailing, but that's not who they focused on first. They had to go where the pain was the biggest, where the volume was the biggest. And then use that as a building block to snowball into these other markets. PayPal is just like the exact example on that. You see PayPal on just about every checkout page. They're using it for individual consumer-to-consumer payments. They started just with eBay sellers. They basically went over to eBay and they're like, hey, we know you have a lot of high transaction folks that are dealing with checks and all this different stuff. And they went and they won literally 90%, 100% of that market before they then said, okay, who's next? We've proven this works. And so you gotta start small. Another way to think about, well, how small? It should be relative to where you're at. And so it's just really funny. We get a lot of, um, seed and Series A companies that come to us, and especially the seed ones are usually doing a couple hundred thousand in ARR. And you talk to 'em about their positioning and they, they're thinking in terms of like, how are we gonna be a $100 million company? And that's so flawed. You can't, Your growth's not gonna happen that way overnight. And what they end up with is really watered-down positioning, which leads to really vague messaging and it just doesn't work. And so you gotta start really close to where you're at. And again, if you're just in that idea stage, like you're kind of just positioning for, can I get a single customer, right? And that'll help you shrink pretty aggressively either by location, like who are your friends, who's in your network? And then again, using that as building blocks to scale out. Another one here, and you'll see this come back in messaging as well, is at some point you will have to make a decision. This is that core question. One of the core questions that I talked about of like what comes into positioning, it's deciding who you're for. And there's a counterintuitive principle here that, and it's a mistake that founders make. They think, if I just leave my options open, there'll be more potentials for revenue. I'll cast a bigger net. And then I'll just figure it out. I'll see which one's best. There is a time and place for that, very early stage when you're really not sure and you're just, you're talking to people that are maybe in your network and you could throw out these ideas and you're looking for that pull. But if you're actually positioning, it's really about making that choice. And that's what this visual is meant to represent. And this is that first step toward repeatability when we think about our definition of product-market fit. When you double-click on that piece, and so how do you make that decision? There's the way that, and we use this as a tool to help founders make that choice because some of the founders who come to us do have a million in ARR or more, multiple millions. But when you start to look at that revenue, you'll usually find, especially in early stage, is it's coming from a lot of different folks, right? If we go back to the cube, it's coming from different parts of the cube. Different industries, slightly different use cases. Well, we came into the marketing team over here. We actually won with the engineering team over here. Those are signals that you have traction and possibly not fit. Fit is represented on the right-hand side from a go-to-market perspective. Is it repeatable? And anyone who's ever been in really any company, but especially a startup that's trying to grow, you'll know in terms of how they operationalize their decisions, who has fit and who doesn't. The ones where all their processes are breaking and you can't figure out what to put on the roadmap is usually the one that's Company A. They're just broad. They have multiple positions and they haven't really carved out a core position and they haven't really found fit with any given segment. And so we're trying to encourage founders here to move. Don't be Company A, be Company B. There's a time for Company A and experimentation, but then you have to make that choice. And so, okay, those are our principles for positioning. To recap, think small in the early days, position relative to where you are and what the actual milestones is for you in terms of goals. Um, and, and in doing so, it's really about just making some simple choices— who you're for, what you're building it to do. And if you get those right, you're on the, the right path. And so now I want to share with you what we call our minimum viable positioning framework. This gets a little bit more tactical into how we do this. Uh, and so you'll, you'll recognize some similarities here even to the cube model and how we think about things. And so the, the flow when we're working with with founders is usually starting market first. As I said in the very beginning, we were big believers in like, you gotta know who you're building for, what problem are you solving? And it starts with who has the fricking problem. In B2B, there are two elements to pull on there. The department, sometimes we'll call this team or the champion. And what we say in B2B is because it's multi-persona, you wanna pick the person or team that is close enough to the problem you have, but has enough influence to basically be your biggest cheerleader. And get you in front of a bunch of different audiences and stakeholders to eventually sell your deal. And we would say position for them, and then you can always support with additional messages for these different audiences, but this is gonna be the one to help you translate that. Company type usually is industry, sometimes it's business model, but it can also be other criteria and things like, well, what tech stack are they on? And like, what integration is it that's gonna power this eventual use case that we have? And so that's really step one here is identify the audience of who you're positioning for, who you're actually gonna message for. And then there's two approaches that we've uncovered doing this with over 150 companies to actually explain your product. And the idea is it's all about finding reference points to explain your product on or against. The most direct one is on use case, telling them exactly what they would use your product to do. For very novel new products, this isn't always the best route because the use case isn't that well known. It's like, well, we're not really doing that. That, which brings us into the competitive anchors. And even though we use the word competitive here, these are again just reference points. So it's not always a replacement, even though a lot of times it is. These are tools, methods, existing product categories, or sometimes specific competitors for people to understand when they might use your product. And so this is the model. An example is probably the best way to unpack this a bit. And so I actually, I just posted a version of this today, but if we took Slack as an example, Again, everyone in the room knows who this is. We're in tech, and so you kind of have to flash back to when Slack was beginning. They are horizontal. They also have to start kind of bottoms up from those smaller cubes in the way they think about messaging themselves. And so you start to get a sense here of like, well, these are the different teams they could have positioned for in the early days, as well as the different company types that they're now— and they have go-to-market programs that now span all of these. And what we surface here are potential use cases and potential competitive anchors to explain you against. And so if we take this one here, basically when we do this with with, uh, founders. We flush them all out and then we basically pressure test and say like, which one is the product actually really good at related to where the problem sucks the most? And which way of explaining it's the most compelling? And so if we take engineers at software companies doing code reviews, you can start to imagine, and this flushes this out, what the actual expression of that positioning could look like, um, where you're actually Saying like, hey, you would use Slack to do code reviews and here's exactly how you do it and the benefit that you could unpack. And Slack actually does this. If you go to one of their subpages, this is how they're leading with a message, is how they're positioning for engineering teams in one of their sub-go-to-market programs. Now, what if Slack— this one starts— went the competitive route? And not only does this one go the competitive route, but this is actually— and I'll share a little bit more in a second— this is audience agnostic positioning, which we don't always encourage. You could see the grayed out, there's no department, there's no company type. This is what they have on their homepage. And so they're trying to speak to all of these audiences, which I guess they can get by with a little bit today now that they have a little bit more brand recognition. But here they're positioning against email. And so when they're explaining themselves to support this positioning, instead of saying, here's all the use cases, they reference email as a way to then understand, oh, I, I know what I would use Slack for, and then they can craft a message to support how they actually do that. A couple more examples here. I brought up audience-agnostic positioning in that Slack example. Here are two more, especially for horizontal companies where— and Loom did this for a while in their growth stage where they positioned against very, uh, not email, but unproductive meetings. And in a competitive framework, another thing to keep in mind, usually when you're doing competing, especially when it's a replacement angle, It's a reflection of energy. You're trying to say, don't go left, go right. Don't book a meeting, send a video link instead. That's what Loom was trying to do by creating that reference point as a way to explain the product. Calendly did it a little differently. They weren't trying to get you to stop scheduling meetings online. That's what you were doing. That's the use case, the activity that's already being carried out. They're simply saying, we've got a 10x better way to do it. And so the energy is more of a capture of existing energy and saying, hey, we do it better. We're not trying to reflect the energy. And so these are the options that surface themselves. And what will happen now is you'll start to see these show up likely in messaging everywhere. We can't unsee them. As you progress, and even in like, if you go dig into these pages, they're likely using some layering of both approach. From a positioning standpoint, it's really just a matter of what you're leading with. What's the tip of the spear to get people to understand you? That starts to surface your potential value related to your application. And then final example here in the canvas, this is our company, Fletch. We are very focused, right? So when we think about minimum viable positioning, not only are we anchoring on use case in the way we position ourselves, but we also have the rest of these, these boxes filled out in detail in the way we explain ourselves. And so when you think about how you might apply this, it's really about how many of these anchoring points on the left-hand side that represent the market element elements can you lean into to more clearly explain your product? And as you might imagine, the more elements you have, the more specific that cube is, right? We're basically picking a more specific segment in the market. And so that's our, that's really how we view positioning, our minimum viable positioning framework to surface options. And really, again, it's about figuring out what's the clearest, most compelling way to explain your product to your ideal customer. I have some key principles on messaging. I said I'd keep this to 20 minutes, and so I'm gonna fly through these a little bit. They're very straightforward, and we can always circle back and double-click into some of these examples. The principles that I wanna share, and really the first one I really hit home 'cause it ties directly into positioning, but it's a mistake we see all the time. Market to your SOM, not your TAM. Market on use cases, not outcomes. We'll talk about this. Lead with capabilities, not benefits. Share first-order benefits, not second and third order, and then message on surface-level problems. And so I'll try and do a, let's do like a minute per on each of these, and then we'll get to some good Q&A. And so this is probably one of the biggest mistakes we see. I've hit on this a bit, so I'm actually just gonna share with you an example of what this starts to look like. If you start to message to too many segments at once when you're early, flat out, it's just not gonna work. No one knows who you are. You're gonna be broad. You're gonna end up with messages like this where you basically say, It could do anything and it could be for anyone. Like, you got to avoid this. We see this show up and sometimes we like to poke fun of it at larger companies. We see this show up all the time. These are actually messages that were used by very successful companies and we think they were doing themselves a disservice. One platform, many solutions. One workspace, endless solutions. Connect everything, achieve anything. And this again was a real one that we saw that We can't believe they're using that as a message. Market use cases, not outcomes. So what this really gets into is avoid abstractions, avoid what— and this is counter to what you hear in a lot of like marketing gurus that are out there that say sell the progress, sell the outcome. And there's some truth in that. You do sell the outcome, but when you're positioning and doing early messaging, the burden is on them even just understanding what the heck you do and who they're for. And so you can't do outcomes until they're clear on what the use case is and what they'd actually do with the product. And so we've got some funny examples here. Real advertisement on the left-hand side, actually telling you what you could do with it. You would go swimming in these shoes. If they hired a B2B marketer, they probably wouldn't do this. And we see SaaS and B2B scattered with this kind of thing all the time. Apple, we joke, Apple does a really wonderful job and granted they are a consumer product that has a physical good. So it's kind of baked in, but for them, if it was SaaS, they'd probably lead into one of these messages. I'll skip through some examples here. This is really the key thing I wanna, wanna be able to share. Be concrete. And we see this a lot. Executive ego is same thing as founder's vision. Be specific on what your product can do today, those use cases, and ignore these abstract outcomes that happen later. So really key principle in our framework. Next one here, lead with capabilities, not benefits. This goes hand in hand with the previous principle that we have, but this is where it really starts to get into like get into the product. And we, we built our value prop framework. Um, one of the core elements in there that we think was missing of like what's in a value proposition is this terminology we call capability. And the way we defined it is it's the, it's what someone would actually do with the feature. And so Loom video and screen recording, what would I do with it? Record quick demonstration videos to share with your team. Benefit, the outcome of of using that capability. And so this is really important here. Capabilities end up being not only the bridge to benefits, but they're the thing you should lead with, right? So they're the connecting piece of, oh, there's the use case, here's the capability for how I would actually address that use case, here's the benefit of the capability, and then I can get to these higher-level second-order outcomes, as I'll speak to in a moment. So really important, and sorry for flying around, but I want to hit on these and get to the— get to your questions. Share first-order benefits, not multi-order benefits. And so assuming you're leading with use case and supporting with capabilities, then we talk about benefits. And these come in a lot of different flavors. This is the key visual that I wanna share. The core takeaway here is your, your broader outcomes and benefits are gonna be your least differentiated. And in B2B, all roads lead to get more customers, save time, make more money, grow revenue of some way, shape, or form. But everybody says this, and so like if you say this, it's just not differentiated, right? And so what we say is pull— come back to as close to the product as you can and speak to those benefits, right? So Asana, your team will complete projects way faster. It's like, that's— if you use their project management tool, that's a first-order benefit that you could use to message. You could always walk it out. Well, if I complete projects faster, I'll launch more features. If I launch more features, I'll increase— my customers will be happier. If my customers are happier, they'll probably tell more people about it. And if they tell more people about it, more people will probably get more customers and more customers means more revenue. There's such a tendency to message out here. And when you sell, you do have to eventually get to this on a personalized level. But when you position and market, you gotta stay closer to here. One more example here just to kind of hit this home, like real, uh, real messaging in the wild. None of these products directly compete with each other. We got Gong, that's like revenue intelligence, you know, listening in on sales calls. Mutiny, really website personalization. Pocus is a product-led growth. Dreamdata is an attribution tool. They're all completely different, serving very different use cases. They all say grow revenue and they all sound alike and they're doing themselves a disservice from a positioning standpoint. Okay. Last one here, message on surface-level problems. So like the final piece of like the value proposition in our, in our model and our framework. We see this a lot with, and this is well-intentioned, but this issue happens. Yeah, we'll work with this example. The idea here is that your target prospects and customers likely don't know as much about the problem you're solving. Because if you're building your product from a really differentiated way, usually it means you're solving it from a core first principle standpoint. So like core problem. And so if we walk out this example, uh, that could be tempting. Let's say you're a warehouse solution, um, that you basically have an efficient rotation system for warehouses so that packages are always delivered on time. It can be tempting to mesh and message near the bottom down here. Where you're really speaking to like, is your warehouse shift rotation system not very efficient? Your target audience probably doesn't think of this, right? And so when we go back up to the surface, this is like, what are they really struggling with? These are the things they're struggling with. Well, our packages keep getting delayed. Well, why are they getting delayed? Well, the loading process takes longer than we realize. Why does it take longer? Well, we have really limited staff to load the trucks. Why do you have limited staff? Because employees have been taking unscheduled time off. Why are employees taking unscheduled time off? Because we don't have an efficient system, right? And so even if this is the problem you're solving, you have to message on the struggling moments because this is what's going to earn you a conversation where then you can educate them and bring them down to the root cause of this. And so same idea here, and then we'll jump to questions, but for Gong, Gong basically is solving at the very core It's a data silo problem. Data's everywhere. It's not connected. And then there's all these lost insights. But if you go to a VP of sales and tell him he's got a data silo problem, he's going to look at you weird and be like, get out of here. I don't, I, what are you talking about? Data silo problem. But if you go to that VP of sales and you say, hey, I bet you listen to one of your, your reps and they're not using the most up-to-date pitch. They're likely going to change their tune. They go, my gosh. That's exactly what I'm struggling with. And then you create this opportunity for dialogue and conversation around like, well, how are you actually gonna make sure that my rep is using the right sales pitch? And this goes into then like you can apply your product into this piece. And so last principle for us, message on service level problems and not root cause problems when it comes to your marketing. All right. And that is what I wanted to cover. Probably a good segue into Q&A and I will be able to hang around also for a bit of the, networking.

Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much for that presentation, Rob. I think the content was amazing. The folks agree. You can probably see all the emojis on your screen right now— a ton of applause, hearts, all that good stuff. And also a really cool thing is we had over— in fact, we still have over 300 people, uh, live with us So yeah, awesome. You're a pretty popular guy, like Ehan said.

Totally appreciate you all sticking around and thanks for joining us today. What's the best way, Daniel, to maybe knife into some of these questions?

Awesome. So what I'll do is I'll just bring the questions on stage one by one and we can kind of go through them. I know you spoke about this briefly at the start of your presentation, but just for the folks in the audience, could you maybe talk about this again? How do you know when you've achieved product market fit for an early stage startup?

Yeah, this is one of those funny things where if you have to ask, you don't have it kind of a thing. And so some of the other definitions that come in that I think are more qualitative, the one that I've always quite liked just from a qualitative nature, and I believe it's Michael Siebel at YC talks about it of like It's basically when people are pulling the product out of your hand faster than you can actually build it, right? So things are fundamentally breaking. The issue is, is that's not a very helpful definition, right? And so for us, I, I come back of like, how do I know I have fit? It starts to get when it really comes back to two words, predictability and repeatability across everything that you're doing. And so in our model, when we think about repeatability, can I continue to get in front of new prospects? That I think will likely buy my product, right? And that's part of that go-to-market fit. If you get in front of 'em and that's really the name of the game for early stage, you're gonna have some success. And then the question is, can I repeatedly close them? Like how good am I at closing them, right? That solves for the first half of the equation of can I show value? Can I show the credibility and trust that I actually can solve the problem enough for them to give me money? Big part of it. Then they come into the product. You actually have to get them to value. And so it's very possible to have a really good foothold and path into product market fit where you're finding people, you're selling people, but if the product doesn't do what it says it does, and you see this in SaaS, you'll hear the terminology like a leaky bucket. It means you don't have all the way fit. You found, you found a real market problem. You found a real way to sell, but your solution's off. And so you, that's where you start to fix, fix the leaky bucket. And there's a ton— you start to get into a bunch of stuff like where's the value? Are we activating right? Is there too many features? All the things. But if you actually solve for those 3 things, retention will be there. And not only retention, upsell, cross-sell, word of mouth, and the whole system becomes stable. And so good question. Big question. That's how we think of it in terms of the moving pieces and parts.

Awesome. Thank you for that answer. And I think this is a good segue into the next question here from Brian. Is a concierge MVP the best way to find product market fit in the idea stage, uh, pre-MVP? Like what's kind of the best structure here?

Yeah. Best is relative. I love concierge MVPs. I think not only are they cheap and easy to do, but they're just super effective. They force you to actually prioritize the most critical pieces of that first part if you're actually trying to sell something. The concierge approach is basically how we built Fletch. My partner and I, we started publicly trying to scratch problems on LinkedIn where we're like consulting in public, trying to say, hey, this is an issue with product marketing and this is an issue with messaging, all these things. And like, we didn't have it yet. This is a few years ago now. And people would come in and what that got us is a little bit of trust and credibility where someone, a founder would eventually raise their hand and say, Hey, can you help me? And we'd hop on a call and we'd be like, what do you need help with? And we were pitching really from the hip live. We had, we didn't have very many frameworks. We didn't have a service. And this analogy from a software standpoint, don't have the whole product, but we did have, we knew we were onto something in terms of our approach. And so we were very comfortable. And this is what I encourage early stage founders. You have to be comfortable selling something that isn't there. It's, it's not sketchy because if your intentions are in the right place, you are there trying to help. And you should use that honesty as a, as a place to balance the conversation. And this is what a lot of founders get wrong is they think like, no, if I don't have it, that's like sleazy sales stuff. You should tell your early prospects after you've had the conversation that, oh, by the way, like this is like the first time we're doing this, right? And so like, cuz with there comes benefits, it's like, well, you get white glove and we're gonna customize it for you. But just know, like, there might be some bumps along the way, and like, that tells you that you're on the right path. And so the short answer to your question: I love the concierge model. I think it's underused, but it is relative to what you're building because, you know, if you're going a high-tech route, you know, you think SpaceX and all that, you can't really concierge a rocket. And so you just got to be mindful of your constraints and prioritize the key pieces of like what you're testing in a way that's really reasonable and also ethical.

Awesome. Yeah, you can't really consider as a rocket.

So unfortunately, no.

Yeah, unfortunately. So moving on to the next question here, uh, we have this from Pashkal. How can one position scalably with multiple products? For example, multiple HR product startups positioning for scale.

Yeah, this one here, we see this all the time. Find the wedge. Um, actually, if you give me Give me one moment here. I can bring up another visual that'll help guide this answer. The fact, like, especially early stage, right? And so I know we don't have the context totally of whether you're, um, you have traction or you're just getting started. And here's the visual you think about, but especially if you're just getting started, share my screen. When you have multiple products, right? This goes into that piece of I am either a suite or I am a platform that can do all these things. There's 3 ways to approach that. The one that I can't recommend more is sell the main wedge. And Stripe did this for a while. Stripe has 19 products today in the financial space, which they call like their financial infrastructure. But if you go even to today's positioning, they position around payments. The first 3 scrolls of their website are all leading with payments, payments, payments, because they know if they can be well known for payments, they can then upsell and cross-sell all their other products and bring you into that suite. It's also the best route because remember you have limited resources. So the idea that you think you can go build 3 use cases for 3 different groups at the same time, like getting 1 to work is super hard. You're not gonna get 3 to work. It can happen. It takes a lot of time. This is where we start to get into selling multiple wedges. Monday did this. The issue here, it's so capital intensive. This is huge risk bet and they basically outraised everyone. They built multiple products and then they went to market with 3 products and then use them as this like cohesive platform on the backend. You can do it. Not one I recommend, especially not for early, early stage and definitely not for like finding fit. I think it's super risky. And then this last one is just selling the bundle, calling yourself the thing like we do all things and it's really just a collection of multiple products. You can do this route if you have virality in your product. So you think of the Calendlys, the Looms, the Slacks, right? Like Calendly's a great example by using the product. There's a lot of talk of product-led growth. They have built-in virality. Everyone who schedules with someone on Calendly sees the product and how it works, and then they likely try it out. They can get by and they're, again, they're not a platform, so it's probably not the perfect example, but they can get by doing broader things. And like Slack's probably the better example where there's multiple pieces in it. The other thing to remember when you're doing this bundle piece, and even Microsoft is like the gold standard, this took 'em like 50 years. They didn't even do it this way. They're doing this now. They started with the wedge. I'm pretty sure they built either Word or Excel first and then they branched out. And so, um, it's an awesome question. To recap, I highly recommend focusing on a single use case, find fit with one product, one segment first, and then you can broaden and scale and expand from there sequentially.

Awesome. And because you're talking about Monday and obviously they've raised a bunch of money. We have this question here, Rob, what's the average time to find product market fit in SaaS? They've seen 12 months, 24 months in various publications. Of course that depends, but for investors, et cetera, that knowledge, it's kind of important, right? And just to kind of add to this a little bit, maybe Rob, if you have any insights on you know, the time that one should spend looking for product-market fit as it relates to trying to raise funds? Because we are kind of now seeing more and more investors looking for more product-market fit-ready startups, right?

Because, because of the way the market is right now, the pendulum has swung back, right? Money is harder to come by, uh, and you're seeing a lot of VCs that are being thinking about efficient growth and profitability, which you don't usually see. I think that's exciting. I think it does put pressure back on the founders, but in a good way. It makes them get their priorities straight. And so there's a couple questions in there. The first one, time to product market fit. My goal is not to scare founders in the room. Many years is the benchmark. Like to me, 5+ years, if you're lucky, if you're fast. The news and media, They show companies that find it in 18 months. They are the outliers. They are the 0.01% of the 1%. And so I hope everyone has that. It's so rare. And if you, even if you ask those founders, the ones that find it that quickly, they'll be the first to tell you how lucky they are. They either, they got found some crazy trend and actually they didn't even find it. They bumped into it, like something happened. You know, you look at like COVID happening, right? I think that vaulted a lot of these companies, these remote-first products right into fit before they were ready. And that's fine. And the ones that are surviving and flourishing, they basically are like, oh shit, we better figure this out. And great. Now they're super profitable and successful and they had all the growth. The reality is this stuff is just incredibly hard. There's no playbook, right? There's guides and frameworks and models you can follow, which is why we do this to help bring some of the complexity out of it. But it just takes really, really hard work for a lot of time and a lot of focus. And I think, I don't think it's talked about enough because I think a lot of founders jump in assuming like, I'm going to give this a try for 12 months. I think that's a pretty poor mindset to building things. I think even if you're, and you're not going to be able to predict where it goes, you should be really excited about the space that you're in. And I think that's where the concept of pivots comes in, where sure, you can give it a try for 12 to 12, to 24 months, knowing that you might then have to build a whole new thing on month 25, but where you're still on the 2, 3, 5, 10-year track. And so they just take a lot of time. That was the first piece in terms of length to fit. Daniel, help me out. There was a second component in there.

And I'm— Yeah, more so the question was, you know, what should founders expect in terms of like how quickly should they be looking for product market fit as it kind of relates to fundraising?

Ah, fundraising. That's what it was. Um, to me, I look at fundraising, uh, it's kind of interesting and there's actually studies that kind of back this up. Founders are very, uh, willing to take risk, but when you actually like boil it down, they're actually quite risk averse. And that's how I think about fundraising. I would be very reluctant to take money. I would only take money if it helps me scale something I've already built. To me, taking money to figure out how to finish building the plane in the sky, I always found as like, that's silly. And there's some— there are exceptions, I would say, like if you really do have a reputation and accessibility to the money, like there's some people that'll say, yeah, take it and run with it. You're doing it on someone else's dime. That's fine. To me, what I see is that money without fit or without a good portion of fit, if you think across our model, is a recipe for disaster. You're going to make all the wrong decisions at all the wrong times because it's, well, it's time to be at $10 million ARR. I guess I better come up with a plan for $10 million ARR. That's not how the markets work, right? That's not how customers get value from your product. You have to build it brick by brick. And so like, to me, the inverse of this question is like, why do I think most companies fail? The venture-backed ones scaling too fast. And at the root of that is taking money too early. And so there's no set benchmark. It kind of depends on access to funds, how willing you are to take the risk that you could build it midair. I think about the benchmark for me is that when I, when I feel, and a lot of this is qualitative, but also when I have proof of repeatability And predictability, then I'm ready to take money because then it's not— I can actually see the potential outcome and I know exactly what I'm gonna use the money for. And I just think not enough people, they just like get money and I guess I build a team. I'd rather give me money so I can go put X dollars into this and Y dollars into that for the next 12 months so that I can get results Z. Like that's how I think about it. And if I don't have X, Y, and Z in that answer, I'm just not ready, and I would say most founders aren't.

Yeah, and I think it also kind of speaks to determining whether or not you're even a venture-backable business too, right? Because a lot of founders, they said they have their heart set on raising, but like, as you kind of go along, look for product-market fit, build out your product, you realize, hey, maybe, you know, I don't, I can't make like $100 million, you know?

Well, that's, that's, that is a beautiful question too. It's like, what are your goals? And VC money will tell you your goals. It's to be a billion-dollar company, it's to get to $100 million ARR. Most founders, they don't really want that goal. Like some founders want, you know, some of them just want to solve problems and work on cool stuff. That's great. Some of them do want to make $10 million, retire early, you know, work on things they're passionate about. That's cool too. It's like each financial goal has its own route. And like, I look at a lot of venture, I look at a lot of startups that are trying to be billion-dollar companies and I go, and I see so many that are like, man, there's a wonderful $50 million business here and you're screwing it up trying to turn it into this billion-dollar company. I think that I probably have that sense like once or twice a week when I work with a lot of these founders.

Yeah. Interestingly, we had Gagan, who's the founder of Maven and Udemy. He also kind of spoke about this in one of our webinars last week, was just about how, you know, when you take VC money, it's essentially do or die, right? So sometimes you end up realizing, hey, this is like a $10 million problem, right? Or maybe like a $100K problem and not like $100 million. Yeah, so what I'll do is I'll move on to the next question. We have a few more minutes before we hop on to the networking lounge. So we have this question here from Al. From a sales business development perspective, what are some signs that your product market fit isn't working or your market isn't responding as you anticipated?

Yeah, first thing here, if you go back to our model, can you get in front of your target audience repeatedly? And so one of the first questions I would ask a founder is, how many meetings are you getting every day, every week? And then, you know, you then look at, there'll be some number, or hopefully it's big, but it's probably not just based on the way the question is framed. It's like, okay, well, what are you doing to try and get those meetings? And then what you could start to do is see, you know, what tactics are being effective. Not that the goal is to test those go-to-market motions and channels. But it'll show up two ways in terms of like, is it working? Sheer metrics, like, are we getting in front of people? The other one is qualitative. And the tricky thing here is that most founders take shortcuts in the early days. And I'm gonna pick on running ads for a minute. There, Ads can be an effective testing strategy early on. So I'm not saying it can't work this way, but if you start by running ads, to me it's, to me it's lazy. Um, number one, it's very inefficient and overall ineffective as a channel. Anyone will tell you that. And that's why usually when you see companies, um, go to scale, it will be on their list of their dashboard of the worst performing channel tactic thing that works. The other thing is that ads, you can't get any of the qualitative insights that you can from interactions with your target prospects. And so I always encourage founders, the first thing you have to solve for, you have to be able to be in front of your customers at all. I would say at all times is the goal, but at the very least, like half of the day. And so like the analogy I have in my business is, is LinkedIn. We spend our whole day on LinkedIn. On any given day, we're posting every day, responding in the comments. I get to chat with 10 to 20 founders there. On any given day, I've got 20 to 50 founders messaging me, asking questions. I get to interact with them there. I meet with probably somewhere between 10 and 25 founders a week on little consultations, sometimes sales calls. I'm interacting with founders there and I spend the rest of my time with founders in our work. I am 100% immersed in my target customer. And so I know what they think. I know where they hang out. I know what their problems are. There's no replacement for spending all that time. When you run an ad, I spent $100, this many people clicked, you get none of the insights. You have no idea what questions are behind it. You have no idea the context and details. And so, um, I may be expanding on this question a little bit too much, but I always just bake it down to like, can you get in front of your customers? And it, The last thing I'll say, and this is really funny because there's some founders we come across, they have wonderful ideas and they're like, it's perfect for, and then they'll insert name. They'll say like director of product at these kinds of companies in this industry. Like, that's awesome. Do you know any of those people? And then they're like, well, well, no, no. I mean, we'd have to go talk to them. It's like, there's your first problem. You have, you have no access to the people you're trying to help. Right. And this is why all the advice of like solve your own problem, solve your network's problem, people you're really close to, you have to have it in some level, or if not, you got to solve for it really quickly. And so access to your customer, like the number one leading piece, and there's a lot of ways to measure that.

Awesome. So there you have it, folks. You have to talk to your customer. So, Rob, what I'm going to do is I'll head on to the last question here. And I think this is a pretty good one from Richard. How do I know if it's a product problem rather than a market problem when trying to find product-market fit or vice versa?

This is a pretty awesome question. So thank you for this, Richard. It's an awesome question because it's not always gonna be obvious, right? One of the ways to think about it, If you go back to our framework on product market fit of like the find, sell, get to value, if you struggle to get people to value, like that's where, that's where it's going to show up first. Right. And so there's a, there's a peer of ours who helps with product market fit. His name's Rob Snyder. He posts a lot about it on LinkedIn. He's got an interesting framing of product market fit is about, and it's very similar to ours, but a repeatable case study. Um, and so when you get into that, and so when you start to say like, oh, is there not a market? Or is it my product sucks? It's about splitting that out, splitting out our model a little bit. And so there is a market if you can get in front of people, right? The eyeballs. If someone's willing to talk to you about some challenge or activity they're having, it's a really good signal of a potential market. Market because time is their currency, right? If they're not willing to give you time, first signal, hmm, no one, man, people say this is a problem, but no one wants to talk about it. And we see this one a lot where a problem will just be out there, but it's not severe enough or it's not expensive enough for someone to actually go solve. What we would say is there, that's a potential market that has not yet become a market. And this is a spectrum, right? Because obviously some people are going to care about about that problem more than others? This is where that volume comes in. And so that's the first thing. Can you get people to talk about the problem you're solving? Good signal, there's a market. The next big one, will they put money where their mouth is? Time is a good one, but when it comes to fit, we're building businesses here. You gotta have the exchange of cash. And so a tactic for early stage, especially idea stage, but this works across the board. If you're ever in a conversation with a prospect or a customer, or maybe you're just doing Discovery and research, make sure you're teeing it up almost like it's a sales call, even if you're not. And at the end of the session, say, hey, and there's a lot of ways to do this. Say, hey, you know what? Right now we have a 50% off discount. I can get you signed up for X dollars. Can I have your credit card? The moment you bring money into the equation, everything you will hear after you put that pressure on them is the truth. And I've seen this, I've done so many market discovery, customer discovery interviews, and so many don't ask this question. And it blows my mind because you'll get so much bad data. You'll ask someone, man, is this important? Yeah, that problem's important. Oh, what are you doing about it? Well, we struggle with this. And it's like, well, let me show you what I've got. And then they're like, oh, this is amazing. This is so cool. I love what you're building. It's, it's, it's, I love it. They give you all this positive stuff. You're ready to run back to your team and say, they love it. Let's build the thing. Let's turn on marketing. You ask the question, okay, it's $100. Can I sign you up? Well, well, you see, and then they're gonna tell you what they really think. And I, and it happens over and over and over again. So try and close. The crux of this, can you get in front of 'em? Are they willing to give you time? Are they willing to give you money? If not, there's probably not a market and it's not a product problem. It's a market problem. The product problem will show up. When they've given you money and then the thing's breaking and everybody leaves, probably a product problem.

Awesome, awesome. There you have it, folks. Rob, thank you so much for doing this with us. And to everybody on the call today, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, Rob, thanks for having me. Yeah, awesome. Uh, before we kind of close things out, Rob, would you want to maybe share some insights or any parting words?

The biggest one, I'll hit it again, man, it's not a crazy idea to figure out a way to just live with your customers if you're not your customer. That is the, especially for the early stage folks. If you're later stage, get specific. Those are like, would be the two takeaways that are like underlying everything that we do and how we help early stage companies. The other thing, I know there's a lot of folks in here, a lot of questions we didn't get to. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn, connect. We connect with everyone. Again, you guys are basically my market and my peers in a lot of different ways. We're very active there, so join the conversation. We're posting every day. Give us a little bit of time. We haven't— we don't use AI and we haven't outsourced any of our messages yet, which is getting a little difficult, but please drop us a message and we'll do our best to get back to you.

Awesome, thank you so much, Rob, for being here. Uh, folks, thank you for joining us. Uh, before we close things out, remember we do still have time for our networking. So Rob, hopefully if you have a little bit of time, uh, the FI team will also be there and you can also talk to founders from across the world. And another really exciting thing is we have an event on AI in finance coming up on Wednesday. I'll share the link in the chat. If you want, you know, if you want to kind of like upgrade, update your financial operations using AI and automation, feel free to join that event. Folks, thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you in the next one.