A Product Market Fit Show Mistral.vc

Dane was the CEO of Squarespace from 2007 to 2011. He grew the company from ~$2M in revenue to ~$15M. He's a multi-time founder with multiple exits. His current startup, Odeko, raised $227M.He takes us through his long journey as a founder of multiple companies and shares the key startup lessons he's learned.Why you should listen:- Why 7-day trials led to higher conversion than 30-day trials at Squarespace- Why you should talk to customers every single day.- Why SMB usage doesn't always...

His first startup was a cool idea: Uber for Valet Parking. Investors loved it. But the unit economics didn't work out. So he had to pivot. He ended up selling it, but decided to do things differently the second time around.“It’s the boring stuff that makes money. Sometimes the sexy, interesting things are really great ideas, fun to use, but aren’t money makers. They aren’t durable businesses.”With Argyle, he didn't start with a cool idea. He replaced a product customers already paid for. His ...

His travel startup crashed 90% overnight. Here’s how he used AI to grow past $2M/year—to $2M a month:For a while, Andrew was crushing it. Accelerator -> $750K pre-seed -> $2M ARR -> $2.5M seed round. Then COVID hit. He was selling to events like CES, SXSW, etc. Revenue dropped from $160K/month to under $10K... overnight. Investors from his seed round refuse to wire funds. After nearly going bankrupt, he finds a way to pivot. A year later, his business takes off.2020 -...

Poojan is a multi-time successful founder. He raised $60M for his first startup and exited. He just raised a $75M Series D at his current startup. But it wasn't always easy.- In his first startup, he had to hover beside conference booths for hours to land his first customer.- He gave his product away for free to the first several customers.- It took him 6 years to cross $10M in ARRWhy you should listen:- Learn exactly how a successful repeat founder thinks about team structure in the early da...

Arvind founded 2 billion-dollar startups—by doing everything lean startup tells you not to do. - He didn’t focus on launching an MVP. - He ignored early market feedback. - He didn’t charge beta users anything— for 2 years. And it worked. He went from $0 to $3M in revenue the year he launched publicly. He tripled to about $9M the year after. And tripled every year since. Two months ago, Glean raised $200M at a $2B valuation. Why you should listen:- Learn exactly how outlier founder Arvin...

Snapchat got 0 downloads the day it launched. 5 months in, it had only 127 users. Today Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. Evan Spiegel noticed what even Zuck missed: daily communication is meant to be ephemeral, not recorded for all time.In this episode, we dive deep into how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit. Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M val...