A Product Market Fit Show Mistral.vc

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 ARR



Why you should listen:


- Learn exactly how a successful repeat founder thinks about team structure in the early days. Though he raised $11M, he spent only a third of it.


- Understand why sometimes giving your product away for free is the best way to get off the ground.


- Hear about specific sales tactics you may want to use to get your first customers.

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:30) Before Clumio




(00:05:53)  Raising 7 Million Dollars off a Power Point





(00:09:35) Starting Clumio





(00:16:41) Starting Conversations with Customers




(00:20:08) Finding and Solving the Real Pain Points




(00:24:18) The Stage Between Series A and B




(00:26:02) Keep your Team Lean




(00:27:47) Finding True Product Market Fit




(00:29:06) One Piece of Advice

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 Arvind Jain does things differently at the 0 to 1 stage.
- Why he thinks conviction and persistence are the most important qualities founders need.
- When you should follow playbooks and when to write your own.
- Why it might not matter that most people don't "get" your idea in the early days.

Timestamps:
(2:02) Leaving Google
(3:39) Coming up with Glean
(7:47) Building a Product in a Neglected Space
(11:38) Skipping Lean Startup
(14:11) Using design partners
(16:13) Building for 2 years, with 0 revenue
(20:13) When it's time to launch
(21:12) Why AI was a key tailwind
(26:25) Finding Product Market Fit on Day One
(27:32) One Piece of Advice

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 valuation (!!). 

He shares his four-part B2C framework that helped him understand why Evan and Snap were special before anyone else. 

If you want to understand why Snapchat took off when so many other consumer startups fail to do so, check this episode out. 

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M. 

But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him. 

So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backed startup world, it’s a totally different way to play the game. It won’t make you a billionaire. But it very well may make you $10M— with less stress, less work, and less risk. 

If you want a transparent account of the pros/cons of a venture-backed vs a bootstrapped startup, check this episode out.

While Voice AI is all the rage now, it wasn't a hot sector in 2017. After Dylan graduated from YC, VCs rejected him. He couldn't raise a round. They all assumed Google would do it. So he raised what he could from angels and made it work for the next 3 years.

He's now built the world's most accurate Speech AI model. He's grown to 5,000 customers and raised $115M in venture capital. Last quarter, he raised a $50M Series C from Accel. 

Just this week,  Assembly launched Universal-1, their most powerful speech recognition model to date. Trained on over 12.5 million hours of multilingual audio data, Universal-1 is 22% more accurate than APIs from Azure/AWS/Google and has 30% fewer hallucinations than competing models.

In this episode, we go through how Dylan came up with the idea, how he saw Gen AI coming long before others, and what he did in the early days to grow to $1M in ARR.

Andrew is the founder/CEO of Enable. And he is riding a rocket ship:
2020: $17M Series A
2021: $45M Series B
2022: $94M Series C 
A few months ago he raised $120M at a $1B valuation. 

But it took him five years from the time he started Enable in 2015 until he was able to raise his first round in 2020. 

Andrew was running a profitable development shop as he built the first version of Enable. He often had to chase down customers so he could make the next payroll. He had to balance serving existing customers while building an entirely new startup. Ultimately, he had to move to SF to raise a round and accelerate growth.

We go through the details of how Andrew turned a 'boring' enterprise software company from the UK into one of America's hottest new unicorns.