Humans are one of the most awe-inspiring creatures that have ever graced this planet. Even though we don’t have the sharpest claws or toughest skins nor can we innately survive -50 degrees Fahrenheit, we’ve crafted tools and environments to help us survive in brutal nature. But arguably, our greatest trait is that we’re capable of writing huge epics that transcend our individual abilities and contributions. And share these narratives to inspire not only ourselves but the fellow humans around us.
A member of the our proud race, founders are no different. They are some of the greatest forecasters out there. To use Garry Tan’s Babe Ruth analogy, founders have the potential of hitting a home run in the direction they point. They build worlds, universes, myths and realities that define the future. They live in the future using the tools of today. In fact, there’s a term for it. First used by Bud Tribble in 1981 to describe Steve Jobs’ aura when building the Macintosh – the reality distortion field.
Yet, we humans are all prone to anxiety. A story nonetheless. Simply, one we tell ourselves of the future that restricts our present self’s ability to operate effectively. Anxiety comes in many shapes and sizes. For founders, one of said anxieties is attempting and worrying about the future without addressing the reality today. In the early days, it’s attempting scale before achieving product-market fit (PMF). Building a skyscraper without surveying the land – land that may be quicksand or concrete.
Here are four signs – some may not be as intuitive as the others:
One of my favorite thought exercises to do when I meet with founders who have reached the A- and B-stages (or beyond) is:
“What will his/her company look like if he/she is no longer there?”
The Preface
While the question looks like one that’s designed to replace the founder(s), my intention is everything but that. Rather, I ask myself that because I want to put perspective as to how the founder(s) have empowered their team to do more than they could independently. Where the collective whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Have the founders built something that is greater than themselves? And is each team member self-motivated to pursue the mission and vision?
“Well, Mr. President,” the janitor responded, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.”
From the astronaut who was to go into space to the janitor cleaning the halls of NASAs space center, each and every one had the same fulfilling purpose that they were doing something greater than themselves.
And if the CEO is able to do that, their potential to inspire even more and build a greater company is in sight. Can he/she scale him/herself? And in doing so, scale the company past product-market fit (PMF)?
For the purpose of this post, I’ll take scale from a culture, hiring, operating, and product perspective, though there are much more than just the above when it comes to scale. Answering the questions, as a founder:
How do you expand your audience?
How do you build a team to do so?
And, how do you scale yourself?
And to do so, I’ll borrow the insights of 10 people who have more miles on their odometer than I do.
While many of these lessons are applicable even in the later stages of growth, I want to preface that these insights are largely for founders just starting to scale. When you’ve just gone from zero to one, and are now beginning to look towards infinity.
The TL;DR
Build a (controversial) shocking culture.
Hire intentionally.
Retaining talent requires trust.
Build and follow an operating philosophy.
Create, hold, and share excitement.
Align calendars.
Upgrade adjacent users as your next beachhead.
Capture adoption by changing only 1 variable per user segment.
I was recently inspired by a fascinating conversation between Mike Maples Jr., co-founder and partner at Floodgate, and Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Benchmark Capital and Wealthfront, but more interestingly, the founder of the term, product-market fit, or PMF – a term that signifies when a product is recognized by a strong demand in the market. Over the years, there have been various ways entrepreneurs, go-to-market strategists, and investors have defined when an idea reaches product-market fit. But before I dive into the PMF, let’s take a look at market definitions first, which admittedly is a step off the beaten path.
The Markets
How I Like to Think about Market Sizes. *Not drawn to scale
Traditionally, the total addressable market (TAM), serviceable addressable market (SAM), and the serviceable obtainable market (SOM) are defined according to the geographic location of your market. It makes sense – your market is as big as where you can offer the service. But now, in an increasingly connected world, technologies are less and less inhibited by the geographical boundaries that plagued the decades before. That said, there are still cultural, social and economic differences when accessing new demographics, which is why I like to characterize the TAM, SAM, and SOM by psychological resistances to new ideas. The TAM is still defined by the total upside potential of a product, where it still excludes laggards, or folks who would most likely never (seek to) use your product. The SAM is construed of people who would use the product after three to five friends in their network recommend and are using the product themselves. And finally, the SOM consists of customers who are desperate, as Andy Rachleff called it, for your product. They have spent sweat, blood, and tears finding or building their own solution. They have already traversed the idea maze themselves and put the dollar (or the euro, peso, krone, pound, yen, RMB, BTC, ETH… you get my point) here their mouth is at. And here, in the SOM, is where you find your product-market fit.
Product-Market Fit
PMF is most noticeable on the hockey stick curve. Before PMF, traction is slow and looks very much like the blade of a hockey stick. And after PMF, traction skyrockets and exemplifies exponential growth.
The Hockey Stick Curve
While there are many heuristics to assess PMF across different verticals, I’m the most fluent in consumer tech where I’ve spent most of my time in. And in consumer tech, I’d like to underscore the notion of ‘exponential organic growth’, and subsequently, a short analysis on each word of that phrase.
Exponential is probably the most straight-forward, where at the early stages of a business, we’re looking for rapidly compounding growth.
Organic growth, as opposed to paid growth, is a measurement for word-of-mouth. Investors tend to measure the effectiveness of a product by its virality from its initial customers to its nth customer – growth that is achieved without directly spending (ad) dollars on acquiring the new customers.
Growth is something I break down into – retention and adoption. Increasing adoption is great as measured by the growth of total users on consumer platform or for a consumer product, but focusing only on adoption leads to a leaky funnel, or in my case, trying to hold too many groceries in my hand without a shopping cart. Every time I grab another item on the shopping list, I drop some other item I was already trying to balance and hold. Of course, focusing only on retention means there’s no growth, which for keeping your best friend circle is fine (unless you want a thousand BFFs), but not for growing a startup.
Below are some growth signs to pay attention to signify that your product is near/at PMF:
Retention
Adoption
> 25% DAU/MAU
100s of organic signups/day
40% are active day after signup
> 30% MoM growth
Usage 3 days out of every week
“Idea-Market Fit”
As a founder with an ambitious idea, reaching product-market fit is a great goal to have, but the truth is PMF is a mystical beast – a chimera – in and of itself. Market demands change; what satisfied the definition of PMF a decade ago may not satisfy it now and will most likely not satisfy it ten years from now. Many studies have shown that most startups don’t fail from technological risk, but rather the inability to reach PMF, which ends up leading to lack of investor interest, demotivation, and the founding team falling apart. And quite obviously, before you reach PMF, the hardest part about starting a business is reaching PMF, or what Peter Thiel and many call the Zero to One. I’ll dive into the lessons I learned about the journey to “1” in future posts, but for the purpose of this post, I’m going to focus on the “0” – or what I like to call, “idea-market fit“, or IMF.
What differentiates a good idea from a great money-making idea? I’m going to borrow Andy’s thought calculus exercise. In a 2×2 matrix with right/wrong on one axis and consensus and non-consensus on the other, “you want to be right on the non-consensus.”
Andy Rachleff’s 2×2 Startup Idea Matrix
Why? Discounting the situations where you’re wrong (because you don’t make much, if any money), if you’re right on consensus, it means the market’s already mature, and perfect competition in a capitalistic market squeezes you out of your profit margins. If you do pursue this option as a founder, you’re more or less tackling an execution risk. On the other hand, if you’re right on the non-consensus, the market is still nascent, and you have the potential for monopolistic control of the market. In other words, you’re taking a market risk.
It definitely isn’t intuitive. At the very least, it wasn’t to me when I was on the operating side of the table. I wanted validation. When I was at Localwise helping build a community of local talent, I wanted people to say “I totally agree” or “You’re onto something.” But often times, I just received friction and resistance, with the toughest to receive from some of my friends.
“No one would ever buy that.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“When are you going to get a real job?”
And at some points in time, I did think, “Maybe they’re right.” Until I started meeting a few people who thought a hiring destination for local mom-and-pop shops wasn’t a bad idea, and especially when small business owners started opening up about their frustrations. Hiring platforms, at that time, focused on the sexier brands and companies to get more demand side traction – the Googles, the Big Four’s, or the Bains, but had seemingly completely underrepresented the population of local businesses. Even if these SMBs were on these other platforms, they were overshadowed by the presence of bigger brands.
When validating startup ideas, you don’t want consensus. If your idea is truly revolutionary, people have yet to be conditioned to accept the idea. Take Uber or Airbnb, for example. If you asked the average person if they would use such a product, most would have thought that you’d be crazy to have a stranger sharing a car ride or home with them. These days, take e-sports or streaming. If someone told me in my pre-teen days that I could make a living off of playing video games, I’d most likely think I was dreaming. After all, I grew up playing Snake on my dad’s Motorola Razr, which admittedly seems to have made a return to the markets.
IMF is about challenging convention and the status quo. That’s what makes an idea revolutionary, or as people in Silicon Valley like to call it, disruptive. A crazy good idea challenges the explicit and implicit biases we have about society and ourselves. In other words, we have to detect the deception we bestow onto ourselves to find the gems in the rough, which Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital explains in his 2019 Lux Annual Dinner Talk – one of the best VC thesis-driven thought pieces I’ve ever seen.
In closing
As a geeky quote collector, I’d like to close this piece not in my own words, but in the words of three brilliant investors who have a few more patches of scar tissue on their back than I do now.
“Most of the big breakthrough technologies/companies seem crazy at first: PCs, the internet, Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, 140 characters…you are investing in things that look like they are just nuts… it has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t understand it. I think it’s too weird, I think it’s too unusual. “
“Breakthrough ideas have the traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.”
