How do you find product-market fit?
We posed this question to legendary venture capitalist Andy Rachleff in a recent episode of the Startup Field Guide Podcast. In Andy’s view, enterprise companies should stay in “discovery mode” until they have found a desperate customer. The best way to find that desperate customer is a disciplined customer discovery process which involves repeated cold outreach to understand customers’ pain points. While founders may start with a hypothesis about their ideal customer, the discovery process will help them validate that hypothesis. Only once that desperate customer has been found should a startup start building additional or custom features.
Getting to product-market fit is not an overnight process. In the Startup Field Guide podcast, we asked the founders of several dev-centric companies what their path to product-market fit looked like. Developers are often not the “buyers” of enterprise products. While developers may be the end users, many startups layer a sales motion into their GTM strategies targeted at buyer personas.
In this post, we feature responses from Guy Podjarny (Snyk), Petter Mattis (Cockroach Labs), and Jyoti Bansal (Harness) about their companies’ path to product-market fit. Each of these founders began their startup journey with an authentic insight into the next generation of tooling to reduce developer toil and enable creative work. While each of these founders took a different approach, what they have in common is a deeply empathetic understanding of developers’ needs honed through early customer conversations, education, and community.
Snyk: Guy Podjarny on driving developer-led customer adoption
Guy saw developer-first security as a shift that absolutely needed to happen because the status quo was unsustainable. The company put “blinders on and focused only on developers.” They were not initially interested in selling to security leaders. All their early user research centered on developers and understanding this core persona’s needs. Early outreach to the developer community happened on Twitter and through conferences and meetups. They networked with influential developers and got open-source maintainers to try the product. To build a product-led approach, Guy advocates for continuous community outreach, especially in the initial stages through friends and colleagues.
Guy had a keen understanding of developers’ mindset with regard to security. It wasn’t that developers didn’t care about security, but that they lacked security expertise and existing security tools weren’t designed for them. Snyk began by asking: “What’s the ideal product for a developer who wants to build secure software?”
A year into the company, Snyk had grown to 6000 users and needed to monetize its product. The team decided to pursue a freemium model. Snyk would remain free for open-source project owners and small teams, but once a developer crossed a certain threshold of tests per month they would hit a paywall. In July 2016, Snyk put up a paywall, hoping to create a $100/mo/dev paid tier targeted at engineering teams. “We waited for the floodgates to open,” Guy says, “and a trickle came out and nobody purchased.”
Thousands of developers were using Snyk, but they didn’t have ownership of the security strategy and budget within their companies. Security leaders still held the purchasing power. The Snyk team realized they would need to deepen their understanding of this buyer persona and adjust their go-to-market approach.
In the following clip, Guy explains how Snyk added a sales layer targeted at CISOs and security professionals:
If you are interested in hearing more about how Snyk created a dev-centric security product, listen to our interview with Guy Podjarny on the Startup Field Guide podcast.
Cockroach Labs: Peter Mattis on building developer adoption through educational content
CockroachDB is a cloud-native distributed SQL database that provides scalability, high availability, and resilient data to applications. The three co-founders — Spencer Kimball (CEO), Peter Mattis (CTO), and Ben Darnell (Chief Architect) — set a clear albeit difficult goal: to make sure that data written in one place would be viewable instantaneously in other locations, no matter how far away. Before Cockroach established a business model, it began as an open-source project that focused on developer adoption.
The Cockroach founding team steered its energy into building a large, engaged user base. At first, this was primarily made up of enthusiasts, hobbyists, and people who wanted to contribute to the project. The Cockroach co-founders invested in community leadership by fostering and engaging with their budding community and providing educational resources to help them onboard and use the product as seamlessly as possible.
Peter Mattis attributes early adoption to the team’s all-hands-on-deck approach to producing a steady drumbeat of content. From the onset, all three co-founders wrote blog posts about what they were building, the technical challenges involved in running a database, and engineering.
In the following clip, Peter explains Cockroach’s approach to creating educational content and documentation, and how this helped them drive greater user adoption.
If you want to hear more about Cockroach’s open-source origins, check out our complete case study on the company!
Harness: Jyoti Bansal on finding product-market fit through customer discovery
Harness is a CI/CD platform that uses AI to simplify DevOps processes. Jyoti Bansal saw the need to reduce developer toil by creating a platform that would automate the software delivery process. He honed in on his value hypothesis for Harness through a deeply empathetic understanding of developers’ workflows. As a former developer, Jyoti was passionate about equipping developers with robust, reliable toolkits to make their workflows more efficient.
For Jyoti, the process of finding product-market fit starts with a rigorous customer discovery process. He firmly believes in cold outreach because customers outside the founder’s network will be more direct and blunt with their feedback. He recommends having at least 50 “cold hard conversations”— this is the best way to validate early assumptions and iterate to product-market fit.
Harness’s path to product-market fit became clear when their initial conversations with mid-sized companies revealed a greater urgency for a solution like theirs. They had started with the assumption that larger enterprises would be ideal customers but adjusted their assumptions when they realized that mid-sized companies were in more urgent need of solutions to ship code faster.
Listen to Jyoti explain his methodical approach to finding PMF. This was the foundation that eventually vaulted Harness to a $3.7 billion valuation in 2022.
If you are interested in hearing more about Jyoti’s original insight for Harness and his approach to customer discovery, listen to our interview with him on the Startup Field Guide podcast.
Learn more about product-market fit
Unusual Ventures is an early-stage fund dedicated to helping founders accelerate their path to product-market fit. Check out more episodes of our podcast to learn more about the PMF journey from founders of iconic companies such as
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