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All companies start with a founder who asks some version of the same question: Imagine if this could be different? What happens next is where the real story lives — when ideas become real. That path is hardly ever a straight line. But what’s shared among those who walk it is an obsession with building something truly great. This year on our podcast, In Depth, we asked founders to retrace the steps they took to find product-market fit in more detail than they’ve ever shared before. Owner co-founder and CEO, Adam Guild, takes us through how the idea for the company started after saving his mom’s struggling dog grooming business. Braintrust founder and CEO Ankur Goyal recounts first feeling PMF when he didn’t have to convince anyone to use the product. And Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of Harness, shares why the hardest decision he ever made was to break up with Netflix as a customer. You’ll also hear from the founders of Gusto, fal, Meter, Postman, Reducto, Sentry, Serval and Stedi. Of course, this is only a sliver of the advice shared across dozens of episodes of In Depth this year. Here were some more of our favorites: - How Clay learned the problems its ICP needed to solve: The product started as an API-connected spreadsheet that pulled information from many sources into one place — but it had too many ICPs, leading to inconsistent usage and feature bloat. After identifying agency owners (and eventually salespeople) as targets, co-founder Varun Anand wanted to better understand their problems. “I would join all these WhatsApp groups and basically wait for people to talk about problems related to data enrichment,” he says. “We used that as a way to get into the ecosystem and get people really solving their problems with Clay.”
- Why Linear’s founders built a product for themselves, making it opinionated instead of flexible: Linear’s co-founder and CEO Karri Saarinen has always had a designer’s eye, but as a principal designer at Airbnb, that focused on a dissatisfaction with the company’s project management software. So he and his co-founders built an alternative. “My design philosophy has always been that you should design something for someone, and it’s really hard to design something good for everyone,” he says. “I don’t believe you can build the optimal tool for anything if it’s very flexible. So from the beginning, we wanted to be opinionated that there should be a good way of doing things.”
- What the co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition believes is the real moment a founder is born: Prior to Applied Intuition, Qasar Younis was a founder and COO at Y Combinator. He’s interacted with many founders and has identified this as the moment they truly claim the founder mantle: “A founder is not made when you decide to start a company or raise capital. A founder’s made when you get feedback about the product, the market or yourself, and interpret it correctly,” he says. “What’s really important is you have to somehow discount some people’s feedback and over-index on other people’s. This analysis interpretation is the true heart of being a founder, especially in the early days.”
Thanks, as always, for watching and sharing!
-The Review Editors
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