Episode 701 | The Long Journey to Product-Market Fit

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In episode 701, Rob Walling interviews Matt Wensing, founder of Summit, a SaaS platform for lead scoring and qualification. Matt shares insights on finding product-market fit, the importance of following customer workflows to get there, and the challenges of marketing and positioning. Rob asks about his choice to raise venture capital, and how keeping a lean team maximizes that opportunity. Episode Sponsor: Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America. They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running. When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week. And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups Topics we cover: 2:27 – “Traveling many H1’s”, refining a target market 5:44 – Moving back to a self-serve model 10:52 – Niching down to achieve stronger product-market fit 12:53 – Tactics that Matt used to achieve traction 16:54 – Lead scoring by behavior and persona-fit 19:20 – Scoring as a whole product vs. as only a feature 23:31 – Pursuing VC with a lean team 29:09 – Who is your ideal customer profile? Links from the Show: Apply for Tinyseed Feb 12th through Feb 25th MicroConf Remote – Early Stage Saas Strategies Matt Wensing (@mattwensing) | X Summit Episode 696 | The Truth about Product-Market Fit + Doing Sales as an Introvert (With Ruben Gamez) Out of Beta Episode 633 | Building SaaS Plus a Two-Sided Marketplace The SaaS Playbook "How I Sold My SaaS in An 8-Figure Exit" with Matt Wensing If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Another week, another episode of Startups to the Rest of Us.
0:03.0	I'm your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode, I talk with Matt Wensing, the founder of Summit,
0:09.4	about his long journey, multi-year journey, finding product market fit.
0:15.1	While I'm not recording a series of podcast episodes about product market fit,
0:19.9	this does remind me of Ruben Gomez this episode,
0:22.4	maybe what, four or five ago, where he talked about the long journey to finding it and then
0:26.9	finding it with a certain subset of customers and certain features and then realizing, oh,
0:31.4	the API is a completely different product I now have to find product market fit for.
0:35.4	And in this episode, Matt Wensing and I just talk about his
0:39.0	journey with Summit over the past. I think we talk about it in the episode. It's like four years,
0:44.0	four plus years of building, talking to customers, launching, finding out he kind of hit the mark,
0:49.8	made some revenue, found out that wasn't the right tool. So then he went back to zero basically and
0:55.0	started again building new features. You might know Matt from Twitter or from his podcast that
1:01.5	wrapped up just a few months ago called Out of Beta. Before we dive into that, applications for
1:06.9	Tiny Seed are opening on February 12th and close on February 25th. If you're not familiar
1:12.2	with Tiny Seed, it's the accelerator I run for ambitious, mostly bootstrapped, B2B SaaS founders.
1:18.3	Even if you're interested in applying outside of the window of February 12th to February 25th,
1:23.1	you can join our mailing list to be notified when applications open again. Visit tini-seed.com slash apply to get on the mailing list or to apply.
1:31.7	I want to invite you to Microcomp Remote Early Stage SaaS Sales Sales Strategies.
1:36.4	It's an online event.
1:37.6	We're hosting March 12th and 13th of 2024.
1:40.5	It runs from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Eastern time on those two days. And there will be sessions
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Rob Walling, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Rob Walling and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.