How do founders know when they have product-market fit?

“Yeah, I get that question all the time. Like, how do I know? How do I know it's a yes? And It's not a simple answer. Like you kind of have to figure out what your, your bar is and, and then work out a process of like, where does, where's my bar and what do I need to get to the bar? And then an interesting thread, uh, that you mentioned as well is like check size versus, um, versus time that you're spending with the founder. 'Cause often when you're writing early stage checks, yeah, you, you like reasonably get 1 to 3 meetings with the founder and maybe a data room. So yeah, if I had to answer your question, like how, how do I know? I, I know because I have thought about what are the key questions that I need yeses to in order to feel confident to make that decision. And for me, it's founder. So like, do I feel that this is the right founder for the, for the right market problem space? And also, do I feel like this is the founder that this is a founder who could in the future, um, lead a, lead a huge company. Um, I don't need to feel like the founder in their current form could lead a huge company, cuz often that's just no. Like there's very few, I don't know, maybe you've run into them, Maxim, but I, I don't meet a lot of founders at that very early stage where I'm like, yeah, if I popped you into a 150-person company tomorrow, you'd be solid. Um, but I need to feel like they could get there. And that they'd be open to coaching and that they're like self-reflective and, um, like have a desire to learn enough to get there. Um, so that's one is the founder. Um, the other one is the, like the problem space and how painful is this? I need to feel like it's a genuine problem for a group of customers that are gonna be willing to pay for that problem to be solved. Mm-hmm. So for me, that actually excludes some things. Like, I would never have invested in TikTok or Instagram because, like, is the problem of seeing photos scrolled through endlessly really a painful problem? No. That's entertainment. And I'm— I guess maybe I'm more of like a utility-oriented person because to me, I like— I probably would never have seen that and been like, yeah, that's a painful problem. Yeah. And maybe that means I miss out on those things. And then the last one is market size. I need to believe that th”

“Um, the way that we looked through this kind of lens was through the lens of like product, right? You have to make investments as a team into products that have product-market fit because otherwise when you push that growth engine, things just don't really work. You can send 100 salespeople at a given market, you can have a specific pitch, you can have a product that kind of works, but unless it has proper product-market fit, your return on investment just, it just won't work. Like when we tested certain things in certain markets, We could— you could feel it. Like, you can feel that this thing is just not hitting the, the product market fit how we expected. So initially we didn't go and throw all the money at selling our, our product as it was in that moment. We were like, that's not a winning play and that's not a responsible use of capital. Instead, we ended up investing a lot of that money into hiring good engineers that could support the product and the product iterations we wanted to make in order to get the product into a place where it did have that product-market fit and we could start pushing the growth engine a little bit further down the line. So if you look at the organization today, it's kind of roughly 13 people. Like, you know, the majority of that is engineering. And the reason why is like Redactive is a product that really hits a lot of developers and the product needs to be super well engineered. Otherwise, you know, it becomes very apparent very early on like that it's, it does not meet the required standards. Yeah. Of the customer. And again, so until it's kind of was in that place where we were more comfortable, like, okay, it's meeting the needs of a customer, that's when we started going, okay, now let's start pushing the growth buttons. Let's get in, you know, an enterprise salesperson. Let's talk about marketing. How can we start pushing these, these other levers? Because otherwise I think you, you end up, you actually end up wasting a lot of your own time. This is another thing as well, which is like the only thing that sucks, like more than probably like spending money on a product that's not— that doesn't have good product-market fit is attempting to market it yourself as the founder and then being like, oh my God, this is, this is, this is not the right”