Founder-Market Fit: What are you built to build?
The advantages I've gained from transitioning from a low founder-market fit idea to a high founder-market fit idea.
Welcome to A Founder’s Life for Me! I’m Alek, and based on my experiences building companies, I provide practical recommendations on how to build your company and career.
Special note: I’ll be on vacation for two weeks. You can expect to receive the next edition of A Founder’s Life for Me when I return on Thursday, 5/30.
What is Founder-Market fit?
In the startup world, ‘founder-market fit” describes how well-suited the founder is to build their startup. For example:
John is a dog trainer turned software engineer. They are building accounting software.
Sarah is a professional accountant with a web development background. They are building accounting software.
Who would you invest in to build accounting software? Sarah has a clear advantage based on her experiences; this is “founder-market fit.”
My startup, SolidlyAI, and I have evolved from having a low founder-market fit to a high founder-market fit. You’ll leave this article with:
an example of my journey toward founder-market fit, to help guide your own
an understanding of the advantages of founder-market fit
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My accidental journey toward founder-market fit.
When I started SolidlyAI in 2022, I knew about “founder-market fit” but ignored it.
In 2022, I had experience in data analytics, AI, customer success, gaming, and product management. I decided to build an AI meeting notetaker, which was lightly tied to my experiences working on AI. I knew “founder-market fit” was a thing, but I had only heard it mentioned in the context of fundraising; it’s easier to raise money to work on your startup if you have highly relevant experiences to back it up (think back to your decision to invest in Sarah over John). I didn’t plan to raise money for SolidlyAI, so I ignored it. I knew I could build the meeting notetaker, so why would it matter?
The main problem I ran into with the original AI notetaker for SolidlyAI was that there were many AI meeting notetakers already out there. SolidlyAI didn’t have all the features other AI notetakers had, which put me at a significant disadvantage. Customers were deciding, “Why should I pick SolidlyAI over the other options available?” These customers decided to go with the established AI notetakers instead of SolidlyAI.
As the founder, what would you do in this scenario?
At a high level, I saw two paths:
Build the features other AI notetakers have, and your customers expect.
Cater your product to a more specific, ideally underserved, audience.
I chose to target SolidlyAI to a more specific audience. But who? I thought back on my six years of experience working in customer success. Why did we never use an AI notetaker? I decided on some reasons:
The AI notetaker couldn’t join the meetings because the client was hosting.
The clients wouldn’t be comfortable with the meeting being recorded.
Our most important meetings were typically in person.
Meeting notes needed to be organized around each client, so access was limited to people supporting that specific client relationship.
With some minor changes, SolidlyAI could solve all of those problems. Thinking about the specific customer success use case also gave me more ideas:
You could perform client sentiment analysis and build a profile of how a specific client feels about their relationship with you over time.
You could build client health scorecards based on an analysis of prior client meetings to summarize the state of the client relationship.
You could automatically identify and notify stakeholders of potential renewal risks.
You could automatically identify and notify stakeholders of potential cross-sell opportunities.
By applying SolidlyAI to my prior experience, I was incidentally improving my founder-market fit. I’m now building an “AI and analytics platform for customer success teams,” which ties back to my experience in AI, analytics, and customer success. It’s hard to imagine someone better suited to build this product.
5 benefits of high founder-market fit.
As I’ve transitioned from low founder-market fit to high founder-market fit, here are the benefits I’ve experienced:
1) It’s easier to understand the customer’s needs.
Because I’ve been in the customer’s shoes, I quickly identified relevant problems with existing solutions. I still spent time validating that other people in similar roles had similar challenges, but I had a massive head start based on my experiences.
2) It’s easier to find customers.
I worked in customer success for six years. During that time, I met many people who have now gone on to work in customer success roles at other companies. So, it’s been easier to find my “target audience” by scrolling through my contacts.
3) It’s easier to position SolidlyAI against existing products.
Once I have a customer on the phone, SolidlyAI's increased specificity makes it easy to compare its benefits to existing products.
“Your existing AI notetaker is not role-specific. SolidlyAI specifically focuses on the needs of customer success teams. As a result, it offers benefits that other notetakers do not, including X, Y, Z.”
4) It’s easier to describe specific challenges and solutions.
The increased specificity of SolidlyAI also encouraged me to point toward specific challenges that customer success teams would be looking to solve and how SolidlyAI would help.
“Your junior customer success reps are meeting with clients every week. When a potential renewal risk is discussed in the meeting, how often is that raised to leadership, and how quickly do you respond? SolidlyAI automatically notifies you of the risk seconds after the meeting is finished.”
5) It’s easier to prioritize solutions to specific customer problems.
When I was building a generic AI meeting notetaker, if someone in a customer success role had said, “I wish this could build a sentiment profile for a specific client contact over time.” I would have thought, “Well, sentiment analysis isn't relevant for most meetings, so I can’t prioritize building that feature.” Now, because SolidlyAI specifically caters to customer success, it’s easier for me to prioritize features that are important to them.
Focus on a niche where you have a high founder-market fit.
By focusing on a niche where you have a high founder-market fit, it’s easier to:
understand your customer’s problem
find customers
position against existing products
describe specific challenges that your product helps to solve
prioritize building solutions to specific customer problems
Building a company is hard. To increase your odds of success, you should give yourself every advantage you can. One easy advantage to give yourself is to work on ideas where you have a high founder-market fit. By challenging yourself to increase your founder-market fit, you’ll increase the specificity of your product, reaping the benefits outlined above.
Thanks for reading! Questions or ideas for topics? Email me.