How I'm approaching PMF for my new startup
High on my own supply
My next Product-Market Fit bootcamp launches July 8th, and pricing goes up June 8. If you know a startup that’s interested, please have them complete this form! If you want blurbs, have questions, etc. just email me at rob@reframeb2b.com.
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Now that I’ve more-or-less found PMF for my quarterly PMF bootcamp, it’s time to build my next software company. (Why? Because why not! Building companies is fascinating, a privilege, and helps make PMF Camp better.)
Thought I’d share exactly how I’m approaching this new company. It might help you or someone you know.
Here’s the story:
Origins
My CTO and I have worked together before, and want to work together again.
Our constraints:
We both have full-time jobs we enjoy - we’re not trying to change that anytime soon.
We’re not going to raise money and go on a VC-fueled death march - we’re going to use cash constraints as fuel for creative growth approaches.
We aspire to build a small, profitable software company. We like serving customers, and we don’t want to manage a bunch of employees.
All that said, we both believe in unfolding: We have no clue what will happen in the future, and we will design this business around demand as we find it. Which means we might take VC + build a big team if that’s the shape of the opportunity.
The idea
My CTO had the original idea, from a seed planted years ago when we were one of Vanta’s early customers. If you’re not familiar, Vanta is compliance software for B2B software companies that want to sell to enterprise buyers. It is a great product in a growing category that includes well-funded startups like Drata, Secureframe, Thoroughpass, etc.
These products tell you what needs to change in your product, policies, and processes to get SOC 2 compliant. They give you the task list, but ultimately you have to do the work.
We are huge fans of Vanta & related compliance products. But it took a grueling 3+ months of engineering work to get our product SOC 2 ready. We have heard this again and again from startups trying to get SOC 2 ready.
It took us so long because we didn’t have a ton of AWS knowledge at the time, but also because AWS is, by default, strangely insecure. (As am I, but that’s another story.) This means there were a ton of tasks we had to do, and we had a steep learning curve to do them right.
And so, years later, after some divine inspiration, my CTO came to me one day and said, “Hey I’ve built this boilerplate AWS foundation for secure web applications. Think it could be something?”
I responded: “Could you please repeat that, except this time say it at a 5th grade level?”
Approach
After ~5 hours of translation and ~10 pages of Google docs, I felt dangerous enough to go out and start talking to potential customers.
To do this, I created a sample case study, and used it to structure and guide my conversations.
The first five conversations were painful. After each conversation, I spent ~30 minutes thinking and refining the case study. Now conversations go a bit better.
Here are the first few slides.
Slide 1: Case study opener. Here’s what we often hear when startups come to us.
Slide 2: Options people typically consider.
Slide 3: Outcomes. Here’s what success looks like when companies take “Option 3” that includes us.
These first three slides are my way to find demand:
What is the big thing they are trying to accomplish?
How do they think about their options for accomplishing this thing?
What are the words they use, don’t use, like, hate, fear?
What does success look like to them?
They are not currently perfect, and there are glaring errors I’m debugging. As I get these three slides right, I can:
Understand who is our exact ideal customer (& who isn’t) - and therefore what is the true shape of our addressable market
Know how to describe our “supply” to fit perfectly into demand
Know generally where the product needs to go to deeply serve this perfect-fit customer
And then the following 2-3 slides become obvious - what is supply, how does it work, and what does it cost?
From here?
Who knows.
We have startups using this now, which is an honor. We will keep learning from them, and in so doing we’ll figure out the real shape of the business.
Could be big. Could be small. Could just be an open-source project that makes us feel warm & fuzzy. Could be nothing.
So what?
This is how we’ve gone from idea to customers in weeks, rather than spinning our wheels for months. It’s also a representation of the simple, practical framework we implement at PMF Camp. There’s a lot of nuance underneath it, but the essence is simple:
Build a theoretical case study
Use the case study to replicate the case study (aka: try to sell & serve)
Debug to figure it all out
Repeat
Let’s see what unfolds!