A Product Market Fit Show Mistral.vc

“It’s the boring stuff that makes money. Sometimes the sexy, interesting things are really great ideas, fun to use, but aren’t money makers. They aren’t durable businesses.”His first startup was a cool idea: Uber for Valet Parking. Investors loved it. But the unit economics didn't work out. So he had to pivot. He ended up selling it, but decided to do things differently the second time around.With Argyle, he didn't start with a cool idea. He replaced a product customers already paid for. His ...

His travel startup crashed 90% overnight. Here’s how he used AI to grow past $2M/year—to $2M a month:For a while, Andrew was crushing it. Accelerator -> $750K pre-seed -> $2M ARR -> $2.5M seed round. Then COVID hit. He was selling to events like CES, SXSW, etc. Revenue dropped from $160K/month to under $10K... overnight. Investors from his seed round refuse to wire funds. After nearly going bankrupt, he finds a way to pivot. A year later, his business takes off.2020 -...

Poojan is a multi-time successful founder. He raised $60M for his first startup and exited. He just raised a $75M Series D at his current startup. But it wasn't always easy.- In his first startup, he had to hover beside conference booths for hours to land his first customer.- He gave his product away for free to the first several customers.- It took him 6 years to cross $10M in ARRWhy you should listen:- Learn exactly how a successful repeat founder thinks about team structure in the early da...

Arvind founded 2 billion-dollar startups—by doing everything lean startup tells you not to do. - He didn’t focus on launching an MVP. - He ignored early market feedback. - He didn’t charge beta users anything— for 2 years. And it worked. He went from $0 to $3M in revenue the year he launched publicly. He tripled to about $9M the year after. And tripled every year since. Two months ago, Glean raised $200M at a $2B valuation. Why you should listen:- Learn exactly how outlier founder Arvin...

Snapchat got 0 downloads the day it launched. 5 months in, it had only 127 users. Today Snapchat is an $18B company with 400 million daily active users. Evan Spiegel noticed what even Zuck missed: daily communication is meant to be ephemeral, not recorded for all time.In this episode, we dive deep into how Snapchat went from idea to product-market fit. Our guest is Jeremy Liew, a Partner at Lightspeed and the first investor in Snapchat. He led Lightspeed's seed round in 2012 at a $5M val...

If you feel like the ‘unicorn or bust’ playbook isn’t for you, then this episode definitely will be. Rand Fishkin is a multi-time founder and published author of Lost and Founder. He founded Moz, raised $29M in VC, grew to $50M in revenue and exited for $70M. But he ultimately realized that the VC-backed life wasn’t for him. So he went on to start SparkToro, a profitable 3-person startup that does $2M in revenue and takes only 30 hours a week of work. For those of us in the VC-backe...