If a startup has to convince users, it lacks product-market fit
Ankur Goyal · What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO) · Jul 24, 2025 · at 1:04:49
Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, shares his framework for diagnosing true product-market fit.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think if you have to convince people, it's super unlikely that you have product market fit. Whereas if without convincing people, they just find their way to the product and then they've, they're already convinced or they've convinced themselves very quickly. I think it's a pretty clear sign.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ankur Goyal
Early AI teams preferred managed evals over brittle open-source tools
“We actually heard early on from people and allergic, no reaction to that. They were like, Hey, we were using open source stuff and it's super brittle and it breaks all the time. And we just evals suck and observability sucks and we just don't want to deal with…”
Braintrust built a terrible go-to-market motion to test product strength
“I wanted at Braintrust to, again, in the spirit of skepticism, Build a terrible go-to-market motion early on, but make the product, make Braintrust only successful if the product was so good that despite being grossly incompetent at selling and marketing our p…”
Overhyped failure is much better for startups than dying in obscurity
“I think there's only one right answer, which is it's much better to be overhyped and then fail. I mean, obviously within the realms of morality and integrity, but I was, I sort of learned like, I don't want to be an obscure product that no one cares about.”
Pre-PMF startups must hire salespeople accustomed to working without PMF
“A classic example of this is when companies hire salespeople from extremely successful product-led companies, and they expect the salesperson to be good for their product-led company that does not have product market fit. That is not the right You actually wan…”
When a product fails to sell, the problem is almost always pipeline
“Like if your product isn't selling for some reason, then it's almost always pipeline.”
Starting a company without an idea prevents finding product-market fit
“And then I did something which I honestly don't think any founder should do. We're talking about product market fit. This is almost a surefire way to prevent yourself from finding product market fit. But I sat down and I said, okay, I want to start a company. …”