Stevenson: True PMF causes a physiological reaction and dilated pupils in customers
Scott Stevenson · For 5 years he struggled to get traction. Then with AI he grew 12x— in 1 year | Scott Stevenson, ... · PMF Show · Mar 11, 2024 · at 15:10
Scott Stevenson, co-founder and CEO of Spellbook (formerly Rally), describes the mental model his team used to evaluate whether they had achieved real product-market fit.
0:00 / 0:29exact quote · 29.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We had very high conviction that like product market fit should feel having an almost physiological response from your customers where when they see the product, their pupils are dilating, you know, There's like a neurochemical reaction happening. And I remember reading a quote. I can't remember exactly where it was from. I can't remember. You might know, but it was a quote that basically said, if you have product market fit, it should feel like basically the product is being pulled out of your hands faster than you can provide it. Your servers are on fire. Your salespeople are burnt out. That's what it should feel like.”
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 Scott Stevenson
Stevenson: Legal software fails if built as a standalone web app
“And we learned that like the form of the feature, whether it's in word or not actually matters more than almost the product itself. Cause if you're building a web app for lawyers, sorry, you already lost the game.”
Stevenson: Legal storefronts failed because lawyers cannot drive web traffic
“Lawyers could get this thing up and running, but they had no idea how to drive traffic to it. You know, they're kind of chasing this mirage of, and I'm sure Shopify has this issue too. They probably have tons of people setting up stores and no traffic going to…”
Stevenson: Growing feature lists overwhelm customers and harm early products
“You get this feature cruft and your feature list growing is actually not a good thing. It actually overwhelms customers. It starts to feel like it's overlapping with other products they're using.”
Stevenson: Automating legal doc creation fails; founders need human advisors
“What we realized is even if you could automate the creation of these documents for people, they still had no idea what they say. They still need someone to trust. They still need someone to explain it to them”
Stevenson: Enterprise law firm sales cycles obscure product-market fit signals
“And I think, especially if you're working with a large customers, large law firms, you know, the danger there is like the implementation cycle can be like a year. It can be like two years to technically get something rolled out, you know, past all the committe…”
Stevenson: Rally required sub-12-month CAC payback to claim PMF
“The other way we measure PMF was CAC payback period. So we were just kind of a little bit religious about like, what's our CAC payback period, you doing this motion. And if the CAC payback period Wasn't clearly well under 12 months. We're like, okay, we don't …”