If there’s one thing we’re focused on at Eniac Ventures, it’s helping our founders find product-market fit. The term gets thrown around so often that it’s easy to assume every founder knows exactly what it means. But like many simple, powerful ideas, PMF can take on different meanings depending on who’s using it. The most popular definition comes from a 2007 blog post by Marc Andreessen, who wrote that PMF “means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Here at Eniac, we believe PMF is closely tied to the idea of market pull. As we wrote last year: "The true test is whether you’re getting 'pull' from the market, or if you still have to 'push' your solution onto the world. When we meet with founders who’ve found true PMF, they’re usually incredibly stressed — not because they’re hustling for the next sale, but because there’s so much positive word-of-mouth that they’re struggling to on-board all the new customers, and to scale the infrastructure needed to support them." Other signs that you have PMF: Customers are loyal, happy, and demanding new features at a rapid clip; willingness to pay isn’t an issue; and if it’s a B2B product, you see organic expansion within a customer organization. It’s also worth noting that finding PMF is one thing, while maintaining it is another: Just because you have it initially doesn’t mean you’ll always keep it. You have to continue iterating to meet growing demand and a diversity of customers, while also keeping the core product intact. Indeed, it’s important to remember that PMF isn’t purely binary. It exists in different degrees — it’s not just a question of whether you have it, but whether it’s stronger or weaker (one of our founders has talked about trying to make his product-market fit “tighter and tighter tighter”). Of course, where PMF becomes meaningful is not in a general description, but rather a specific, warts-and-all narrative: How a company does or doesn’t find PMF, with all the inspiration and missteps along the way. That’s why we’re excited to kick off Eniac’s PMF Q&A: An in-depth interview series with our portfolio founders, where they talk about their search for PMF and what they think they’ve learned in the process. These founders come from companies at different stages, in fields ranging from mobile analytics to robotics, connected only by the fact that we think they’ve found PMF. They don’t always agree with each other — or with us! — about what PMF looks like, but in our view, that’s part of the fun. We’re learning a lot from these interviews, and we can’t wait to share them with you. Come back next week for the first, with one of our smartest founders in AI.
Eniac Ventures’ Post
More Relevant Posts
-
Congrats again to the team at Tradespace for raising a seed! You can read more from about why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/e7JDxebR
To view or add a comment, sign in
-
The Faux First Mover Advantage. Check out this guest post on how being first isn’t as good as people thinking you were first By Nir Zicherman who cofounded and sold Anchor to Spotify https://lnkd.in/e4M53zns
The Faux First Mover Advantage
eniacvc.medium.com
To view or add a comment, sign in
-
We know how hard it is to build robotics software; that's why we built Model-Prime to accelerate your development processes. Read up on our take on the biggest pain points you're likely facing and how we help you move past them. https://lnkd.in/gd795aAQ
How to Solve the Biggest Challenges Related to Robotics Software Development
model-prime.com
To view or add a comment, sign in
-
Eniac is excited to announce participation in Tradespace’s $4.2M seed funding round as the company looks to unlock $1 Trillion In #IP value with its #AI-powered Commercialization Platform. Tradespace’s platform is trained on the largest set of IP and innovation data to help IP owners evaluate new inventions and generate higher-quality IP - and has already helped organizations unlock more than $100M in IP value. Read more below. Tradespace, Scrum Ventures, Amplo, Hike Ventures, 500 Global
Announcing Tradespace's $4 Million Seed Round
tradespace.io
To view or add a comment, sign in
-
We’re thrilled to share the news that Fabi.ai has officially launched, and that it’s raised $3 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures. Fabi.ai is tackling data democratization, allowing business users to understand their data without using technical resources. It connects to existing data systems and uses AI to automate the process of answering queries from product management, marketing, customer success, or elsewhere in the company — streamlining that process while still giving data teams control over the ultimate output. This is a problem Fabi.ai’s founders Marc Dupuis and Lei Tang have seen at a number of companies, including when they worked together at Clari, where Marc was director of product management and Lei was chief data scientist. Marc found himself constantly sending data questions to Lei, who would have to write SQL queries to find the answers. Eventually, the two of them decided to find a more efficient way to help all teams get the information they need — freeing data scientists from monotonous and repetitive tasks so they can focus on more strategic work. We’re thrilled to be partnering with our friends at Outlander VC on this investment, and even more thrilled to be backing Marc and Lei. Although Eniac and Fabi.ai are located on opposite coasts, we were able to close the deal over a three-hour lunch meeting in Vancouver, where we solidified our conviction that they were the perfect founders to tackle this issue. Beyond seeing the problem, Marc and Lei understand the technology needed to solve it. While the latest generation of large language models can translate natural language into SQL code, company data is often messy, requiring you to build deeper connections to the data stack if you want to access it in an automated way. We see Fabi.ai as part of a larger shift towards the democratization of data for nontechnical users. We’ve backed a number of companies working to improve the data stack, from infrastructure companies like Model-Prime to companies that empower data scientists like Pienso and even those that use data to transform healthcare like 1upHealth. By simplifying the interface needed to access this data, Fabi.ai isn’t just making teams more efficient — it’s making data accessible to virtually anyone in an organization. Read more about it from the Fabi team: https://lnkd.in/eYAJFjXC
To view or add a comment, sign in
-
Read an expanded version in blog post form here https://medium.com/@eniacvc/introducing-eniacs-pmf-q-a-what-is-product-market-fit-anyway-1e56652bf054