Episode 701 | The Long Journey to Product-Market Fit

In episode 701, Rob Walling interviews Matt Wensing, founder of Summit, a SaaS platform for lead scoring and qualification. Matt shares insights on finding product-market fit, the importance of following customer workflows to get there, and the challenges of marketing and positioning. Rob asks about his choice to raise venture capital, and how keeping a lean team maximizes that opportunity.



Episode Sponsor:





Find your perfect developer or a team at Lemon.io/startups



The competition for incredible engineers and developers has never been more fierce. Lemon.io helps you cut through the noise and find great talent through its network of engineers in Europe and Latin America.



They take care of the vetting, interviewing, and testing of candidates to make sure that you are working with someone who can hit the ground running.



When it comes to hiring, the time it takes to write your job description, list the position, review resumes, schedule interviews, and make an offer can take weeks, if not months. With Lemon.io, you can cut down on a lot of that time by tapping into their wide network of developers who can get started in as early as a week.



And for subscribers of Startups For the Rest of Us, you can get 15% off your first 4 week contract with a developer by visiting lemon.io/startups



Topics we cover: 




2:27 – “Traveling many H1’s”, refining a target market 



5:44 – Moving back to a self-serve model



10:52 – Niching down to achieve stronger product-market fit



12:53 – Tactics that Matt used to achieve traction



16:54 – Lead scoring by behavior and persona-fit 



19:20 – Scoring as a whole product vs. as only a feature



23:31 – Pursuing VC with a lean team



29:09 – Who is your ideal customer profile?




Links from the Show: 




Apply for Tinyseed Feb 12th through Feb 25th



MicroConf Remote – Early Stage Saas Strategies



Matt Wensing (@mattwensing) | X



Summit



Episode 696 | The Truth about Product-Market Fit + Doing Sales as an Introvert (With Ruben Gamez)



Out of Beta



Episode 633 | Building SaaS Plus a Two-Sided Marketplace



The SaaS Playbook



"How I Sold My SaaS in An 8-Figure Exit" with Matt Wensing




If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please