Before PLG tools like Slack became common, the iPhone and other smartphones were the first consumer technologies to force their way into the enterprise. This created the initial tension between user preference and top-down IT control, paving the way for the broader "consumerization of IT" movement.
To validate an idea before writing code, identify customers quoted in competitors' press releases or featured on their websites. These individuals are proven early adopters in your target market and are often surprisingly willing to offer advice to founders, providing a direct line to valuable feedback.
Founders can secure meetings, pivot in conversations, and leverage their deep product knowledge in ways that hired salespeople cannot. This initial success is a unique, non-repeatable phase of founder-led selling, not a scalable go-to-market strategy to be replicated by a sales team.
While now known as a top-down enterprise sales giant, Salesforce's initial wedge was a product-led growth (PLG) motion. Individual salespeople signed up for accounts to manage their personal pipelines, creating bottoms-up adoption that Salesforce later monetized by selling visibility to sales managers.
To convince large enterprises to buy from a small startup, you need a two-part "bullhorn" pitch. First, solve an immediate, urgent pain point. Second, frame that solution as the first step on a journey to a larger, strategic destination that the customer wants to reach, justifying the long-term partnership.
To move beyond anecdotal evidence, MobileIron conducted a "deal grind" by analyzing 20 won and 20 lost deals in a single session. This forced exercise reveals concrete patterns about the ideal customer profile, key decision-makers, and winning arguments, forming the core of a repeatable go-to-market playbook.
At the end of customer conversations, asking this simple, open-ended question can reveal larger, more urgent problems than the one you initially intended to solve. For MobileIron, it led to focusing on the iPhone; for BlueRock, it pointed them toward AI security, proving its power in finding true market needs.
Product-market fit isn't about creating demand from scratch. It's about identifying a massive, existing wave of change (like cloud, mobile, or AI) and building a product (the "surfboard") to ride it. Success comes from correctly identifying and timing the wave, then making adjustments, not from paddling in calm water.
Many founders mistakenly believe achieving product-market fit is the final step to explosive growth. However, growth only ignites after also finding a repeatable go-to-market fit, which translates the founder's initial sales success into a scalable process that a sales team can execute consistently.