PAT:
Welcome to Like a Glove, the podcast about product-market fit from The Mill. This is our very first episode, and for our first episode I’d like to pitch it over to our podcast producer, Jeremy Shere.
JEREMY:
Thanks, Pat. We’re going to tell the folks whoever’s listening a little bit about this podcast. So let’s start right there—what is this podcast about?
PAT:
Like a Glove is all about product-market fit. In startup terms, what that means is your product—whatever you’re selling to your customers—solves a major pain point for them and fits like a glove—which is obviously how we came up with the name. And this is a really critical step for startups to figure out, because if they don’t figure out this step, everything else is much more difficult. Selling is more difficult. Getting referrals is more difficult. Marketing is more difficult, because ultimately you’re trying to sell a product or service to your customers that isn’t quite exactly what they’re looking for.
If you do find something, if you do build a product that they’re looking for, for obvious reasons, it’s going to sell a lot better. And that product-market fit is really critical to get to, and it’s difficult to figure out exactly how to get there and if you’ve achieved it. So that’s what the focus of our podcast is about.
JEREMY:
Okay, great. In other words, you can have the greatest idea, the greatest product, but if the fit is not there, then you’re going to have a much harder time succeeding in business.
PAT:
Exactly. To use a silly example with a literal glove, if you have a four finger glove, you’re going to have a lot of marketing and a lot of reasons why a four-finger glove is better than a five-finger glove. That’s just a silly example, but for startups, it really matters quite a bit. It’s hard to figure out if you have product-market fit. It’s not quite as easy as, “Hey, I have five fingers but only four fingers on my glove.” It’s not
that apparent. And so a lot of what we’re going to be talking about is figuring out how to get to product-market fit and how to make sure you know you’ve got it.
JEREMY:
There’s no simple formula, no simple algorithm you can just plug it in, and it’ll give you a yes or a no.
PAT:
Exactly. Yep, yep. There’s no fit like that.
JEREMY:
Yeah. Okay. Who are we going to be hearing from on this podcast?
PAT:
On our very first podcast we’re going to be hearing from Cy Megnin. He is our Entrepreneur-In-Residence through our partnership called Velocities. It’s a two and a half million dollar partnership with the City of Bloomington, the City of Columbus, and Elevate Ventures—the state’s venture capital arm. Cy really acts as a full-time mentor for our startups. So he helps them figure out how to build their companies, how to market, how to assess market size, how to raise capital. And so he’s a really great first guest to have to talk about PMF.
JEREMY:
Okay. And then future guests will be along those same lines, people with experience in
entrepreneurship who’ve gone through this process of finding that fit.
PAT:
Absolutely. Some folks who are helping others go through the process. Some folks who’ve gone through it themselves. Some folks who have tried to go through the process but maybe didn’t get all the way there, or maybe they even were successful in selling their companies but didn’t really have great product-market fit. And so yeah, we’ll have a gamut of different folks and experts talk about product-market fit.
JEREMY:
What do you hope that listeners take away from the podcast? What do you hope they get out of it?
PAT:
The biggest thing that I want our listeners to come away with is knowing that product-market fit is really critical to the success of their business. It is one of the probably top three things that startups need to figure out. It’s probably in the bottom three of topics that are talked about. And so most people in the startup world and entrepreneurship world know what product-market fit is. There’s no podcasts about it. This is the first one. There are no blogs about it. People do obviously talk about it, but not in depth. And so that’s what we want to provide people with is an in-depth resource to figure out this critical piece of their business.
JEREMY:
Alright, great. Well, folks, you can find this podcast on any podcast app. We hope you’ll tune in. Alright, thanks, Pat.
PAT:
Alright, thanks, Jeremy.
Like a Glove is a production of The Mill, a coworking and business incubator space in Bloomington, Indiana. Our mission is to launch and accelerate high-potential companies, and our vision is to become the center of coworking and entrepreneurship in Indiana. You can learn more about The Mill at DimensionMill.org. Thanks for listening, and be sure to check back every other Monday for new episodes.