First Round Capital reposted this
Malleability is a startup’s greatest weapon — but like all strengths, it’s a double-edged sword. I like this framing from Clay co-founder Kareem Amin, that there's a time and a place for it: "You can be malleable when you're defining what the product is, but once you’ve taken a pass at that, you need to harden it when you try to go out to market. You can’t be changing the value prop or even the product itself from meeting to meeting." This is a mistake I see a lot of early-stage founders making, and it's a pitfall that Clay ran into early on, too. The team has been on 🔥 for the past 18 months, but it’s no overnight success story. They’ve been quietly plugging away to land on the right messaging and product — for almost 6 years before breaking out. "We were being too malleable when we were trying to sell Clay early on, which made it even harder to separate the signal from the noise. A prospect can say, 'Oh, could you guys do that?', or 'Are you guys this?' And then you can become that, quite easily. What I’ve learned is that you have to know when to be malleable. When you narrow the scope, it feels claustrophobic. Why are we doing something that’s smaller when we could be doing something bigger? Eventually, we realized that by narrowing down our scope, we were actually increasing our value." More positioning and ICP wisdom from Kareem on The Review today (link to the story in the comments)
I loved the article that landed in my inbox, and it was an important reminder that there is no such thing as an "overnight success." Seven years to hit a stride is not for the faint of heart, and I appreciated the callout for the balance between being malleable and staying the course. If we're getting caught up in the next "great idea," it's hard to fully bake the great ideas we've already put into motion.
Really great insight here. Your point on narrowing scope reminds me of the advice to content creators to focus on a narrow niche in order to actually provide more value.
When considering investment opportunities in SaaS products, do you prefer to invest in prototype stage? Your insights and advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated. You invested in indian companies?
It's Clay Day today! Let's go Kareem Amin!
Partner at First Round Capital
4mohttps://review.firstround.com/clays-path-to-product-market-fit/