Validating an Idea: Founder Fit

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written about different elements of the idea and problem validation process: the problem, the buyer, and the market. Today, I want to discuss an aspect of validation that will significantly impact you, the founder, and how you fit with the business you hope to build.  As David Cummings mentioned on his blog, the problem/founder fit is vital to success. While David talks about temperament, and happiness around a problem space, which is very important, I will expand this into other areas of founder fit. The founder fit is hard to quantify but should be top of mind throughout your validation journey. Be brutally honest with yourself on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of founder fit. Entrepreneurship is hard, and honesty and vulnerability now will save you a lot of pain down the road. Having previously worked on problems I wasn’t excited about, I wanted a customer persona I would be happy serving for the next ten years when I was doing market validation for ideas that eventually led to TheraNest. 

Lean into Your Advantage

When building a high-growth startup, find your personal advantage and lean into it. Your prior validation work should have given you a good idea of the major challenges of the problem and the market. Take inventory of these challenges and what would be needed to overcome them. If you have unique skills and temperament to overcome those challenges, add that to your signal that you could have founder fit. Continue to evaluate your unique skills and advantages as you validate the market. Your advantage can show up in your network, your funding ability (especially for founders with a prior exit), your skillset, and your temperament.

One area of founder advantage is technical know-how. If addressing a highly technical problem, do you have the subject matter expertise to go to market faster or to launch at a lower cost than competitors? If you’ll be selling to highly technical people, will your know-how confer authority that gives you a unique advantage? 

Another form of advantage is personal or positional access. While validating an idea around software for civic clubs such as Rotary, I ran into a competitor called DACDB. However, the founder of DACDB had deep roots in the world of Rotary and was a District Governor. That gave him a unique advantage. Sure, I could tell myself I could build a better product, but I didn’t even understand the inner workings of the global organization and its buying and governance structure anywhere close to the extent that he did. I would be at a significant disadvantage if that competitor coupled that with technical know-how and great design.

Your experience may also give you an advantage. If you’re an enterprise salesperson with years of experience navigating a particular market and the primary method of reaching that core market is outbound sales, that’s an advantage. If you’re a marketing person trying to sell into a crowded space that requires a unique set of growth marketing skills that you know you have excelled in, this becomes a huge advantage. 

One clear advantage is audience and followers. Do you have existing and trusted access to a large audience or following, especially in the problem space? Influence doesn’t always have to present itself in the form of a social media following. If you’ve built a product for a particular market and have an existing market to sell into, this is similar to having a following or an audience even if you don’t have a large following on Twitter or Facebook.

The Role of Cofounders

Founder fit is where bringing on a cofounder can help increase your chances of success. As you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses and how they align with the market, also consider what skillset someone else might be able to bring. For example, if you’ve got sales experience and know that selling is your best strength as a founder, bringing on a technical co-founder with product experience can be a strategic advantage. Or, if you have a product that will be served by building an audience but don’t have the network or following, you can leverage a cofounder with an audience that fits your market. 

As I discussed in my early startup mistakes newsletter, taking a personality/strengths test with your cofounder is a good idea to understand what you both bring to the table. This interdependent relationship can increase your chances of founder fit and therefore success, but it can also be complicated, so treat it with intentionality.  You also want to ensure your co-founder is just as excited about serving the market as you are.

As you evaluate idea valuation and founder fit, remember these all add up. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell will tell you that markets and many other phenomena don’t tip all of a sudden. It’s a gradual build that turns to an overflow. Your fit as a founder is another drip in the bucket that makes it easy to trigger an overflow of probability for success.

This post concludes our validation series. If you missed the prior editions, check them out here. Let me know what you thought of this newsletter here, on Twitter, or on Instagram.