On Product Market Fit

[The Elusive Product Market Fit, Overcoming My Allergy to Slide Decks, Behavior Change, Lead Gen in a Trench Coat, The BirdDog Hypotheses, The Incomplete Promise, The Decision, The Path Less Traveled]

2025.04.27

XCVII

Thesis: BirdDog can hit PMF by simply selling leads or might be able to hit PMF by doing something different.

[The Elusive Product Market Fit]

Product Market Fit (PMF) is very much like the woman of my dreams–alluring, elusive, and possibly not real.

PMF is this idea that you have a product that fits your customers needs like a glove. It is the Mecca, the promised land for startups–this place you get to where the customers flow in, the reviews are phenomenal, and word of mouth spreads like wildfire.

Unfortunately for BirdDog, based on Mr. Andreessen’s quote, we don’t have PMF.

That doesn’t mean everything is bad, not at all; we’re getting a lot of positive signals:

•  A user said, “I would take a pay cut to have BirdDog.”

• Another user qualified two 6 figure deals in a week off of our signals.

• It’s pretty easy to sell monthly subscriptions

• We’re getting screenshots of people we’ve never heard of talking about our product in their company’s slack.

We have negative signals, too though:

• Actual usage of the product isn’t as high as we’d like to see it.

• Churn is higher than it “should” be

• It’s hard to close annual contracts.

• A client who said he & everyone on the team loves it also isn’t sure how he’s going to pitch ROI to the CFO when it comes renewal time.

In other words, there’s something of a disconnect, and we’re not exactly sure where it is. 

After listening to a sales presentation from an advisor, though, we think we’re onto it, and it presents us with a choice: 

Should we really do something different or should we copy a tried & true business model everyone else is doing?

[Overcoming My Allergy to Slide Decks]

This week, one of our advisors showed me a sales presentation that blew my mind.

He would close 80% of prospects who saw this presentation.

In other words, it was really good.

It was for a budgeting software he sold to universities. The average price was $40K ($20K/yr + $20K implementation). 

He would use the presentation for a 90 minute “Demo Call.” It was his second call and happened after the first “Discovery Call.” In the Discovery Call, he had learned a lot about the client’s current state and needs. In the Demo Call, he would explain how his product answered those needs.

The demo would start with Boomer / Gen X memes–you know, those black and white cartoons that look like they’re hand drawn? He used them to relate directly to the problems the prospect felt in a humorous way.

He would go on to explain what a solution to their problems ought to be.

Of course, he would say, by the way, that’s what I’m selling. 

The really cool part of the demo, though, is that he would list out some tasks his prospect would perform & ask them how long it would take them to do it with their current system. They’d say, “2 days.” He’d say, “I’m gonna do it in 30 minutes.” They said, “No you won’t!”

And then, he would.

[Behavior Change]

While our advisor’s presentation inspired us to make one of our own & formalize our sales process, it did something a whole lot more important: it made us realize that we’re not being crystal clear about what we’re selling. 

In the advisor's presentation, he went through very specific problems that the team had & explained how a system should solve these problems. Then, he would explain that his system did solve those problems.

What he sold involved behavior change. This means he had to:

1. Convince them that the behavior change was needed 

2. Offer a system (his product) that makes that behavior change as easy as possible

It’s a subtle nuance, but the start of the presentation was not him selling his product. It was highlighting problems they faced, why the current way was broken, and coaching them on what the solution should be. Then he would sell his thing.*

We are realizing that we aren’t doing a great job of selling the need for a behavior change or a system that makes it easy to do that behavior change.

While what we’re promising is different, in practice it’s getting reduced to something called lead generation.

*Very Challenger Sales influenced

[Lead Gen in a Trench Coat]

A lead generation (lead gen) company helps sales teams get “leads,” or people or companies they can sell to. At the end of the day, no matter how you cut it, this gets priced on cost per lead generated.

For the purchaser, it’s a simple ROI calculation.

In essence, a lot of sales tools are lead gen in a trench coat:

• Intent Data - Based on web searches, which company should I sell to?

• Social Listening - Which decision makers are talking about your product or problem on social media?

• Web Visitor Deanonymization - Which prospects visited my website?

• Lead Gen Agency - Pay me & I’ll book meetings for you.

• AI SDRs - Lead Gen Agency but AI

• ClayGency - Lead gen agency but using Clay

It’s a violently competitive space with brief, glorious moments of true differentiation followed by commoditization and competition. 

Of course, there are different degrees of quality of leads, and different degrees of management (am I sending you the lead data for your team to use or am I booking you meetings for you? How good is the data? How good are the meetings?). At the end of the day though, it’s a pretty simple ROI calculations.

With so many platforms in the space that are really lead gen in a trench coat, it’s not surprising that customers are trying to grade us as lead gen.

[The BirdDog Hypotheses]

So, if we don’t want to be lead gen, and our customers don’t seem to buying us as lead gen, what are we?

Our first hypothesis was something like: 

Real world signals make it easier to connect to the real issues going on at the prospects companies.

Unfortunately, this take is easy to compress into another flavor of lead gen–use signals to book more meetings. That’s how some prospects and clients have viewed us, and, in some ways, that’s what we’ve caught ourselves trying to deliver.

Really, though, some important parts that are getting lost between the pitch and the implementation are that:

• These signals increase the probability of the deal closing

• Addressing these signals enriches the whole sales process

This is what we’ve been selling on, and it’s what our biggest customer bought on, and it’s what the grayest beard doing a paid pilot with us believes in. 

It sounds obvious: “Of course a company that mentions value selling is more likely to buy my value support system. And of course I should ask on a call how the value role they hired for 6 months ago is working out for them.”

The probability bit is validated by demo’s where reps give us their account lists, we rank them on our signals, and they say, “Wow, I’ve recently closed one of the accounts BirdDog ranked in top 5 and am in serious talks with 3 ranked in the top ten.” Or, for one client we just turned on our account finder for, he said, “This is great guys, but we’ve already sold to half of these companies… but we didn’t tell you that.”

We know that the way we are ranking companies accurately reflects the probability they are a good fit for our clients.

And, anecdotally, we know it’s been helpful for our clients to bring up context from BirdDog in real world meetings.

Our update hypothesis is now closer to:

A research driven sales process leads to easier to close, better fit clients, more revenue, & fewer headaches.

[The Incomplete Promise]

While he might agree with everything I just said, even the grayest beard I mentioned believes the pilot is a “success” only if the number of meetings booked gets a lift. There’s nothing in there about the number of prospects that we suggest that actually close, or how accurate the information was. 

The truth is, the default tool in the space is a lead gen tool. So, it’s only natural that it’s the default grading rubric. We haven’t gone out of our way to tell them how to grade us to explicitly frame away from BirdDog as a lead gen service.

And, on top of that, if we’re being honest, we’ve invested more in features recently that make it easier to do lead gen, rather than features that make it easier to have a research driven process.

[The Decision]

On one end, we can succumb to market pressure and become a lead gen tool. On the other end, we can very clearly mark ourselves as different & try to crack PMF for the research nut.

In either case, we’d have to do as our advisor did and:

1. Convince the prospect that a behavior change is needed

2. Offer a system to make the change as easy as possible

For the lead gen path, we think 1 & 2 would both be trivial; you can hardly call it a behavior change. For 2, we’d be able to reduce the complexity of the product, our sales cycle, and our marketing.

While we’d likely be able to get some semblance of ‘PMF’, the catch is it doesn’t matter as much. We would not have a monopoly. Yes, we’d niche down to a specific group that is underserved by competitors, but, in the long run we’d likely have more churn & way more competition.

The other path is much more tricky & involves a much greater risk that we don’t hit PMF.

To get 1 right, we’d have to dial in a very optimized sales process and find a convincing way to control the definition of success from the offset in a way that didn’t grade us against lead gen tools. Rather, we’d likely frame on the cost of human researchers or possibly connect the data to closed won deals.

To get 2 right, we would be able to remove some of the current technical complexity, but we’d have to add more complexity in. We’d certainly need to integrate with existing systems like CRMs. The system would need to be aware of the current state of each sales cycle and provide different data accordingly. It would also likely react to the client’s internal initiatives and goals.

Despite all of the risk, we feel the rewards are far greater. We think it is a real whole in the market and haven’t seen someone get close to cracking it yet. Our clients haven’t, either, which is why some of them are with us. Because this is what they want us to do—make it easy for them to have research driven sales.

Neither path is certain, but one is certainly more straightforward and lower risk than the other.

The other, though, is far more exciting & interesting…

[The Path Less Traveled]

So, what is the future of BirdDog?

We haven’t decided yet, but I really like these lines:

Live Deeply,