Enterprise Weekly #464: NYC Shakes It Up, Ideating & Validating to PMF, and More
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An earthquake hit NJ/NYC this morning! And of course, VC/tech Twitter is lit. While it appears to be sub 5 magnitude, hoping everyone is ok 🙏
Back to our regular newsletter programming…we wanted to talk about what often feels like a rollercoaster ride for founders – finding and optimizing Product-Market Fit (PMF).
While many founders have been taught YC's well-known mantra of “shipping early and often,” this is ultimately at odds for founders building enterprise software, given Fortune 500s are some of the most internally complex, safeguarded, and regulated companies in the world. To serve these companies requires rigorous product features around security, privacy, and data.
The catch-22: To land your first enterprise customer, you need to understand their requirements…and to understand their requirements, you need customer feedback. So how do you break into large enterprises to connect with users for product discovery?
We unearthed a few general rules for founders to consider:
Develop a trusted network: While domain experience can give founders a deep understanding of the problem set, industry credibility, some understanding of early use cases, and a pre-established network of potential users to help validate their ideas, not every founder building in enterprise software has specific domain experience. If that’s the case, it's important to start developing intelligence nodes in the industries you're exploring.
Begin conversations with personas in your perceived ICP: Create a plan to talk to a few dozen enterprise users and take detailed notes. Even if those users aren’t in a position to buy the product now or aren’t in direct control of a budget, they can still provide critical feedback to what their organization’s tech stack looks like and where their biggest prioritized pain points lie. See some product discovery questions from
here.Listen to feedback, validate hypotheses, and build from a place of strength: The feedback from your product discovery conversations can help you find a whitespace and a problem that is generalizable across many potential users. Along this journey, two mistakes we often see founders make:
Building features for ONE enterprise customer.
Being too committed to the founding idea, even if all other evidence points to an adjacent product demand.
Read our full post on how to ideate and validate ideas during Pre-Product Market Fit and see our case studies from our founders Adam Wenchel of Arthur and Harald Collet of Alkymi.
🖥️ Join more events:
Saturday, April 6: MongoDB GenAI Hackathon where you can try new GenAI tools, models, frameworks, and platforms and bring your innovative ideas to life
Tuesday, April 16: Work-Bench’s NY Enterprise Tech Meetup on “Product Inflection Points from 0 to IPO” with Braze's 5th employee and now Chief Product Officer
Tuesday, April 23: Work-Bench’s Next NYC Product Marketing Night on “How Product Marketing Can Help Educate the Market and Separate You From The Rest” with GTM Product Marketing Manager Lead at Pinecone and Senior Product Marketing Manager at Temporal
📚 Read more news:
CNBC: Rubrik Files To Go Public As Tech Companies See Thawing Of IPO Market
Pitchbook: 3 Charts That Explain Tiger Global’s Downsized $2.2B Fund
Reuters: Alphabet Weighs Offer For HubSpot
WSJ: AT&T Reset 7.6 Million Customers’ Passcodes After Data Breach
📚 Read more (th)reads:
Company: Authzed
Role: Site Reliability Engineer
Technology: Managed Permissions Database
Funding: $3.9M from Work-Bench, Amplify Partners, Y Combinator
🌟 Company of the Week 🌟
SiftHub raises $5.5M led by Matrix Partners and Blume Ventures
Sales / Marketing • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Founder: Manisha Raisinghani (CEO)
Inner AI raises $2.4M led by Canary
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Pre-Seed • Los Angeles, CA
Ivo raises $4.8M led by Uncork Capital and Fika Ventures
Collaboration / Productivity • Seed • San Francisco, CA
Quadratic raises $5.6M led by GV
Collaboration / Productivity • Seed • Boulder, CO
Scrut Automation raises $10M led by Lightspeed, MassMutual Ventures
Risk / Security • Series A • Milpitas, CA
Proxima raises $12M led by Mucker Capital
Sales / Marketing • Series A • New York, NY
Permiso raises $18.5M led by Altimeter Capital
Risk / Security • Series A • Palo Alto, CA
Datavolo raises $21M led by General Catalyst
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series A • Phoenix, AZ
Read AI raises $21M led by Goodwater Capital and Madrona Venture Group
Collaboration / Productivity • Series A • Seattle, WA
Modal raises $25M led by Left Lane Capital
Future of Work • Series A • San Francisco, CA
Luminance raises $40M led by March Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • Cambridge, UK
Coalesce raises $50M led by Industry Ventures and Emergence Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series B • San Francisco, CA
Homebase raises $60M led by L Catterton Growth
HR Tech • Series D • San Francisco, CA
SiMa.ai raises $70M led by Maverick Capital
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Series C • San Jose, CA
Aerospike raises $109M led by Sumeru Equity Partners
Data / AI / Machine Learning • Venture • Mountain View, CA
Pigment raises $145M led by Iconiq Growth
Future of Work • Series D • Paris, France
ServiceTitan acquires Convex for an Undisclosed Amount
Sales / Marketing • Acquisition • San Francisco, CA
Dumb Q: What's an ICP?