 Wow. Hi, everyone. I'm not going to introduce myself because that was an amazing introduction. I sat there going, my God, that sounds pretty good. It always sounds good on a slide. So I'm here today to talk about product market fit, right? But before we go into it, just going to, awesome. This is me, and I'm not going to tell you who I am, you just got the introduction, but I think what's important to understand is why I'm qualified to talk about product market fit. So I work with companies when they're at scale-up stage, right? I joined tier a year ago after it's been around for two years. I joined N26 when they were four and a half years old, and scaled it from 800,000 customers to six and a half million. Now, product market fit for you is exactly the same as product market fit for those companies that are growing that fast, right? You constantly need to think about it. It's not just at the beginning where you have to think about it. It's also as you grow. As you grow, we heard earlier from the great speaker from Voi and we heard yesterday in the pitch speeches, as you grow, you need to think about product market fit every single time, whether you go into a new country, if you go into a new user group, if you go into a deeper product set, you have to revisit product market fit. So that's my first tip. You're going to always think about this. This is not something that is going to go away. Now, product market fit really talks about being in a market with a product that suits the market. Mark Andreessen wrote a blog article about a couple of years ago. It said the only thing that matters, right? And it really, really is. Because if you don't have it, you're going to struggle every single time. You're going to struggle to get traction. You're going to struggle with your product. You're going to struggle with funding. And it's really important to understand how it works. So when we think about product market fit, we think about all of this stuff. There's frameworks. There's processes that you can look at. There's talks that you can look at. But in the end, what are we really, really here to do? We're here to capture monetizable value from the market. That's the end goal, right? And I sat in the founder's stage yesterday listening to Heno from Personio, talking about how it was really important to them to start charging for their product early. Because it is true. It's different getting feedback from people who are paying for a product versus feedback than people that are using that product for free. And if you need to start charging for it later, that's something that you change your product market fit. Because something that's valuable to someone without paying for it is very different than something that's valuable to someone when they are paying for it. And I saw this at N26 when we had a free product, which was amazing. And then you had a premium subscription model. You needed to show the value as you went up the product ladder. So we talk about product market fit. We talk about this end goal of making sure that we have this monetizable value from the market. OK, great. We understand. I think we all know what the end goal is and what we're trying to achieve. But how does that work? And Slush contacted me about four months ago to talk about this. And I thought, oh, yeah, I don't want to talk about the same old thing. It's not like no one knows what product market fit is. And I actually built a whole different presentation. And then I presented it to someone and they were so confused. They was like, but isn't there a Venn diagram, which explains product market fit? And I realized that in this industry, and when we're in startups, when you're founding something, even as you're growing and scaling things, we overcomplicate things so much. There are a million books. There are a million different processes. There are a million different frameworks that you can use. But in the end, we need something that is clear and easy to understand so that we can get on with doing the job. So when we think about product market fit, the Venn diagram works. The problem with the Venn diagram is that you need to understand all the elements that make it up. So when we think about product market fit, we think about desirability. Does it solve the problem for the person? We think about feasibility. Can you make it work? And we think about viability. Can it sustain itself financially? Now, only when all three of these things come into play do you have product market fit. And this is really, really important because it hasn't always been the case that product market fit had a diagram like this, which had these three elements. I want to give you a bit of background to this. If we track back a little bit, pre-tech into the industrial age. In the industrial age, when you were doing production, systems, processes, really what you had was thinkers or white collar, we often called them. And they were creating the plan. They were doing all of the numbers. They were working out what the business was going to look like when the delivery dates needed to happen and how we were going to organize this. And then that got passed down to the workers. And the workers executed the plan. Now, the problem was that the thinkers who were up in the offices, they didn't do any of the work. They didn't have experience in making it happen. And the workers, down making the things happen, they saw things that the thinkers didn't see. And so when the plans were being created, they were being created with known information. Now, moving into the post-industrial age, you can't work with known information. We all know this. We're all trying to be pioneers. We're all trying to push the boundaries. And so desirability really became something that is crucial to product market fit, making sure that we're delivering value to the consumer. Because we moved from this world where we have the production of goods to the provisioning of services, which we often call value today. So really, how do you create value for the customer so that you can have good product market fit? Now, the problem with this a little bit is that we spent so long with only viability and feasibility that we leaned really hard into desirability. And there are so many organizations that are starting out these days that are consumer obsessed. It's all about the consumer. It's all about the hypothesis and the value that you're providing to the consumer. But that alone does not give you product market fit. You cannot forget feasibility and viability. I was talking earlier today with Christina Vaklamaya, who is the CEO of Nuri. And she used to work with me at N26 when we were a product. And we were talking about how, as product managers, we were obsessed with consumer journeys and hypothesis-driven development. And then we moved into more senior roles. And sometimes I feel like product managers think I sold out. Because as soon as I get to the executive role and founders, you'll find this as well. It's all about consumer-driven development. But you have to be able to run the company, right? If you can't be financially viable, you're not delivering any more value to your consumers. And if you work in a purpose-driven environment, like I do at Tia, if we're not around in 10 years time, we cannot change mobility for good. It's not something that's going to happen in three years. So viability is really, really important as an executive team for us making decisions. And that sometimes means you have to cut decisions on the desirability side. So you can see you can't just focus on one thing. You have to really look at, OK, what would be the perfect solution for this problem? Can I make that happen? Is that possible? Can I make it work? And how is that going to make money? Because if I can't make money from it, I can't grow. I can't build the business. So let's pause there for a second. We understand the Venn diagram. We're going to go into it a little bit more, and I'm going to give you some examples. Because this is not rocket science, right? The hard part about building companies, building products, is context. You can read all the books. You can listen to this presentation. But without the context and the understanding of the why, you're never, ever going to get anywhere. Because it's going to be it's not building a company is not a checklist that you can tick off. So if we think about product-market fit and we think about this Venn diagram, we have to also think, are we making the right solution? So I want to take us back a step. Because product-market fit starts before you get to those three circles. Product-market fit starts with the right problem to solve. And I think it's been mentioned in a lot of talks on this stage over the last two days, because it's really, really important. Everything always starts with a problem, right? And you need to make sure that that is the right problem. Otherwise, you're going to go through this product-market fit cycle, and you're going to have a great solution. But it might not be the right one. And it might go get the traction that you think it will. So one of the things that I've learned over time, and I didn't learn it at school, I didn't learn it at university, and no one really taught it to me in my career, was that the most important thing that you can do is learn how to define a problem correctly. If you can break problems down into small pieces so that you can provide really clear solutions to it, that is going to make you way faster than anything else that you can do, way faster than hiring 100 people, way faster than anything else. This gets even more important as you scale. As you have more people to onboard to your Y to get on board with the problem that you're trying to solve, it really is something that you should learn how to do. So what I'm going to do is tell you what I have created for myself. You can work it out, you can take it, you can use something else. But when I think about a problem, I break it down into three parts. So the first part is, you always have the problem. You know it, right? You've got it from the start. And I think this is how lots of companies get started. You either have a problem or you see an opportunity, and you start building solutions for it. But first, you should explore the situation. Now, this is also something that most people do. You do research, you run surveys, you talk to people. If you have a design thinking background, you probably run some kind of sprint and use a research interviews and really understand the situation and the scope of the problem that you're thinking about. Don't stop there, right? You cannot stop just with understanding the space. The next thing that you have to do is explain it to someone. And this is really important because what we'll see is that you adjust every time you explain it to someone, they will give you feedback, they will misunderstand it, or they'll think you're talking about a different problem, or they'll say that's not a problem, that's not my problem, you need to think about something else. So explaining it to someone is really, really important. The next part, once you've explained it and you realize, yeah, okay, some people might not have this problem, but this is the problem that I want to solve, then you need to say, why is that the problem? And this is super important because as you ask yourself, why is this the problem? You start to unpack the problem and you get deeper into it. And so once you understand why that's the problem, you'll find out there's a different problem further down. And that might be the problem that you want to then go back, explore the situation, explain it to someone, and then come back to this. And what you'll get is you'll get much more clarity on the exact problem that you're trying to solve. This will not only help you with product-market fit, it will help you with pitching to investors, it will help you with onboarding people to your team. So this is all very well, but I want to give you a live example, and it's not going to be about tier, right? Because tier has a good product-market fit, it's scaling, it's going well. I want to come back to something that I just started 10 months ago, and I don't have a product-market fit and I don't have a solution for this. 10 months ago, I, like lots of you, was angry about something. There was some information that came out from Pitchbook that only 2% of VC funding in 2020 went to women founders. And only 11% went to our teams with a woman in the co-founding team. Now, I cannot tell you how angry this made me feel as a woman in tech for the last 15 years and watching funding grow and grow and grow in the sectors and seeing how little of it is going to women. My first reaction was, this is ridiculous, it's about, we need more equality, it was a rant, I promise you. The second part I thought was, well, we're not funding diverse enough ideas, it's not even about the founders, it's about if we're only funding ideas from such a small representation of society, we're not going to get the solutions that we need for the future. And then as people started telling me, investors, things like that, that there's a perception that women do not start commercial enough ideas, right? So they're not starting companies that are obviously monetizable was the answer that I got. You know, you can imagine, right? I was fuming, I was ready to dive in and I did. I literally sat down one Saturday with my husband and I was like, we have to do something about this. I have to do something about this. And I started a LinkedIn group, we have an amazing network of women entrepreneurs who are a combination of women who want to do something or want to start something or want to found something with women who are in a position to help them do that, either through advising or funding or just a connection. And that's fantastic. And I got a lot of traction and sifted, covered it, it was fantastic, heaps of noise. Then I had to stop because define the problem properly, right? I got so passionate and so excited about this and I was like, I can do something and I'm getting traction and I'm moving it. But if we stop for a second and define the problem, right? First thing I had to do was explore the situation. So I spoke to heaps of people. I spoke to VCs, I spoke to women founders, I spoke to male founders, I spoke to everyone. And I got a lot of different answers as to why they thought this was the problem. The next thing is that I decided to explain it to people. Now, this was really interesting because everyone had different takes and everyone had different positions and different biases. So explaining it to people was always really different depending on who I was talking to and all of that feedback gave me more information about the problem. And then I had to work out why that was the problem. Now, this was the critical part for me because 2% of VC funding going to women founded companies is not the problem, it's the outcome. The problem was something different and so as I started to unpack the problem, I started to work out that actually there was a much different problem underneath and it was much more complex than just connecting people together. So what I had was two defined problems to solve. Also I had two different customers. The first was that most VCs, and I say most because it's not all, have traditional business networks, right? And they don't have easy access to a great population of women founders. It's harder to find them. And the answer here that I was getting here was it's deal flow. There's no deal flow, so we can't invest in women. The other part which I is a problem and I had investigated this through my problem statement was that women founders don't always have the same experience in presenting concepts commercially. Now you need to read this statement because it's written this way for a reason. This is not capability. But if you think about the experience that we've been able to have and you think about how many women leaders are in tech companies, if you think about how many women VCs we have, there's just not as many as there are men. And so without the experience and the everyday pitching and everyday seeing commercial numbers and models and talking about CACs and growth rates, they're pitching in a different way. They're pitching in a way that is much more holistic. Now this is hard for VCs because it's not as easy to compare companies when they're coming through as pitchers. So we had two really clear problems to solve. So when you look then go into the product market fit, we've got these two problems to solve. You have to look at desirability first, right? We don't live in the industrial age. We live in the post-industrial age. And really consumers have the power. And consumers' demand is changing and moving as fast as it has ever done before. They're convenience driven. We want instant everything. We have very, very strong opinions on what it is that we want, right? And you need to look at two things when you look at desirability. You need to look at the person and you need to look at the problem. Now I had two people in this situation. So I had to look at who they were. I had to look at what was driving them. I had to look at what was getting in the way of them achieving their goals. Now this was a really interesting one because women were very clear. They were like, help me then. And I can advise lots of women in leadership positions, coach women founders in how to present commercially. There was a great presentation yesterday on how to pitch, which was fantastic. And there's lots of content out there. Now, VCs, there wasn't a lot getting in the way of their job. There's plenty of people to invest in, right? And there are many more and more VCs who are very focused on making sure that they have a diverse portfolio. But the more important thing as a VC, whether you're a man or a woman, is that you have a profitable portfolio, right? So we need to reshape the way that we think about things. And actually, at the moment, with the amount of funding that goes to women companies, the best way to increase the profitability of your portfolio right now is to invest in a woman founder. It will return double the revenue per investment than a male driven company will. It's just numbers. So talk numbers to people. You need to talk in people's language. You can't expect them to understand everything from a different standpoint. So you really need to think about that when you think about who the person is and what's driving them and how you can talk to them and how you can reach them. The second part is the problem. How are they experiencing this problem and how does it affect their lives? So you can think about this from a software product. You can think about this with this problem to solve. You can think about this with a mobility company, right? So what is the problem? What are you trying to solve? Pioneer products are harder. So if you are trying to create a market, you need to show people what their problem is. So for instance, in micro-mobility transport, a lot of people in cities don't think they have a problem because they have a car, it's convenient, they get around. But what we're starting to see is a change. So cities are starting to bring in slower speed limits. They're removing car parking, making cars less convenient than they have been before. And I'm not saying that scooters are going to be the solution to all the problems, but you need to understand the problem and understand the person to make sure that you can build the right solution for them. Now, the other part to desirability is feedback, right? And this is continuous. So if we take an example from Slack, right? So when Slack was building, they were begging everyone. They wanted feedback all the time. Now, we talk about feedback in product a lot, but what they did was really clever. They started at the beginning and they started with small teams. And they got all their friends who were in small teams to try Slack and they got feedback on that. And then they went to mid-sized teams and they got all the feedback on mid-sized teams and they adjusted the product as they went. It's really interesting because it's something that you need to do. And we talk about feedback a lot, right? But it's an easy thing to say. It's a really hard thing to do, right? So I don't love going into a restaurant and laying out a wire frame in front of someone and saying, hey, can you make this work, right? You need to put yourself out there. If you don't get feedback, you're not going to create a desirable product because you will create a product for yourself. And this is where, you know, they say never build a product for yourself. Well, you will if you don't get feedback constantly. The other thing about desirability is that it's about adapting to customer needs. And this is why you need to remember because adapting to customer needs needs to happen all the time. It needs to happen when you start the company. It needs to happen as you grow. It needs to happen as the market changes. It needs to happen as technology changes. And so it's a constant thing. There is no set product market fit. The next part is about feasibility. So in this state or degree of something being easily or conveniently done, right? Really important is convenient, right? If you can't make it happen, it won't work. And you need to think about feasibility in a number of different ways. So does the solution solve the problem, right? First one, there's the obvious one that's on every Venn diagram, right? Are you going to solve the problem? This is going back to making sure you have the right problem to solve. The second part is can you build it? Now, technically, capably, and economically, is this something that you can do? And you need to think further out. Can you run it? And another question is should you run it, right? If you think about can you build it and can you run it? It may be a case that you don't need to in the beginning. And then you look at things like white label solutions. FinTech is a really good example here. You see a boom in these amazing consumer FinTech products which are under the hood, a white label solution from another company. Now that's fine because feasibility is different depending on the stage of company that you're at. Something that you can build in four days is fine for your pre-seed funding round. That product will need to be rebuilt, trust me, in a year when you start getting consumers on that platform. So you need to address feasibility at the stage of the company that you're at. And if you are going with a white label solution, then you need to think, am I always going to go with that solution? Or is this something that I need to think about building further down the line? And if I do need to build it, can I? And how would I do that? Because these are questions that investors will ask. The other part is, can you do it better than the competition? Now this is important and you need to be honest about it because you either need to be the first person that does it or you need to do it much, much better. Looking at viability, it's something's ability to survive or exist successfully. Especially under certain conditions like COVID, you need to be able to make sure that this can run properly and you can sustain it. Viability is ultimately linked to the profitability of the business. Now the profitability is the key here, right? Because revenue is one thing, cost is another thing, and profitability is what you need to make, right? And one of the things that we've seen over the last couple of years with the insane increase in VC funding is that profitability moves further down the line, right? And if you're a great company, you can be profitable and choose to put that revenue into growth. Aim for that, all right? Because profitability is something that you're never going to get away from. It's going to chase you all the way through your company if you don't figure out how to do it first. And when we think about viability, we don't just think about it from a monetization perspective. We also think about it from a size and a market size perspective. How big is the addressable market that you're talking about here? Is this something that can scale across borders? Would you need to build it differently if you went into a different market? Do you need licenses? How are you going to do that? Does the market exist right now, or is it saturated? And saturated markets is fine. Let's have a look at dark grocery stores. There is an insanely saturated market, but there is still room to move, right? But you need to be able to be honest and work out what is your product market fit if you're going into a saturated market? And what is your monetization strategy? When I invest for a sale, I always talk to founders about what other revenue streams are. So when I worked in Marketplace, it was really interesting was that you had to have multiple revenue streams. You had the initial one, which was that the consumer pays and the customer gets the revenue, and then you had secondary verticals. So you had tools for your customer or you had other offers for your consumer. So making sure that you can have multiple revenue streams, whether you use them at the beginning or not, is really important. So you need to be able to stand the scrutiny of the complexity of your strategy here, because this is something that investors are more and more interested in and they want to understand that something can work from a profitability perspective. So if we think about the Venn diagram, right? And it's simple and you've seen it before, but I hope what I've done is given you some examples as to how it has to work and shown you how important it is to have all three. I think when you think about the classic drawing of the skateboard and then the bike and then the car when we talk about agile and iterative development, you also need to think of that with product market fit as well. Don't just focus on one and make sure that you get that right. You're better off doing this iteratively, starting in the middle of that Venn diagram and doing a little bit of each and then building it out as you go. A bit like Slack did with the appropriateness of the teams that were using the product. So desirability, does it solve the problem for the person? Feasibility, can you make it work? How is that going to happen? And viability, can it sustain itself financially? Because if you can't do all three, even in a very small scale, it's not something that's going to work. But remember, there's no point going into the Venn diagram if you don't know what problem it is you're solving. And you don't know exactly what the solution is that you're trying to create. You need to know the problem, you need to know the person and you need to be really, really clear about what that problem statement is. So thank you very much for listening to me. I know it seems simple. It's something that we hear all the time, product market fit, but it's something that is, it is simple, but you need to make sure that you cover all your bases and always start with the right problem. Thanks very much.