Investing at Founder-Market Fit

#News(Startup) [ via IoTGroup ]

Headings…
Investing at Founder-Market Fit
Tom Wilson

Auto extracted Text……

As a pre-seed and seed stage investor, we very rarely have the luxury of investing where there are clear signs of product-market fit and hence getting a sense of if founder-market fit is present is of crucial importance and something we spend a lot of time focused on.
3 ways that founder-market fit can manifest:
Domain expertise Mission-driven mindset Technical skills
For example, just because someone might enjoy travelling (domain interest) does not necessarily mean that they have the founder-market fit necessary to build a billion-dollar travel startup.
Domain expertise likely carries more weight when assessing founder- market fit for certain sectors over others.
Very broadly, I think this element of founder-market fit is likely most relevant in the B2B space where it’s even harder to really understand the specifics of a market without having been on the front-line immersed in the sector.
How it manifests itself might be a personal connection from the founding team to the problem that the startup is solving.
This mission-driven mindset can be incredibly powerful in creating a connection to the problem and a compelling narrative around why they are the perfect person and/or team to be building a product in such a space.
When considering technical skills generally we are thinking about across a founding team rather than specific to any one individual.
The impact this can have on the degree of founder-market fit is dependant on the nature of the startup being built.
However, for less technical products or applications, as technical skills may be less of a factor in assessing founder-market fit there likely needs to be excellence present across the other areas considered above.
An additional area, that is something to bear in mind when considering the degree of founder-market fit present for a VC backable company, is the ability of the founding team to raise capital

Read More..
AutoTextExtraction by Working BoT using SmartNews 1.02976805238 Build 26 Aug 2019