Case Study: Wilco's Product-Market Fit Journey Is All About Generating The "Aha!" Moment For Its Users
Achieving product-market fit requires a lot of work, iteration, and willingness to return to the whiteboard.
Introduction:
On Freund is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wilco, a startup dedicated to empowering developers to unlock their full potential. Throughout his career, On has managed development teams, most notably as VP of Engineering at Handy and WeWork. Besides these roles and others, he is also a proud angel investor and a humble former VC. On is married to an immunologist and is a father of 3. You'll likely see him playing drums or tinkering with home automation outside of work.
Executive Summary:
Problem: Providing The Right Content For Every Developer
A challenge we need to solve right now is ensuring the platform provides the right content for every developer. After all, what one dev finds incredibly easy is insurmountably difficult for another — and we don’t want to limit the product to a specific difficulty range.Market: Seasoned Engineers Need To Keep Developing Their Skills
I’m speaking to seasoned engineers who love their job yet are thinking of leaving so they can continue developing. These scenarios are ubiquitous.Solution: Building For The Community Of Developers
Since our target audience can only be defined as “developers,” we first decided to begin with a community edition. Not only did we not want to be associated with corporate upskilling programs, we believed (and still believe) that true PMF has to come from a value-driven proposition.Team: Having Respect And Knowing When To Step Back
Our team is our proudest achievement; thus, we look for people who not only help improve our company culture but are driven by our mission.Takeaway: The “Aha” Moment Means You’re On The Way To PMF
The market doesn’t necessarily know they need something until they are presented with something they don’t have. When they are, the “aha” moment is a glorious thing to behold.
Case Study: Wilco
Problem: Providing The Right Content For Every Developer
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
Our journey to product-market fit is just beginning. A challenge we need to solve right now is ensuring the platform provides the right content for every developer. After all, what one dev finds incredibly easy is insurmountably difficult for another — and we don’t want to limit the product to a specific difficulty range.
We’ll need to create variety and, more importantly, a way for every developer to easily discover the quests that will challenge but not frustrate.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
We’re not building a niche product but a platform that’s supposed to be scalable and ideally provides value to every software developer out there. Solving the challenge of content-user fit is one of the most important keys to unlocking product-market fit in our case.
Like any content personalization effort, you always risk overfitting specific groups. We can easily create a product that’s custom tailored for highly experienced developers, but that would be at the expense of everyone else who’s going to have a hard time using it. On the flip side, if there is too much hand-holding throughout the journey, new developers might have a great time, but everyone with decent experience will not be challenged enough.
The problem is that we might sympathize more with one of these personas, or a specific cohort of users might be more vocal than others. Trying to keep an objective view that balances the needs of every experience level will always be a priority for us.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Founder to Founder to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.