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.

Sep 13, 2022

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.

Market: Seasoned Engineers Need To Keep Developing Their Skills

Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you understand my pain and create a solution to address it?

We know this pain because, as engineers and engineering managers, we and everyone around us experience it constantly.

The first day of your first job is when your engineering experience becomes less about writing code and more about solving challenges with the skills you need to acquire.

You slowly master those skills on the job by looking at what others are doing and making costly mistakes. This is the price of improving yourself. If you have a good mentor and a good team, you’ll absorb their skills and develop your own quicker.

As a senior engineer, you’re likely very good at your work. And so, you’re given the tasks you’re good at. They aren’t necessarily the tasks where you can continue to develop professionally. So you have a side project going, but it’s slow because you don’t want to take care of the design, and it doesn’t simulate the complexity of a real environment, with a full-blown production environment and other humans involved in the process. You are, again, stuck unless you switch jobs.

I’m speaking to seasoned engineers who love their job yet are thinking of leaving so they can continue developing. These scenarios are ubiquitous. Every engineer experiences them, but most discard them as the cost of doing business in this industry.

Our aim was to detach professional development from the workplace. It sounds trivial, but this is a massive challenge. Knowing the desired result was just the beginning.

Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?

Honestly, since we let the first developers into the platform, they have validated our assumptions. The qualitative and quantitative feedback was full of excitement about the potential of Wilco to help engineers gain and master skills independently of their workplace. To get back to one of our favorite metaphors, it’s as if pilots were first exposed to a home flight simulator. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect, but we’re constantly improving Wilco based on the feedback and analytics from our users.

How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?

By definition, our scope couldn’t be limitless as you need to support the stack of choice for your audience. We started with full-stack web development because it’s both one of the most popular fields of work for developers today and one where it’s difficult to acquire skills outside of a real workplace. Generating your own production environment to learn how to detect bugs, for example, isn’t an easy thing to do.

Solution: Building For The Community Of Developers

How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?

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. The ones who can judge our value aren’t necessarily the buyers at companies but the developers who will have to use it.

The main blocker right now is cracking the journey part of Wilco. We are still working on improving the journey for all the different experience levels, backgrounds, preferred tech stacks, etc. There is no one size fits all. So we are currently working on defining the core elements and spending time researching our users and their behavior with Wilco so that we can get closer to achieving product-market fit.

What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?

As we’re letting more and more developers into the platform, we’ve had to limit our reliance on some 3rd-party services and no-code solutions. Those are great when you’re building a startup, but not when you’re trying to provide many users concurrently with their own simulated startups.

What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?

This is still a work in progress. Most of our users today are beta users, so they know what they are getting into. They are getting early access to a product, and they are doing so knowing that their honest feedback is crucial for us. To get that feedback, we’ve opened several channels of communication, from a community Discord to post-quest feedback questionnaires. A dedicated CSM team also talks to our beta companies to get their B2B point of view on the value Wilco provides and things like the onboarding flow.

Are we scared about whether we’ll be able to scale this very-tight feedback loop? Of course. But we’re planning on trying to do so because user feedback is invaluable for us.

Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.

Alon, Shem, and I have a wide network of engineering managers whom we have good relationships with. In the beginning, it was more about getting their feedback and synthesizing the suggestions we were getting into the product. What we saw pretty quickly, though, is that once we showcased the product for feedback, the engineering managers not only wanted to continue to play around with it themselves but were interested in using it to upskill their teams, and that’s how we got our first few beta companies secured.

Team: Having Respect And Knowing When To Step Back

If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time when you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?

Alon, Shem, and I have known each other for years. We work as co-founders because we deeply respect each other’s capabilities and skills and allow each other to own our domains. Sometimes that means knowing when to step back even if we don’t quite see eye to eye.

What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?

We believe it’s all about the people. 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. 2/3 of the team are in engineering and product. We’ve also been exceptionally successful in attracting top female engineers to Israel. 40% of our engineering team is female, including our VP.

For us, this was a major validator, that someone not only has the right skill set but is inspired by and excited by the product. They dogfood it because they’re interested in upskilling themselves rather than the need for QA.

If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?

The Wilco team is working on a net-positive product with the potential to help the developer community worldwide. This, in my opinion, is a great baseline to excite the right kind of potential employee. As importantly, we wholeheartedly believe in our “never stop developing” slogan when it comes to our employees, not just our clients. Wilco is where you’ll be asked about how you want to develop yourself professionally, where you’ll be given the right amount of responsibility and support to accomplish everything you set out to.

Takeaway: The “Aha” Moment Means You’re On The Way To PMF

What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?

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.

Achieving product-market fit requires a lot of work, iteration, and willingness to return to the whiteboard.

There is a lot of trial and error. We need to take risks and place bets to have something work or fail so that we can iterate quickly accordingly.

What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?

Delivering on the promise of being able to help every developer out there. On the narrative side, different levels of experience need different kinds of guidance, and some challenges are too easy or difficult for our users. We’ll need to add a more dynamic level of guidance and expand the tech stack.

But even then, our resources are limited. So you know what would be cool? If users could create their own quests, our catalog was filled with a lot of content for any developer. Nothing to announce yet, though!

Click Here for Wilco’s Founder File:

Wilco’s Founder File: Building The Right Company Culture

Description:

Let’s start with a few paradigms:

Heterogeneous teams build better products.
Unfortunately, women still bear the brunt of the workload regarding raising children.
Stress is very rarely conducive to good company culture.

Why do we mention all of these? To connect product development to a culture that will bring different kinds of people to your company.

At Wilco, almost 50% of our team are women, including 40% in engineering. Most of our team are parents, and our company culture was purposefully built to help them succeed in what is still essentially a start-up work environment. Here are a few steps we’ve taken to accomplish that.

Wilco's Startup Secret

Two Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Assaf Glazer: as a founder at Nanit, Assaf disrupted the nursery. Now he’s working on disrupting your kitchen.
May Piamenta: I’m a big believer in founders that do good while doing well, and May and Vee are the perfect example.

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