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Marketing fit comes first
Product-market fit gets the attention, and product-marketing fit gets underrated. The way a product is talked about and marketed can come before building it, drawing on a deep understanding of the technology and of the enterprise sales process. Done excellently, that work can be the element that makes a company successful.
The pitch method
The method is to pitch 100 people, refine the pitch as much as possible, and get the marketing narrative for why the thing is transformative right. Only then does the exact product shape get committed to.
Sutter Hill's playbook
The lesson came from Sutter Hill Ventures, a firm that is intentionally illegible: its website shows nothing, and it operates as quietly as possible while standing behind some of Silicon Valley's most iconic successes. Its incubation model, started by partner Mike Speiser, has produced success after success, which points to a playbook rather than luck. Recruiting is part of it, helped by an internal tool called Redicle that maps everyone the firm has interacted with and the ten best people each of them has interacted with.
Why does positioning come before the product?
Marketing strategists Al Ries and Jack Trout first wrote about positioning in the trade magazine Industrial Marketing in 1969 and popularized the term in their 1981 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind. Their argument was that a product competes less on what it is than on the place it holds in a buyer's mind. Geoffrey Moore built on that thinking in his 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, which focused on how technology companies move from early adopters to the mainstream.
How did Dropbox test demand before building?
Drew Houston posted a demo video of Dropbox on Digg in 2007, while the product was still early. Viewers saw file syncing work the way it would in the finished product. Houston has said the beta waiting list went from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight. Dropbox went public in March 2018.
How did Sutter Hill incubate Snowflake?
Snowflake was founded in 2012 by Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes, and Marcin Zukowski, with Sutter Hill's Mike Speiser closely involved in building the company. Sutter Hill used its own capital and staff to shape the business from the start, instead of waiting for founders to arrive with a pitch. Snowflake went public in September 2020 and raised about 3.4 billion dollars, then the largest software IPO on record.
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