Founders leaving big tech often forget to sell their product

Mick Johnson, who worked at Google and Meta and later started two companies, was talking about the search for product-market fit, meaning the point when enough customers want the product that demand starts to pull it forward. As he put it, "You're trying to get to product market fit, and you build thing A and no one really responds, and build thing B and no one really responds. And when you finally build thing X and it takes off, you will know."

That search taught him a warning he now gives to founders coming out of large tech companies. Johnson said, "I often coach people who've gone from a large tech company to being founder of a startup, and they always forget or deprioritize go-to-market."

What he means is that distribution feels easy inside a giant. Johnson said, "if you work for Google or Facebook and you have a new feature or a new idea, you can get it in front of billions of people." He added, "That's not hard." A new company starts with no such ready audience.

He said many founders tell him, "Well, we're planning to just build it, and we'll get referrals, and people will like it, and that's how we'll grow." He says a pretty good product with strong selling can get enough feedback to become great. As he puts it, "And if you can't get people using your product, it doesn't matter."

By that, he means unglamorous work to win users, from direct outreach by phone to paid search to useful articles to referral programs. Without that effort, he says, the product does not get the feedback it needs to improve. His own startups, he said, built "really interesting things" but "Ultimately, it didn't scale" and "It didn't succeed."