This week on Product Love, I sat down with Albert Saniger, the CEO and founder of nate. nate is a digital assistant that does the checkout on your behalf. It takes 3 clicks and 5 seconds to buy what you want without annoyance of having to make loads of micro-decisions about opting in to marketing materials or entering your credit card info. Pretty cool, right?
On this week’s episode, we talked about the founder vs. CEO mindset, as well as how Albert approaches product-market fit.
Founder vs. CEO Mindset
Currently, Albert carries both titles, but they can mean very different things. As a founder, you’re often the head of marketing, product, sales, and everything else. Albert sees the role of a founder as a series of decisions essentially firing yourself from each of those positions as you fill them with other people. But how does one transition from a founder mindset to a CEO mindset? It happens in three phases.
The first phase is a “gut feeling” driven stage, where a lot of decisions are made in uncertainty and darkness. Then, once you start operationalizing, you enter phase two: becoming data informed. You began to have hypotheses, and the data either validates or invalidates it. The last phase is when you truly become data-driven. The transition from being a founder to a CEO is completely taking decisions from gut feelings to being data-driven.
Product-Market Fit
Albert sees finding product-market fit in a pretty unique way. Rather than a fixed event, he considers it a series of product and feature fit decisions. He seeks product market fit on a feature-by-feature basis. Doing this avoids polluting your data by measuring the entire product at once. Breaking product-market fit down by feature provides more visibility and data into how users are behaving.
Want to learn more about how nate works, and what role AR/VR play in the product? Check out the episode above.
You might also like
