David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit

So our next speaker and I have something in common: we both started businesses to allow people to create websites. The difference is that David's business was massively successful. Davidenko is the founder of Weebly, which early this year sold to Square. And he's going to give us a talk about how Weebly found product market fit.

"Thanks, thanks, Jeff! I'm really happy to be here. I'm actually very impressed with how full the room is given it's right after Burning Man. Did anyone go this year? Oh, not too many attendees. All right, we got one over there.

Okay, so, so just my quick way introduction a little bit by myself. If you haven't heard of Weebly, Weebly is an easy way for entrepreneurs to build a website or an online store. Before Weebly got started, the only way to do that was to learn to code yourself. And now there are plenty of tools and services to allow you to drag and drop and build a site.

I wrote the first line of code in February 2006, so a little over 12 years ago now. I grew that company to 50 million users and around 350 employees. I sold to Square in May of this year for three hundred sixty-five million. And probably one of my favorite stats is that half of the US population visits a Weebly site every single month. The reason it's my favorite is that it's reflective of the success of the entrepreneurs, people building the websites themselves and actually having success and seeing those results.

So I'm here to talk to you today about how to find product market fit. It's the top problem that anyone deals with. I'm gonna try to keep it fairly practical, not theoretical, because I think finding product market fit is really about the practical nitty gritty, the hustle.

So I want to just preview real quick and talk to you a little bit about our journey. Like I said, I wrote the first line of code a little over 12 years ago, which sounds really weird that it has been that long. This is what it looked like. This is a photo I took from February 2006; it's where I was, to be a Beaver Stadium at Penn State when I wrote the first line of code. Just kind of gives you the setting.

But in college, in August of 2006, so this has been six months. We should introduce this graph. So this is a graph of the new users per day signing up for Weebly, so non-cumulative, just whenever someone signs up, you know you get a one. And this is six months in, so we still hadn't launched. Six months in, Dan, Chris, and I were all doing internships that summer. You can see here our massive record signup day was twelve users! I think we just created accounts for friends and family.

So six months in, we still hadn't launched. Right? Just to give you an idea of how long it takes, we worked for six months and hadn't launched. In October of 2006, this is eight months later, we still hadn't launched. We were hustling for buzz on forums. We had created a sign-up link. You can see here now we had 30-some users that signed up on our record day, but eight months in and still hadn't launched.

In October of 2006, I read about Y Combinator on Slashdot. The deadline was about three hours ago, so I think it was about 1:00 a.m. Eastern when I read it. The deadline for application was midnight Pacific. So I had about two hours to create a YC application. I didn't have time to call up Dan and Chris, my co-founders, and asked them if they want to drop out of school with me and move to San Francisco, so I took a guess.

My guess was that Chris was gonna drop out of school and Dan wasn't going to. I called Chris up first the next morning and said, “Hey, Chris, you want to drop out of school with me, move to San Francisco?” And just on the spot, he's like, “Hell yeah, let's do it!” I caught up with Dan and said, “Dan, you want to drop out of school with me and move to San Francisco?” He said, “You know what? This sounds like a really promising idea. Let me call my parents. I'll call you back in two hours.” It was a much more responsible approach.

But I applied with less than an hour to go. We drove up, interviewed, and got accepted. Actually, funny story: we finally were able to get on TechCrunch the day of our YC interview..."