How Harness found product-market fit

Jyoti Bansal knows how to build companies from the ground up. As the founder of 3 successful companies (Appdynamics, Harness , and Traceable ), he is incredibly methodical about uncovering customers' pain points, and building products that solve real problems.

A while back, John Vrionis and Sandhya Hegde chatted with Jyoti about how Harness found product-market fit, and why he believes customer discovery is the key to building generational businesses.

The customer discovery process for Harness

1. The insight for Harness came from Jyoti’s interactions with AppDynamics customers who were dissatisfied with their CI/CD process. For every 10 to 12 engineers at these companies, there was at least 1 DevOps engineer whose job was to build the automation to deliver their code and babysit deployments. When Jyoti spoke to large banks, he saw that on average they employed 10,000 engineers, out of which hundreds were dedicated to writing automation scripts. Jyoti realized that there was a need for a software delivery platform that would automate and manage the process, making it less expensive and time-consuming.
2. During the customer discovery process, Jyoti recommends moving beyond “friendly” contacts. He is a firm believer in cold outreach because customers outside the founder’s network are going to be more direct and blunt with their feedback. Jyoti recommends having at least 50 “cold hard conversations”— this is the best way to validate early assumptions, and iterate on early messaging, ICP, and personas.
3. Founders need to learn how to sell and become comfortable with rejection. Initially, a big part of selling is reaching out to many people, articulating the pain, and the solution. This is critical to the process of finding product-market fit.
4. During customer discovery, Jyoti uses the “3 Whys” framework: Why buy anything?—is there enough of a pain to require a solution? Why buy now?—is there enough urgency to solve the pain today? Why buy us?— is the solution differentiated enough to buy from you?
5. Jyoti and his team had initially assumed that large companies would be ideal customers for Harness, but initial customer conversations revealed a greater urgency (why buy now?) within mid-sized companies that were starting a new initiative or moving to a new architecture like Kubernetes.
6. Jyoti recommends that founders “go wide and then narrow.” Don’t restrict your customer discovery phase to companies within Silicon Valley. Out of 35 million software developers, only a million or two are in the Valley. Find companies that have an early adopter mindset across the country or maybe even outside the country.
7. Instead of MVP, Jyoti prefers the phrase “Minimum Sellable Product” especially if it is targeted at an existing market, and there is already an incumbent available. The Minimum Sellable Product should not only include all the features of the incumbent but should also include differentiating capabilities so that customers will pay for it.

To hear the entire conversation, check out Jyoti's episode on the Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures !

A version of this article originally appeared on unusual.vc/blog.