Airplane: The Importance of Founder-Market Fit in SaaS

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Josh Ma is the co-founder and CEO of Airplane, a SaaS platform for engineers to build internal tools.

In 2020, Josh and his co-founder Ravi began exploring new startup ideas. They were most excited about building internal tools for developers.

However, after seeing how crowded that market was, the two of them began exploring other startup ideas. But they struggled to find another idea that resonated with them.

Eventually, they realized that building internal tools was an area that both of them were most passionate about and where they had a strong founder-market fit.

So, despite the idea not looking all that promising on paper and being a very competitive space, they decided that this was the idea that they were going to work on.

The founders seemingly did everything right when they started out, including interviewing over 40 developers to better understand their frustrations and pains before writing any code.

Armed with those insights, they shipped the MVP version of Airplane around 4 months later.

But acquiring those initial customers wasn't easy. Their first attempts at targeting other tech startups fell flat. And their outbound sales efforts didn't get traction either.

Through lots of persistence, experimentation, and customer conversations, they kept refining their messaging and positioning. And they began targeting and testing other markets.

Today, Airplane is a 7-figure ARR SaaS startup with hundreds of paying customers. The company has raised over $40 million in funding.

This episode is part of our Enterprise Sales series.

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