Why read this article
This article, by our friends at The Review, emphasises the importance of focusing on customer problems before building solutions. Christina Cacioppo's strategy for Vanta involved stopping product development to engage deeply with potential users, understanding their daily routines, and identifying problems worth solving. A key insight was the shift from building based on assumptions to validating problems through extensive customer interviews, aiming for a high predictive understanding of customer issues. This customer-first approach underlines that the challenge isn't in coding but in creating something that meets a real need. For a comprehensive understanding, consider reading the full article below.
Key takeaways that resonated with us
To forge the path to product-market fit:
- Start with a critical problem
- Find the minimum viable pain killer
- Embrace scrappiness
- Look for inflection points
- Listen to customers constantly
- Capitalise on emerging trends
- Time product expansion carefully
Vanta began by solving a painful compliance problem for startups and SMBs that needed to become SOC 2 certified but found the process extremely costly, time-consuming, and complex.
Rather than building a full product initially, Vanta launched as a hands-on consulting service to learn exactly what customers needed to get SOC 2 certified efficiently.
Vanta's founders did much of the manual work themselves initially - from helping customers with compliance policies to undergoing audits - to deeply understand pain points.
Key inflection points like launching self-serve tooling and automating more of the process allowed Vanta to progressively scale their solution.
Vanta invested heavily in customer interviews, sharing wireframes, and letting user feedback reshape their product roadmap frequently.
As cloud computing and SaaS accelerated, Vanta adapted to serve this growing market need for continuous, automated security compliance.
Vanta expanded from SOC 2 to other compliance standards like ISO 27001 and HIPAA only after nailing their core use case first.
Ultimately, finding product-market fit requires a customer-obsessed, iterative approach of solving a critical pain point and continually evolving the solution based on real-world feedback.