Ben Alarie spent 8 years building Blue J with "partial product market fit"—real customers, real revenue, but no real market pull. Then he made a bet that would either kill the company or 10x it: he put the existing product in maintenance mode and gave his team 6 months to rebuild everything from scratch using a technology that barely worked.
Two years later, Blue J went from $2M to $25M in ARR. They're adding 10 new customers every single day. NPS went from 20 to 84.
This isn't a story about getting lucky. It's about a founder who knew—with absolute conviction—that the market would eventually arrive, and made sure he was ready when it did. But it's also about the danger of fooling yourself into thinking you have PMF when you only "kind of have PMF."
Why You Should Listen:
- Learn the brutal difference between fake and real PMF
- Discover when to abandon millions in existing ARR to go all-in on something else
- Why "time to value" might be the single most important metric for word-of-mouth.
- See what it takes to survive until the market is ready.
Keywords:
startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, founder journey, early stage startup, startup pivot, AI startup, SaaS growth, founder advice, hypergrowth startup
Chapters:
(00:02:00) Starting BlueJ
(00:9:26) Introducing AI to Tax Research
(00:12:44) Starting to Build
(00:17:03) Not Having True PMF
(00:19:44) Believing in Retrieval Augmented Generation
(00:25:34) Updating to V2 of BlueJ
(00:30:58) The Necessity of Time to Value
(00:33:47) When You Knew You Have PMF
(00:38:19) One Piece of Advice
Send me a message to let me know what you think!
