The Importance of Early Customer Skepticism

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There's a definite combination of both in this space. When we just started then it was more a lot more around is the safe and possible. Once we prove the initial value at one manufacturing site and we avoided a few failures for that company that essentially provided enough ROI for the program to pay for itself for the whole year. We immediately had the confidence within their leadership team. One specific VP level champion became very vocal about our solution internally and more importantly externally to other customers. And so if I would say one of our best customers was not the biggest deal that we closed initially even though that's very important. It was also not the customer that helped us improve the product the most despite they

Our guest today is Artem Kroupenev, VP of Strategy at Augury.

Augury is a leader in a category they helped to define known as “machine health.” The company sells products that combine hardware, AI, and SaaS within industrial manufacturing.

Artem joined the team at the very beginning of its journey and helped shape strategies for how the team measured product-market fit, go-to-market, and eventually, a strategy for designing a brand new market category they could compete in.

In our conversation today, we dive deep into measurable product-market fit and category-creation strategies. Artem shares particular wisdom on:

Augury’s storyboard-based approach to product vision
How to sell to a limited pool of customers
The REV (revenue, engagement and value) model from measuring product-market fit
When founders should start exploring creating a new category to operate in

You can follow Artem on Twitter at @artemkroupenev You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @firstround and @brettberson.