Testing Startup Ideas While Employed

The total addressable market. TAM.

We sometimes think the bigger the better, right? Hey, it means I can go to potential investors with a more impressive number.

But too large a total addressable market can hinder success. As this episode’s guest says, “serving everyone serves no one.”

To hear the story behind that lesson, and many more lesson-filled stories, I talked to Itai Sadan, CEO & co-founder, Duda [https://www.duda.co/]. 

Duda has raised $100 million, including most recently $50 million in Series D growth funding. Sadan manages a team of 180 people at Duda.

Lessons from the things he made

• No one needs to give you a mandate (even in a big company), just find your customer’s problem and solve it for them
• Crank through it
• Evolve your product over time to land on the right idea
• Speed in decision making is very important
• If you are feeling the pressure, it means that you are not applying enough pressure
• Solve the right problems for the right customers…serving everyone serves no one

Turn your knowledge assets into a new revenue stream

MarketingSherpa has teamed up with parent company MeclabsAI to produce a research study. We are granting 10 AI engineering vouchers worth $7,500 each to eligible companies. Apply for your $7,500 AI Engineering Voucher [https://meclabs.com/research/ai-engineering-voucher].

Discussed in this episode

Open-Source Start-up Marketing Strategy: Sometimes you need to poke the snake (podcast episode #147) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/open-source]

Time To Value: 3 speed-to-value marketing case studies featuring A/B testing, value focusing, and niche ad targeting [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/case-study/time-to-value]

Entrepreneurial Resilience: Many of the day-to-day annoyances that inspired him to sell, he actually missed after he sold (podcast episode #78) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/entrepreneurial]

B2B SaaS Marketing: No progress after Series A without product marketing (podcast episode #148) [https://marketingsherpa.com/article/interview/B2B-SaaS]

Get more episodes

Subscribe to the MarketingSherpa email newsletter [https://www.marketingsherpa.com/newsletters] to get more insights from your fellow marketers. Sign up for free if you’d like to get more episodes like this one.

For more insights, check out...

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages [https://meclabs.com/course/] free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application