How LaunchDarkly found product-market fit: Edith Harbaugh on building a developer movement

LaunchDarkly is a pioneer in the feature management space. Founded in 2014, while the agile and cloud movements were still relatively nascent, LaunchDarkly was ahead of its time. They have now scaled to a $3 billion company, serving over 4,000 customers.

In this episode, LaunchDarkly Co-Founder and CEO Edith Harbaugh takes us back to her initial insight as an engineering manager and product leader at TripIt, deeply versed in the value of systematic feature flagging, and keenly aware of how underutilized it was by many other dev teams. She shares the conviction required to build a product that most buyers in Silicon Valley weren’t yet looking for, and how she engaged her network to gain initial design partners for the product that would come to define the feature management space.

Join us as we discuss:

Honing a founder insight and being early vs late to an emerging sector

Hypothesis testing and building with design partners

Community-building and marketing a movement

Fundraising when VCs are skeptical of a new sector

About Unusual Ventures — Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building infrastructure software and application-level companies. Unusual was founded in 2018 with the mission to reinvent the venture capital engagement model by serving entrepreneurs with an unprecedented level of hands-on services. Described as a partner versus a top-down stakeholder by its portfolio companies, Unusual is laser-focused on serving exceptional founders and teams building innovative products. With offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, and Boston, Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, Harness, and Vivun.

About Sandhya Hegde — Sandhya is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in enterprise SaaS companies. Previously an early employee and executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor.

She can be reached at sandhya@unusual.vc and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/sandhya) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/).

Further reading:

Identifying initial customers — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ideal-customer-profile-and-personas

Early-stage pricing — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/pricing-your-product

TOOL: Founder prioritization heatmap — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/ceo-founder-prioritization

Building a self-serve motion  — https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/self-serve-user-buyer-journey