A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders He "kind of" had PMF for 8 years—until, after a rebuild, he raised $100M | Ben Alarie, Founder of Blue J
Oct 20, 2025
Ben Alarie, the Founder and CEO of Blue J, is a tax law professor who revolutionized AI in tax research. He reflects on his journey from having 'partial product-market fit' to achieving remarkable growth, scaling from $2M to $25M in ARR after a bold rebuild. The episode dives into the importance of recognizing true PMF versus self-deception, the game-changing role of retrieval-augmented generation, and how improving 'time to value' has driven rapid customer adoption and word-of-mouth referrals.
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Partial Product Market Fit Is Misleading
- Partial PMF feels like real traction but lacks consistent user behavior across cases.
- Ben calls this 'partial product market fit' because the product solved some issues but failed to be a daily, broad-use tool.
RAG Turned Research Into Conversational Answers
- Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) lets an LLM synthesize authoritative legal sources quickly.
- Ben says RAG replaced slow model-by-model work and simplified the product experience.
Domain Data + Expertise Beats General Models
- Horizontal LLMs miss paywalled, authoritative legal content and can be stale.
- Blue J's value comes from curated, up-to-date legal libraries plus domain focus for expert-level answers.
