How Harness found product-market fit: Jyoti Bansal and John Vrionis on customer discovery

Harness is an emerging leader in the CICD (continuous development) space. Last valued at $3.7B in a 2022 fundraise, this is Jyoti Bansal’s second enterprise software unicorn. His first startup Appdynamics was acquired by Cisco the night before their IPO in 2017.

In this episode, Harness CEO Jyoti Bansal and Unusual founder John Vrionis take us back 15 years to when Appdynamics first got started. They walk us through their learnings around customer discovery and the journey from having a unique product insight to finding product market fit. With stories from the early days of Harness, we cover:

• (1:45) How Jyoti arrived at his original insight for Harness
• (3:27) John and Jyoti on the Unusual Method — a rigorous playbook that they co-teach at Unusual Ventures to help founders find product-market fit
• (6:33) Why cold outreach - and not friendly conversations - is the best way to validate early assumptions
• (12:11) How Jyoti looked for early adopters outside Silicon Valley during the customer discovery phase
• (14:08) Why doing your own cold outreach as a founder is an irreplaceable activity
• (19:40) How to articulate the business value of your solution so prospects have a reason to buy
• (23:28) Iterating on your messaging and ICP If you are not seeing similar patterns around the pain
• (24:42) How Jyoti constructs messaging and defines the “minimum sellable product”
• (29:15) The surprises Jyoti encountered during customer discovery for Harness
• (31:55) Why and how exactly founders should focus on efficiency during an economic downturn

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and

• Twitter - https://twitter.com/sandhya
• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandhyahegde/

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from the Startup Field Guide:

• Customer Discovery: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/outreach-playbook
• Early customer outreach: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/outreach-playbook
• What are design partners?: https://www.field-guide.unusual.vc/field-guide-enterprise/what-are-design-partners