This Will Make You Rethink Your Product and Career in 2025 | Sachin Rekhi
How to find market fit for your product and career in 2025 and design your work to suit your life, not vice versa
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Sachin Rekhi.
Sachin scaled LinkedIn Sales Navigator to $200M ARR and 500 employees. He then left it all behind to start Notejoy; a team notes app. I had a great chat with him about finding market fit for your product and career in 2025 and designing your work to suit your life, not vice versa.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Sachin and I talked about:
(00:00) I got my dream PM job then realized I didn’t want it
(02:19) Why the MVP is (mostly) dead
(08:02) Execution is NOT the only thing that matters
(09:40) A proven loop to achieve product-market fit
(14:18) Better ways to validate your product than MVPs
(20:01) How to even measure product-market fit
(26:03) Why Sachin opted out of the path to VP
(29:16) Aligning your career with your zone of genius
(36:18) I saw the small team trend coming
(40:38) use the explore-exploit algo to find your dream career
(44:01) Closing tips to design your life with purpose
Why the MVP is (mostly) dead
Most people start by building an MVP and getting customer feedback quickly. What's your take on this approach?
MVPs are largely dead. When we developed the lean startup concept in 2008, there wasn't much software available, so putting something out quickly to test demand made sense. But:
Today, people expect so much more from their software.
If you launch an MVP and users don't retain, is it because you had a bad idea or because the functionality was too lightweight? Look at products like Notion and Airtable — they took years before launching, very much not MVPs. The default approach should depend on what market you're targeting.
But if you’re not building MVPs then how do you make sure you don't spend a year building something nobody wants?
Customer discovery is crucial, but many people do it wrong due to confirmation bias. Asking "Do you have this problem?" or "Would you use this?" often leads to polite but meaningless yes answers. You need to determine if it's an acute problem worth solving. Here's a better approach:
In a B2B setting, ask someone to list their top five challenges in their role.
Then introduce your problem and ask them to rank it among their initial list.
If they rank it at least third, you've identified a top priority.
If it consistently ranks at the bottom, you likely have a "nice to have."
Has the pendulum swung too far toward MVPs and away from strategic planning?
The lean startup convinced us that writing 50-page business plans and spending years building before launch was terrible. That's true. But now we've gone too far toward "execution is all that matters." Some upfront, thoughtful planning is critical.
We're all navigating an idea maze when building products — deciding which problem to solve and which audience to target. The maze is huge, and if you're just experimenting without direction, you'll never test all possibilities before running out of runway. Being strategic about your entry point and target audience helps narrow the search space.
A more deliberate approach to finding product-market fit
Can you walk through your deliberate product-market fit loop?
Sure, my loop has three key steps:
Define your initial PMF narrative and strategy for winning the market.
Validate your riskiest assumptions using techniques beyond MVPs
Measure whether you have product-market fit.
Once you get traction from the steps above, then focus on scaling your users both manually and through other growth loops.
Let’s break this down by step — how should people define their PMF narrative?
You need to answer six critical questions:
What problem are you solving?
Who is your target audience?
What's your value proposition?
What's your competitive advantage?
How will you acquire users?
What's your business model?
These six dimensions represent the most common reasons startups fail — they either miss identifying an acute problem, can't find an audience, fail to grow, or can't monetize effectively.
Should the problem come before identifying the customer, or vice versa?
You can start with either. Some startups begin with a problem but pivot to a different audience that feels it more acutely. Others start with an audience they're passionate about and then figure out which problem to tackle.
Many founders build for themselves as the customer, which can work well as long as you can find a large enough audience with the same problem.
Ok so after you’ve drafted a PMF narrative, how do you validate your riskiest assumptions without just building an MVP?
There are many validation techniques cheaper than building an MVP — customer interviews, surveys, smoke tests, pre-sales, and prototypes.
Start with broad validation through customer interviews to identify your riskiest assumptions, then choose specific techniques to test them.
For example, when building Connected, we knew willingness to pay was our riskiest assumption. Instead of launching a free product, we launched with a price tag and a 14-day trial. While some users complained, we quickly discovered our paying customers were outbound professionals who valued relationship management. This helped us focus our roadmap on a core customer segment.
Can you share a real example of how you validated the demand for LinkedIn Sales Navigator through pre-sales?
We leveraged pre-sales to determine both the minimum feature set for V1 and if people would pay our premium price point. We created a sales deck with our value proposition, screenshots, and pricing, then pitched it to potential customers. We asked them to commit to deploying it to 15 salespeople and participate in weekly feedback sessions. Since dedicating sales team time is essentially spending money, this was a real commitment.
Our goal was 40% saying yes to validate the product.
Initially, we weren't close to that target, so we kept adding features and iterating on our value proposition until we reached it. This meant we were building something pre-validated for both features and pricing.
Once you have some validation, how do you measure if you have product-market fit?
We've evolved from Marc Andreessen's "feeling it" to using concrete metrics. Surveys aren't reliable because they have response bias - only engaged users respond. Instead, focus on two key metrics:
Retention: Does your retention curve flatten over time, showing a stable base of long-term users?
Growth: Are you growing month-over-month sustainably?
You need both. AOL might have retention, but without growth, you don't truly have product-market fit. Getting the retention curve to flatten is incredibly difficult, and even then you might only have product-market fit for a specific niche.
Finally, what's your approach to scaling once you have an initial product-market fit?
Take a two-pronged approach to growth:
First, do things that don't scale to get your first hundred or thousand users - use your network, leverage communities, launch on Product Hunt, and get PR. Then develop sustainable growth loops - viral loops where users bring in other users, content loops that drive traffic, or paid loops through advertising or sales teams.
The dark side of product leadership roles
Ok, now let’s talk about finding PMF for your career. Back in 2015 you were leading Sales Navigator at LinkedIn. Can you describe what the job was like? Why did you leave it all behind to start your own company?
Everything was going well on paper. I had pitched LinkedIn on building a sales tool, starting with a team of 12 that grew to 500 people. As co-GM with our head of sales, I had P&L responsibility for a $200M business. There was a clear path to VP, and my boss was asking what other products I could take over.
But while I was succeeding, much of the work was draining.
I got into product to talk to customers and design features. Instead, I rarely talked to customers directly - I had teams of PMs for that. My involvement in design was limited to product reviews. While I owned high-level vision, the day-to-day work I loved about product had disappeared.
Justin Kan talks about the "zone of excellence" versus the "zone of genius." I was in my zone of excellence - work I was good at but found draining. I realized continuing on this path would take me further from the parts of product I actually loved. I needed to pursue my zone of genius instead to find work that energized me.
That must have been a tough realization. How did you think about walking away from the career ladder and higher compensation to do something else?