This week, we’re back with another installment in our Paths to PMF series, this time on how Gong CPO and co-founder Eilon Reshef found conviction ahead of a market curve.
Gong’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Why This $7B Company Still Works With Design Partners
A decade ago, product veteran and entrepreneur Eilon Reshef had just sold his first startup to Answers and was itching for something new. He soon met future co-founder Amit Bendov, who pitched him an idea for a tool that records customer calls to give sales teams keep better insights into their deals pipelines. Reshef loved it — and proposed they infuse the product with AI to make it even more helpful.
But this early idea for Gong — which is now a $7B leader in revenue intelligence — was met with heavy skepticism. For context, this was back in 2015, when a bet on AI for business was more of a gamble than the table-stakes play it is now. Investors weren’t sold on it, convinced that CRMs were good enough and worried that a recording tool would ruffle up privacy concerns.
Reshef and Bendov ignored the critics and launched the beta for Gong with a batch of 12 design partners, who didn’t pay at first. These design partners helped the co-founder duo confirm that they were onto something: After only a few months, 11 out of 12 immediately converted into paying customers.
In the latest installment of our Paths to PMF series, Reshef walks us through how he crafted the early prototype and scaled Gong’s suite of products — working with design partners at every step. Here’s a snippet of his tactics:
- Keep the beta lean. Reshef wanted to focus on gauging the value of the tool with design partners, so he resisted investors’ suggestions to add more sophisticated features to the beta.
- Don’t ditch your design partners after you find product-market fit. In Reshef’s view, design partners are valuable sources of feedback for startups at every stage. To this day, Gong’s 20 or so PMs each work with up to a dozen design partners, helping them refine new products and features.
- Build a roadmap that blends founder vision with customer input. “I think the strategic roadmap is maybe 80% ‘vision.’ And then the tactical roadmap is probably 80% customer-led,” says Reshef.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
We recently unveiled our PMF Method Retreat, a 4-day intensive experience for B2B SaaS founders. The content lineup features a session on how to work with design partners, along with a breakdown of the four levels of PMF, customer discovery techniques and a deep dive on markets. Apply by September 23rd — it’ll only take 5 minutes.
Recommended resources:
-Notion is hosting its first-ever in-person conference
-A guide from Review favorite Julie Zhuo on managing your manager