The founder to market fit is as important as the market fit of your idea…
Fundamentally, your startup success rate is directly dependent on your team, market, product, and traction.
And all early stage venture firms look at team, market, product, and traction.
It all boils down to closing the sales and having a great marketing matrix and the core of the issue is: to you have an “unfair distribution advantage.”
Smart investors gravitate towards startups that possess a unique and defensible route towards gaining sales & marketing scale once there is product-market fit. This advantage can manifest itself in many ways. Sometimes there is a founder which a particular charisma to strike step-function business deals.
Sometimes there is a structural advantage like exceptional SEO built directly into the product itself.
Sometimes there is the presence of an analytically-trained marketing-oriented founder who knows the paid acquisition playbook cold.
Or a true growth hacker marketer.
Or a service which is truly inherently viral (not just high word of mouth & referral rates).
At the end of the day, the founder (or founders) need to know the field and all the mines in the sales and marketing hurdle…