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According To This Founder, One Simply Does Not Achieve Product-Market Fit
The primary method of educating students has not changed in decades. Traditional lecture-based learning still dominates our primary, secondary and higher education systems. Lecture-based learning is ineffective in helping students retain knowledge. Maxwell Brodie, 26, and Edward Sun, 26, started Kaizena to give educators the tools to provide fast, high-quality feedback on student work with voice comments, explainer videos and skill tracking through a web app. The founders recently completed Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program and have raised roughly $1.2 million in venture funding from NewSchools Seed Fund, Horizons Ventures, Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn), and other angel investors.
Frederick Daso: Is it ever possible to truly achieve product-market fit? Have you been able to accomplish this at Kaizena?
Maxwell Brodie: Product-market fit is more like a continuum. A continuum with a minimum threshold for having a product that is successful in the market. Yes, you need a certain amount of product-market fit before you can expect your users and customers to refer you to others, but every time you get feedback from your users and customers along the lines of “Oh, that doesn’t work as I expected it to,” or “Why doesn’t it do this?” It’s like a disruption in the product-market continuum…
