When Building a Company, MacGyver Is Your Best Friend

“If I had some duct tape, I could fix that.”

by Bryan Hale

Perhaps the single biggest milestone for an early stage company is achieving product market fit. It’s often described in mystical terms as if, once unlocked, the heavens part and you can hire sales reps and plan your IPO roadshow.

In reality this is quite a bit murkier. It takes a lot of fumbling around before customers place high value on what you’ve built. For those who are in the “murky” phase, I’d like to share one important bit of evidence that indicates you are on the right track.

If you’ve found MacGyver, product market fit isn’t too far behind.

Let me explain.

Prior to rejoining DFJ last month, I spent nearly six years at CHEF (fka Opscode) in a variety of roles. CHEF provides an automation framework that makes developers and systems engineers wildly productive so their teams and organizations can release code faster and scale bigger. It was in the very early days of CHEF that I noticed a peculiar trend. CHEF’s founder Adam Jacob had something in common with customers such as Ezra Zzygmuntowicz at Engine Yard, Lamont Granquist at Rhapsody, and countless others.

They had already built something (sort of) like CHEF.

The problem of IT automation was so great and the range of available solutions so lacking that, prior to CHEF, folks had no choice but to rig something up themselves. Usually, these ad hoc tools were cobbled together in a MacGyver-like fashion based on what was available and familiar. Upon seeing CHEF for the first time, someone might exclaim, “Oh damn, I built something like that myself a few years ago, but it used a collection of bash scripts in a subversion repo and SSH in a for loop. It was pretty janky.”

Other successful companies have encountered similar ad hoc tooling at many early customer sites. Examples include:

• Before Yammer, an enterprise social network was often “Reply All” to email distribution lists that had to be manually curated by central IT. Individual subscribers might handle the deluge manually with crafted filtering rules in Gmail or Outlook.

• Before Box, content collaboration might have been a shared file server with rigid folder structures and lightly enforced naming conventions to track document versions.

• Before salesforce.com, salesforce automation for a medium-sized business looked like weekly sales pipeline calls and group-maintained spreadsheets.

• Before SpaceX, advanced rockets and spacecraft…. OK so this doesn’t hold for all market types.

If you are an entrepreneur in the earliest stages of finding opportunities for product market fit, consider it a wonderful sign if you encounter internal tooling that your customers hate to maintain and are terrified of breaking. Look for duct tape, glue, coat hangers, ballpoint pens, and re-purposed garden hose.