There’s a fine line between the “reality distortion field” founders create and just being a bit delusional. During our first year and half as a company — May 2011 to December 2012 — we were closer to delusional, and this massively extended how long it took us to find product-market fit.

In particular, I so desperately wanted an idea to “work” that I just forced ideas through and never stopped to deeply question whether people really, really had this problem. Eventually though, in December 2012, we had an internal moment of crisis and actually did verify that people had the problem we were solving. At that moment, everything changed, and today Segment is growing quickly, with 6,500 customers and a team of 70 people.

I hope that by sharing our story of finding product market fit, other founders can avoid years of “wandering around lost in the woods” like we did, and emerge with product-market fit sooner.