From Confusion to Clarity with Dan Sahar

This week on the Predictable Revenue podcast, Collin Stewart sat down with Dan Sahar, co-founder of Guidde, to unpack the messy path to product-market fit.

This isn’t a highlight reel, it’s a real-world breakdown of what actually worked: from narrowing focus and charging early, to finding pull from unexpected places and riding the AI wave at just the right moment.

Here’s what early-stage founders can take from Guidde’s journey and apply to their own.

Don’t Start Narrow. Get to Narrow

There’s a lot of advice out there telling founders to “start focused.” Sounds good in theory, but in practice, it’s rarely that clean.

Dan and the Guidde team didn’t start narrow. They began, like most founders, with a broad idea and numerous hypotheses. They spoke with 70–80 people across various roles, including RevOps, IT, CS, and agencies. Everyone seemed like a potential buyer. The problem? That much variety made it impossible to see a clear pattern.

Eventually, they realized the mistake: too many personas, too little signal. Instead of going wide and shallow, they needed to go narrow and deep. One persona at a time. One specific pain. Many reps.

That’s when things started to click.

Take this with you:

You don’t need to start focused. You need to get focused. That clarity comes from conversations, not guesses.

• Pick one persona you think has the pain.
• Speak with 10–20 individuals in that role.
• Listen for urgency, not politeness.
• If it clicks, keep going if it doesn’t, move on fast.

Trap to avoid: Don’t build for “everyone who might benefit.” Build for the one person who absolutely needs it, right now.

Build Less, Prove More

Startups love to ship. But building isn’t the same as proving.

One of the most common traps founders fall into is the misconception that more product equals more value. You hear feedback, collect ideas, and before long, you’re building parallel features, hoping that one of them will stick.

Guidde did exactly that in the early days. They developed both a content creation tool and a content delivery platform simultaneously. Both sounded essential. But in practice, neither hit the mark. It was too much, too soon. Customers didn’t get the full value from either, because the team hadn’t had the time to make either great.

So they cut back. They chose one creation and put everything behind it. That single focus is what got them into the market. Only later, once they had traction, did they reintroduce delivery.

The deeper insight:

In the early stage, your job isn’t to build the full product vision. Your job is to prove that you can solve one specific, painful job better than anyone else.

When you try to do everything at once, you lose clarity, internally and externally. Internally, your team is divided. Externally, your users don’t know what you stand for. They can’t champion you, because they don’t get a sharp win.

PMF often happens not when you add more, but when you cut to the part that actually delivers.

What to do:

• Ask: “If we had to cut everything except one feature, what would we keep?”
• Ship the smallest version of that feature that solves a full job-to-be-done.
• Wait for signs: Are users sharing it? Are they paying for it? Are they using it more than once?

If the answer’s no, keep trimming. If it’s yes, go deeper, not wider.

Price the Prototype

Most founders delay monetization. The excuse is usually the same: “It’s not ready yet.” But readiness is subjective. What’s concrete is whether someone will pay for what you’re building, as it stands today.

Dan and the team at Guidde didn’t wait. Before they had a working product, they put a price on it. They pitched design partners using nothing more than a slide deck and mockups, and charged them. Some said yes. That was the real validation.

By charging from the start, they filtered out people with only polite interest, not genuine pain. They positioned the product as valuable from the outset.

This is where most founders get stuck. They treat early access like a favor to the user when it should be a test for the business.

If someone won’t pay even a little for what you’ve shown them, you have to ask: Is the pain real, or are you solving a nice-to-have?

How to apply it:

• If you have a demo, clickable prototype, or mock flow, sell it.
• Anchor your price higher than you’re comfortable with. You can always lower it, but raising it later is much harder.
• Watch what happens when pricing enters the conversation. Flinches, hesitations, and objections all tell you where your value story is weak.

If people start saying, “This is worth it,” before the product is finished, you’re on the right track.

Simplicity Creates Spread. But Only If It Hits

There’s a difference between being simple and being obvious. Founders often confuse the two.

You cut features. You polish onboarding. You remove friction. And yet… nobody shares it. Nobody talks about it.

That’s because simplicity, by itself, doesn’t create spread. What creates the spread is delivering an immediate win that feels bigger than the effort it took to get it.

That’s what Guidde nailed. Not just “easy to use,” but “I can’t believe how fast I got something valuable.” The first experience wasn’t just smooth, it was productive. It made users look good to their teammates. It gave them something they could instantly forward, embed, or show off.

You don’t get that effect from clean UI alone. You achieve this by collapsing the time between input and outcome, making the outcome feel disproportionately impressive. That’s what makes someone drop a link into Slack without being asked.

This is where many early-stage founders misfire. They design for completeness instead of clarity. They prioritize control over speed. They assume that giving the user options = giving them power. It’s the opposite.

When your product does one thing well, without asking the user to overthink, you give them something rare: confidence. And that’s what spreads.

The Most Honest Signal Is the One You Don’t Chase

It’s easy to fool yourself in the early days.

You’ve got a few warm intros. Some promising demos. A handful of logos you can name-drop. It feels like momentum, but it’s not always the kind that compounds.

The shift occurs when someone unexpected shows up.

You didn’t cold email them. You didn’t pitch them. They just… found you. Signed up. Started using the product. And they looked exactly like the customer you wish you could land.

That’s what happened with Guidde. One day, Bayer, a global enterprise with 100,000+ employees, signed up organically. Then, more companies like it followed. No one on the team had spoken to them before. No outreach campaign. No enterprise sales motion. Just real usage from the right kind of customer.

That’s when they knew something had shifted. The product was no longer being promoted. It was pulling.

You don’t need dozens of these moments. One or two is enough to tell you you’re not chasing interest, you’re catching it. That’s a different game.

Build for the Current, Not Against It

You don’t get to decide when the market is ready. The market decides.

Too many founders try to create momentum from scratch, trying to convince customers they should care about a problem that doesn’t feel urgent yet. It’s exhausting. And it rarely works.

The smarter move? Look for the shift that’s already underway. The thing your customer is already navigating, but hasn’t yet figured out how to deal with.

For Guidde, that shift is the adoption of AI. Enterprises aren’t wondering if they’ll use AI, they’re struggling to figure out how. Suddenly, every department requires new workflows, training, and enablement. Guidde didn’t invent that need. They spotted it early and built toward it.

You don’t have to predict the future. You just have to tune in to what your market is already reacting to, and place yourself where they’re headed.

• The question isn’t: “How do we make this product work?”
• It’s: “Where is the energy already building, and how do we plug into it?”

Ride the current. Don’t build a dam.

Conclusion

Guidde didn’t find PMF by guessing. They earned it through focus, fast feedback, and aligning with momentum already in motion.

If you’re building, simplify your bets, talk to your users, and look for pull, not just activity.

👉 Try Guidde if you’re creating internal training or onboarding content
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