Risk, Revenue, Repeat with Paul Powers
Building a startup is chaos. The leap from idea to product-market fit rarely follows a straight line.
On the Predictable Revenue Podcast, host Collin Stewart spoke with Paul Powers, founder and CEO of Physna, about how he turned a risky idea into a market-ready product.
From spotting a costly, overlooked problem to betting everything on a live demo, his journey offers hard-earned lessons for founders chasing traction.
Spot the Pain
The most valuable problems are the ones quietly draining companies of time and money.
Think about the work happening inside your own company or industry. Where are teams reinventing the wheel, wasting hours, or bleeding cash simply because no one’s solved the problem yet?
Paul Powers noticed this exact pattern while working in patent law. Engineers were unknowingly designing the same 3D parts repeatedly. Teams ordered duplicates, inventories filled with identical components, and production slowed to a crawl when replacements couldn’t be found. All because 3D search tools couldn’t track parts across file types or assemblies.
When you find a problem that’s painful, expensive, and unsolved, you’ve found the spark for something big.
Bet on Yourself
At some point, every founder faces a moment where belief needs to turn into action.
It’s easy to say you believe in your idea. It’s harder to put your skin in the game. Would you stake your savings, or your future, on it?
Paul did. He left law, took a $300,000 personal loan, and went all-in on solving the 3D search problem. No salary, no safety net, just conviction.
And he didn’t validate the idea with surveys or slide decks. He validated it under pressure: a live demo in front of 300 potential investors, with a barely functional product and no backup plan. One chance to prove Physna could actually work.
Moments like this define a founder. You either bet on yourself, or you watch the opportunity pass to someone who will.
Focus Beats Possibility
One of the hardest traps for founders isn’t failure, it’s potential.
When your product could solve dozens or even hundreds of problems, every conversation feels like an opportunity. Someone in aerospace sees a fit. A healthcare team has an idea. A lawyer wants to use it for IP protection.
That’s where Physna found itself in the early days. Their 3D search technology could map and compare parts across formats and assemblies, a capability no one else had. After a few months of conversations, they’d cataloged 300+ use cases across multiple industries. It looked like a goldmine.
But that goldmine was quicksand.
Every new idea meant another demo, another proof of concept, another rabbit hole. Progress slowed. Traction blurred. And without clear traction, investors hesitate, teams lose confidence, and the business feels stuck in “almost there.”
The turning point came with a hard decision: pick one lane.
Manufacturing and supply chain became the focus. Why? Because that’s where the pain was urgent and measurable. A single demo could save a company millions by catching duplicate parts or finding replacements faster. Revenue followed focus.
As a founder, possibility feels exciting, but focus is what pays the bills.
Show Value, Don’t Pitch It
If your product is complex, words alone will never close the first deal.
Imagine this: you’re talking to a potential customer about your cutting-edge technology. You’ve built something powerful, but explaining it takes ten minutes and a few diagrams. They nod politely, but they don’t feel the urgency to buy.
Now, imagine instead that you ask for one problem they can’t solve.
You plug it into your product, and minutes later, you hand them back an answer that saves them real money, today. No pitch. No persuasion. Just undeniable proof.
Physna learned this firsthand. Early sales required long, hands-on proofs of concept. But refining the product into an instant-results experience changed everything. Today, a supply chain lead can snap a photo of a part and watch Physna identify it, check inventory, and surface suppliers, sometimes saving millions in a single demo.
When your product can deliver a win in the moment, selling stops feeling like selling.
Simplify for Product-Market Fit
Complex products rarely find product-market fit in their most complex form.
In the beginning, it’s tempting to show off everything your technology can do, integrations, advanced features, endless configurations. To a customer, it’s friction.
Physna’s breakthrough came when the team stripped everything down to its simplest, most powerful promise: snap a photo, identify the part, save money.
No CAD models. No integrations. No weeks of onboarding. Just a clear path from problem to solution.
The value was always there. It became undeniable the moment it became effortless to experience.
Build a Moat That Compounds
A patent isn’t a moat. A clever algorithm isn’t either.
Real moats are built over time, layer by layer, in ways that make it almost impossible for anyone else to catch up.
Think about your own product:
If a competitor saw your deck today, how long would it take for them to replicate what you have? If the answer is “soon,” you don’t yet have a moat. You have a head start.
Physna’s defensibility didn’t come from a single insight. It came from years of compounding work:
- Normalizing 3D models across countless file types.
- Building algorithms that understand objects inside and out.
- Processing hundreds of millions of models to make the system smarter with every new one.
Even with the code, a competitor wouldn’t have the data, the experience, or the years of trial and error to catch up. Every model processed, every insight embedded, widened the gap.
A real moat strengthens itself over time, through usage, data, and knowledge that can’t be copied from a slide.
Scale Through Platforms
The fastest way to scale isn’t always selling more. It’s letting other products do the selling for you.
Many founders hit product-market fit and immediately think: more salespeople, more channels, more ads. That growth is linear and expensive. True leverage comes when your core technology shifts from product to infrastructure.
Imagine your tech quietly powering dozens of other tools.
Users experience your value every day, often without even knowing your company exists. Each integration opens new markets, drives recurring usage, and compounds your reach, without adding headcount.
That’s the shift Physna is making. By exposing its 3D intelligence through APIs, other companies can embed its capabilities directly into their platforms. Growth becomes invisible and exponential.
Recognize Product-Market Fit
Product-market fit doesn’t announce itself. You feel it.
It starts small, a demo that turns into a deal without pushback, a prospect who reaches out already convinced. Slowly, the dynamic flips: you stop pushing the product into the world, and the market starts pulling it from you.
Then, a shift hits the market, an industry squeeze, an economic change, a wave of urgency, and what once felt like a niche tool becomes a must-have.
That’s what happened with Physna when supply chain chaos and tariffs hit. Suddenly, their 3D intelligence went from a sophisticated engineering solution to a critical cost-saving engine. Phones rang. Demos closed faster. Deals scaled without as much effort.
True product-market fit isn’t just growth. It’s the moment the market chases you.
Conclusion
Paul Powers’ path with Physna is still unfolding. From high-risk bets to discovering the right use cases to turning deep tech into infrastructure, it’s a reminder that product-market fit isn’t a finish line, it’s a moving target.
The podcast conversation with Collin dives deeper into the moments we only touched on here, the nail-biting live demo, the struggle of picking one market out of hundreds, and the quiet compounding work of building a real moat.
If you’re in the middle of your own messy path to traction, it’s a conversation worth hearing.
Curious to see how Physna is transforming 3D search and supply chain intelligence? Check out Physna or connect with Paul Powers on LinkedIn.
If you’re navigating the leap from idea to product-market fit, our Founder Coaching Program can help you focus, scale, and move faster with less guesswork.
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