Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast
Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast
Sandhya Hegde, Unusual Ventures
Solo’s product-market fit journey: Idit Levine on timing the market for open source success
45 minutes Posted Oct 30, 2023 at 1:12 pm.
Solo’s origin story
Early fundraising challenges
The technical insight that led to Solo
Studying the market to refine Solo’s product vision
API Gateway as a stepping stone for service mesh
Early customer acquisition efforts
Idit’s conviction in the API Gateway approach
How Solo found its first paying customers
Idit’s approach to founder selling
Idit’s evolution as CEO
Solo’s approach to open source community-building
Advice for founders building open source projects
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Show notes
Solo is an open-source developer platform designed to connect applications with service meshes across any software infrastructure. Their core promise to their customer is to help them migrate from 10/20 year old legacy monolithic applications to new cloud native architectures with APIs and microservices. 
Last valued at $1Bn, Solo has hundreds of enterprise customers including enterprises like TMobile, American Express, SAP, Sumo Logic, and more.
In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo. 
Join us as we discuss:
Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at [email protected] and 
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Idit Levine is the founder and CEO of Solo. 
Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.
Further reading from Unusual Ventures:
Starting an open source company
Hiring for an open source company
Building open source GTM