Finding the right product-market fit remains the holy grail for aspiring tech entrepreneurs.

When it comes to enterprise success, age is not important. However, a mindset for disruption is key, according to Jyoti Bansal (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Harness Inc.

“If you can’t figure out the distribution channel — and that aligns with the product that you’ve built, and that aligns with the market demands and the market needs — you’re not going to succeed,” he said. “If products can be built faster, the innovation velocity is higher. You’re seeing companies that are growing really fast and building products with very small teams. A lot of the enterprise selling is about justifying the business value.”

Bansal spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier for the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards 2025 interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the growth process for a founder-led company and creating products that solve pain points.

The steps to a successful product-market fit

Entrepreneurs should start by identifying a problem they are passionate about and then try to solve it better than anyone else, according to Bansal. Harness started as a software delivery platform that automates code testing and deployment, eliminating pain points for DevOps engineers.

“There are about 40 million software developers in the world,” he explained. “The cost of software engineering for 40 million developers is about $4 trillion. Out of that, 25% to 30% could be … optimized if we can bring the right toolchain for DevOps, for quality, application security, cost management [and] financial operations … all kinds of the work that’s not really the creative work of software engineering, but really the plumbing and the mechanics.”

Identifying a problem is only the beginning, according to Bansal. Next comes execution. At Harness, he created a “startups within a startup” structure that pushed productivity and innovation forward by allowing 15 different leaders to run their own “startups” for different products within the company. Recognizing Harness’ impact on startup growth and enterprise innovation, the company received a CUBEd Award for “Most Innovative Tech Startup Leaders.”

“Opportunity recognition is the first 2% of the job,” he said. “Ninety-eight percent is the execution on the opportunity after that. If there’s a good opportunity that you recognize, there’s a high chance that there’s another 10 to 15 good entrepreneurs that recognize that opportunity as well. Execution is all about speed to market … how you scale, the execution on product [and] execution on distribution. All of those things would really decide who the winner and the loser is.”

Once a founder gets the ball rolling on a new product, it’s time to bring in other leaders who can take the company to the next level. In addition to the 15 startups within Harness, Bansal also founded another company, Traceable, with a different customer persona based around cybersecurity. Now that the personas are beginning to merge, Bansal has decided to integrate the two companies, while still allowing each team to function independently.

“Once you start getting from … that initial product-market fit and product-market distribution fit, then you can start bringing in leaders,” he said. “You need sales leaders [and] marketing leaders, and I do encourage all founders [to] bring in the best people you can. My superpower is building great products, but I need to bring in my team people whose superpowers are … being very good in selling, very good in marketing, very good in operating engineering [and] all kinds of functions that we need to scale.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage for the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards 2025 interview series:

Photo: SiliconANGLE