How Hex found product-market fit: Barry McCardel on data collaboration

How Hex found product-market fit: Barry McCardel on data collaboration

Author: Unusual Ventures May 8, 2023 Duration: 45:31

Hex is a data platform that allows teams to streamline their entire workflow using collaborative notebooks, BI, and docs. Hex offers data scientists the ability to work together to deliver their insights and empowers both business users and data analysts to quickly find the answers they need to do their jobs. Today, the company has over 500 enterprise customers. 

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Hex’s co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel about their path to product-market fit. 

Join us as we discuss:

  • (1:51) How Barry and his co-founders came up with the idea for Hex 
  • (5:37) Why Hex’s co-founders saw the need for a collaborative data platform
  • (7:42) How the early team picked a beachhead around sharing and communicating work
  • (12:01) How “commitment engineering” became key to validating Hex’s early assumptions
  • (16:03) How the team identified early users and personas
  • (20:41) How early users informed Hex’s product roadmap
  • (28:34) Hex’s approach to early team-building
  • (32:33) How Hex sees its user profile evolving, and its impact on their product roadmap
  • (38:39) Hex’s AI strategy to empower people to do creative work with data
  • (43:29) Advice to founders thinking about building data startups


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 sandhya@unusual.vc and 


Barry McCardel is the co-founder and CEO of Hex Technologies. Prior to starting Hex, Barry worked at Palantir and TrialSpark.


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 the Startup Field Guide:



Behind every so-called overnight success in software, there's a long, often messy journey of finding exactly what customers need and how to deliver it. That's the central theme explored in Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast. This series is built for those in the trenches of early-stage software companies, from founders just starting out to leaders tasked with building something from nothing. Each episode moves beyond theory, offering grounded conversations with people who have actually navigated these challenges. You'll hear them unpack the real work of identifying a true market need, the nuances of early hiring decisions, and the practical steps of crafting a go-to-market strategy. Fundraising, often a opaque process, gets broken down into more understandable components. The focus remains consistently on the actionable and the specific, providing a kind of audio manual for the foundational phase of a business. Tune in for a candid look at the less-glamorous, critical work that separates an idea from a viable company, all brought to you by Unusual Ventures. This podcast serves as a resource for turning those initial concepts into a sustainable operation, one hard-won lesson at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 53

Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast
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