Solo’s product-market fit journey: Idit Levine on timing the market for open source success

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: 1:13 Solo’s origin story 6:04 Early fundraising challenges 13:45 The technical insight that led to Solo 15:00 Studying the market to refine Solo’s product vision 16:49 API Gateway as a stepping stone for service mesh 21:58 Early customer acquisition efforts 24:33 Idit’s conviction in the API Gateway approach 25:26 How Solo found its first paying customers 29:25 Idit’s approach to founder selling  31:17 Idit’s evolution as CEO 36:50 Solo’s approach to open source community-building 40:50 Advice for founders building open source projects 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  LinkedIn Twitter/X 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