When Product-Market Fit Isn’t Enough — Grin Lord, Mpathic | Ep31

>> ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠David Brennan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

>> ⁠⁠⁠⁠Arkeo AI⁠, SaaS Copilot

In this episode of SaaS Founder Stories, I sit down with Grin Lord, co-founder and CEO of Mpathic, to talk about one of the hardest realities in SaaS — what to do when you find product-market fit… but the market isn’t big enough.

Grin and her team found early traction helping psychedelic drug trials analyze long-form patient recordings using AI. But with a ceiling on TAM, they had to rethink everything — and found a better wedge further down the pipeline: endpoint assessments in broader life sciences.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
→ Mpathic nailed PMF in clinical trial safety reviews — but the TAM was capped
→ They expanded into endpoint assessments, where inconsistency and human fatigue cost trials millions
→ Their models are trained by real psychologists and validated for enterprise use
→ The new strategy: use AI where human review breaks down — not where it replaces expertise
→ The lesson: PMF in the wrong-sized market is a trap — and you need to plan your next move fast

SOUND BITES
→ "We were solving a real problem — but the market wasn’t big enough."
→ "You don’t need to pivot the product. You just need to find the better use case."
→ "Our goal isn’t to replace clinicians. It’s to help them do what they actually trained for."
→ "PMF is not the destination — it’s the start of the next hard question."

This one’s essential listening for any founder who’s found early traction but needs to figure out what’s next. Subscribe to SaaS Founder Stories wherever you listen.