S 01 Ep 8 | Turning Your Customers Into Your Biggest Champions Dean Stoecker spent 14 years building Alteryx without outside capital , survived the dot - com crash , 9 / 11 , and the 2008 financial crisis , and still refused to raise venture money until he had proven product market fit . That stubbornness turned out to be the strategy . This episode covers how Dean landed Alteryx ' s first customer by staging a mariachi party in a 600 square foot office and walking a prospect through a wireframed product that didn ' t fully exist yet . Why he believes no one will ever love your idea as much as you do , and why getting over that fact early is essential . The astronauts , pilots , and passengers framework for thinking about user personas and how it helped Alteryx expand from two million trained statisticians to hundreds of millions of potential users . Dean also makes the case that leaders are defined not by how many followers they have but by how many leaders they create , and that the only job of a CEO before product market fit is to make sure the money outlasts the search .