
How a User-Driven Pivot Led to Product-Market Fit
Startup Success · 2025-06-17 · 25 min
Episode notes
In this episode, we sit down with Merrill Lutsky, Co-Founder and CEO of Graphite, a breakout startup redefining code review for the AI era. Originally built solely as an internal code review tool, Graphite unexpectedly attracted a huge amount of interest from the developer community, prompting the team to pivot their startup to focus entirely on that tool. Today, Graphite’s AI developer productivity platform is helping engineering teams at companies like Ramp, Figma, and Shopify ship code up to 40% faster. We discuss: Graphite’s remarkable user-driven pivot How they achieved product-market fit The highly responsive and scalable user feedback loop that propels their success Pros & cons of using AI in software development Startup founders - don’t miss this episode packed with lessons on product-market fit, building for a passionate user base, and driving rapid growth in a competitive space. - Stay connected with our host, Kate Adams, here on LinkedIn ! Explore Graphite at graphite.dev and their AI-powered code review agent at diamond.graphite.dev .
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