- Descript’s Origin
- Andrew Mason’s team realized Detour wasn’t working and pivoted to Descript, an audio word processor.
Even though he advises against this at Y Combinator, he funded Descript himself, allowing him to pursue it despite its perceived market limitations.
Andrew Mason
A while, like it was obvious that detour wasn’t going anywhere. We tried everything we could think of. On the other hand, we had Descript, which was obviously solving a problem for people. Like we had people using it. Everybody saw the potential. And even as we’re doing this, like the funny thing is like in the back of my mind, I’m like, this is like incredibly irresponsible to be like, we’re nowhere close to product market fit For one super complicated product. And now we’re starting to think about building an audio word processor. This is exactly what I’m trying to teach people not to do when I’m counseling them at Y Combinator. But it was actually like one of the moments where it was maybe really useful to be funding the thing myself because no one could tell me how stupid it was. What we weren’t sure about was like, how big is the market on that?
