Thank you Hajar! Yes you are right - unfortunately most people (including myself) learn this the hard way.

Product/market fit was extremely challenging because we had 2 audiences (engineers and recruiters), each with different needs and subsegments. If I had my time again, I'd focus on a very specific subsegment pair - trading firms and their graduate recruitment - and tailor a product for them instead of creating a generic platform that attempted to solve for everyone. This is the only market segment we found where technical skills are disproportionately valued. But this is a much smaller market and wouldn't have been enough for a startup on the VC treadmill like ours (hence the need to consider non VC options when starting a business). Hope that makes sense!