Embarking on the journey to achieve product-market fit? Here's a roadmap. Discover the 12 crucial aspects that can make or break your venture. Let's delve into the nuances of aligning your product with the market's needs and demands.
Why Market Matters More Than Anything
Give me a giant market – always
- Find a great market and you build multiple companies in that market
- You can’t change the market, you can change the people
- A value hypothesis is an attempt to articulate the key assumption that underlies why a customer is likely to use your product
- When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins
- If you address a market that really wants your product then you can screw up almost everything in the company and still succeed
Common Misconception About Product-Market Fit
First to market seldom matters. Rather, first to product/market fit is almost always the long-term winner.
- Once a company has achieved product market fit, it is extremely difficult to dislodge it, even with a better or less expensive product.
- Getting product right means finding PMF. It does not mean launching the product. It means getting to the point where the market accepts your product.
How to Get There
Find product market fit first, then harden
- PMF does not guarantee success, but it does prevent businesses from spending money trying to grow a business in a way that is doomed to fail
- Hiring before PMF slows you down, and hiring after it speeds you up
- Until you get PMF, you want to live as long as possible and iterate as quickly as possible
- Founders have to choose a market long before they have any idea whether they will reach PMF
- VCs want to see product-market fit before investing, but founders have control over this
Process Behind Product-Market Fit
Start with a hypothesis, test it, prove it, move on or further iterate on the hypothesis.
- Define and test your value hypothesis, then move on to your growth hypothesis. The value hypothesis defines the what, the who, and the how.
How Can You Tell Whether You Do (or Don’t) Have Product-Market Fit?
You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening.
- The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of ‘blah’, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
- If the market is great and you are the best product available success can happen both suddenly and quickly.
