[HN Gopher] A framework to help B2B founders find product-market...
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A framework to help B2B founders find product-market fit
Author : yarapavan
Score : 168 points
Date : 2024-04-16 13:48 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pmf.firstround.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pmf.firstround.com)
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| The amount of design that went in to this, and the fact that they
| override the scrolling logic, makes me curious what their
| intention actually is. They do a lot of telling what if "feels
| like".
|
| Also... does this site... have motion blur?
| j45 wrote:
| The idea is likely to increase production value to boost
| engagement, and help signal value of what's written to be of
| higher quality.
|
| As someone who has worked in building multiple B2B SaaS when it
| was not popular at all in the retail VC funded universe
| (consumer social media apps were the rage for a long time),
| ostracized, and more, it's kind of fun to see VC's trying to
| play in this area.
| slimsag wrote:
| I mean, it's working. They are #1 on Hacker News currently -
| so like it or not they should continue doing this if that is
| their goal.
| swatcoder wrote:
| #1 on Hacker News while none of the comments engage with
| the content, and instead just express confusion,
| uncertainty and aesthetic discomfort is not what you want.
| It means you probably struck onto a concept or theme that's
| speaks to active interests (the headline draw) but
| delivered on it poorly.
|
| Which is sort of beautifully ironic, given the subject.
| geraldhh wrote:
| maybe the irony implies some sort of artisanal play
| j45 wrote:
| Eyeballs are one thing, and maybe useful for brand
| mindshare, or worse some vanity metrics... but action is
| another.
|
| It's good to try and take the good from anything.
| dartos wrote:
| Are platforms like Vercel not B2B?
| monitron wrote:
| I just want to meet the dev who wakes up in the morning, sits
| down with their cup of coffee, rubs their hands together and
| says "Boy, I just can't wait to make a website where scrolling
| feels like trying to run across an ice rink!"
| adtac wrote:
| If you're on Safari, open devtools, click the monitor icon on
| the top left, disable javascript, reload. The content reads
| fine without JS.
| bendecoste wrote:
| The scroll on this website made me bounce
| yuppiepuppie wrote:
| Everybody complaining about the design. But from a non-founder,
| does this framework actually seem legit? Or is it a fluff piece?
| bko wrote:
| Seems like a lot of fluff. I think the key is to deliver value
| to customers. Do something you know. Don't be arrogant and
| enter a random business you know nothing about.
|
| Trying to get a startup off the ground is basically 2 things:
| pushing code and talking to customers. Set a metric like how
| much users are using the app (proxy for usefulness). If you
| create something that's valuable, it'll probably work out.
|
| There are a few exceptions which they touch on a bit. Movie
| pass model where you sell $10 for $5 obviously doesn't work. Or
| if you take investors and scale up too fast also screws you.
| You could be perfectly profitable and have fit but if some VC
| throws money at you and convinces you to hire dozens of people,
| then it could sink your product despite fit. An investor
| doesn't necessarily have your best interests in mind. They may
| prefer a 10% chance of $100m co where as you prefer a 50%
| chance of a $20m company in that time frame.
| leetrout wrote:
| > Do something you know. Don't be arrogant and enter a random
| business you know nothing about.
|
| Within reason. I think there is a path to success in
| partnering with customers in the market you want to serve.
| Following Seth Godin's advice- "Don't find customers for your
| products, find products for your customers." As devs we have
| the capacity to join ranks with our customers and learn and
| build to solve their problems.
| luckyou wrote:
| It's easier to find PMF by myself them to read this post and
| find a template there. Very difficult text with a lot of
| words.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| at a glance, it seems like good advice. It's just waayyyyy to
| long.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| The content is pretty accurate
| kenm47 wrote:
| tl;dr us someone. No way anyone actually reads that. Especially
| the people who want it.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| It doesn't take that long to read - probably 15 minutes, and a
| few minutes to skim.
|
| For tl;dr use ChatGPT. "Summarize this <link>". You can ask
| questions about it if you're interested.
|
| In general it talks about pmf, gives advice on different stages
| of pmf, and some strategies to be used to help navigate towards
| pmf at each stage.
|
| As far as people that want this, i sure hope they can spend 15
| minutes (or even 30!) on an article if they are spending years
| trying to achieve pmf.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Anyone got a tldr?
| mdekkers wrote:
| today we're proud to unveil Product-Market Fit Method, an
| intensive 14-week experience designed to help exceptional pre-
| seed founders build epic B2B SaaS companies.
|
| Its spam
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| It's the Lean Startup Method but in course form.
| semanser wrote:
| There is also a video on Lenny's podcast (feat First Round
| Capital) about the exact same topic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc1Uwhfxacs
| fouc wrote:
| A lot of people upvoting this without wading through this fluff.
| Someone break out the chatgpt summarizer ha
| makerdiety wrote:
| I'm here to tell the tragic truth that there isn't a lot of
| opportunity for large scale repeatability that happens after the
| minimum viable product is discovered. Startups are basically
| cryptocurrency pyramid schemes hidden in the domain of legitimate
| entrepreneurship.
|
| You shouldn't seek anything that is beyond one order of magnitude
| higher than the minimum viable product. Because Facebook already
| exists. World of Warcraft already exists. You're not gonna
| discover the product-market fit for the next Google. _Because
| there is no next Google._
|
| It's sad how people are being lied to. Startups are literally
| just another lottery to waste resources, time, and energy on.
|
| The bubble will eventually pop and people will be disappointed
| with reality.
| tannedNerd wrote:
| Yes there is probably no next Google, but you know what there
| are a lot of. Companies that the googles etc buy because they
| have gotten to the point where they can't really develop new
| products themselves. So yes you many not be able to make the
| next Google or Microsoft, but there are plenty of success
| stories to still be had.
| makerdiety wrote:
| A lifestyle business isn't the success this "black boxed
| highly performant Product-Market Framework" article is
| advocating for. A lifestyle business is a small business that
| is no better than a corner store selling liquor and
| cigarettes or whatever. The popular trend is to chase after
| frameworks and technology that enables inhuman commercial
| growth.
|
| You don't need a Kubernetes cluster for a little gas station
| business. You also don't even need the concept of a minimum
| viable product for that "humble" little success which is more
| probable for the average person to achieve.
|
| Silicon Valley startups want big achievements. Astronomical
| stuff. That's why MVPs, PMFs, and KPIs were invented. For
| doing aerospace science as opposed to building local mud
| huts.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| >You don't need a Kubernetes cluster for a little gas
| station business.
|
| Chick-fil-a has a Kubernetes cluster at each location.
| Maybe its not so far fetched. Gas stations are all
| franchises of a major corp.
|
| Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=il7Ww_AlhAg
| jnovek wrote:
| First: both Blizzard and Google started out as small startups.
|
| I'm curious, if not startups, where do you expect innovation to
| come from? The things startups do are usually too high risk for
| large corporations to take on.
| makerdiety wrote:
| No civilization is entitled to technological innovation and
| economic growth just because it demands it. You have to
| engineer that goal into reality.
|
| And if you want risk-taking startups and entrenched
| corporations to work together, you are going to have to
| devise a communist style government or something. The free
| markets would just forgo national gross domestic product
| maximization and line up their own little pockets, free from
| the top-down authoritarianism required to organize large
| scale techno-economic activity.
|
| The Roman empire started out as two little baby boys and a
| momma wolf's teats. Good luck replicating that evolution from
| zero to hero without the right framework.
| neom wrote:
| I can tell you how finding PMF went at DigitalOcean. Moisey one
| of the founders was like "EC2 is expensive and hard to use,
| lets make it easy and cheap" - then you all used it.
|
| Without AWS there would be no DigitalOcean, and although (much
| to my displeasure) our CEO often said "we're going to be the
| next AWS", we really just wanted to be a $500MM ARR
| alternative.
|
| Not sure if I'm agreeing with you or disagreeing with you tho,
| hah.
| makerdiety wrote:
| Maybe the next Google or the next Amazon is an inheritable
| phenomenon that exists on a spectrum? If the next Google is
| just a class of points within a gradient, and if Google,
| Facebook, and Amazon are runaway monopolies formed by a
| stacking of scalable wins like the successful implementation
| of a theoretical product-market fit framework, then what is a
| local optimum which is where a perfect neo-Google sits at?
| And what would be its antithesis (i.e. the local minimum to
| its corresponding local maximum)?
| neom wrote:
| I call it "Wake building" basically building a business in
| the wake of a new giant. Amazon was building AWS for itself
| and for businesses like it. It was inventing cloud
| services, and it was always going to be complex and
| expensive. The rest of the industry didn't seem particular
| bothered to go run behind them, so we did. It was a fine
| enough strategy I think, the only people I really ever felt
| I needed to be careful of were Linode and Joyent, so I kept
| a sharp eye on them, but otherwise yeah, no much to do but
| listen to how SMB devs didn't want to consume AWS services
| and build them in a way they did. These days it seems like
| Matthew and Michelle over at cloudflare have picked that
| mission up and are doing an amazing job at it, so kudos to
| that team for sure! :)
| cameron_b wrote:
| alternatively - https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/pmf-framework/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40020601
| altdataseller wrote:
| I found that one lacking a lot compared to this one
| bjornsing wrote:
| Interesting, but I get the feeling that they've packed so much
| into the PMF concept that it's basically the whole business. In
| my mind it makes more sense to reserve the term for what's called
| Level 1 here: the early stage where you need to make big
| adjustments and potentially pivot to an entirely different
| product or market.
| turnsout wrote:
| This framework is attempting to make PMF seem so hopelessly
| complicated that you'll need their magic system (pricing
| unavailable, apply here).
|
| Trust me, you don't need a system. It's so much simpler than
| this. First, start with the M, not the P. Talk to real human
| beings in any market to find a painful problem, create a product
| that addresses (doesn't need to 100% solve) that problem, and
| (don't forget this part) charge money for the product.
|
| That's it. Anything else is galaxy brain. Don't get distracted.
| billmalarky wrote:
| >First, start with the M, not the P.
|
| Well said! This is basically the linchpin behind the Jobs to be
| Done theory commonly attributed to Clayton Christensen (many
| thought leaders developed the theory over the years which he
| credits, but Clay seemed to be the leader of the group).
|
| The premise of Clay's book "Competing Against Luck" is about
| this JTBD theory (he also calls "Jobs Theory") which aims to
| surface the fundamental causality of customer purchase
| behavior, which allows you to build your solution such that it
| aligns directly with that behavior instead of all the
| abstractions and manifestations of that behavior that are often
| red herrings (ie: pointless features, solutions that in reality
| not aligned but this is not obvious, etc).
|
| Ultimately, Jobs Theory is an approach that that aims to
| objectively lower risk around innovation. It teaches you to
| think of customer needs/objectives independently from
| solutions/technologies, so that it's more natural to innovate
| to serve the ultimate need rather than compete against
| preexisting solutions or be misled by customers who are not
| often able to articulate (or they may not even consciously know
| what drove their behavior -- it can be very complex) what a
| better solution for them would be and as such will just mislead
| you.
|
| Instead of taking shots in the dark, you build better solutions
| around preexisting needs (more accurately called "jobs" in JTBD
| Theory, and it isn't just semantics).
|
| Apologies for nerding out on a topic you probably already know
| well but I figured I'd add to the conversation for others who
| might be interested. I really love JTBD. It helps solve imo the
| single hardest problem around startups -- product/market fit.
|
| Read Competing Against Luck folks!
| turnsout wrote:
| Absolutely! I work in design/innovation consulting, and we
| use JTBD quite a bit. It's a nice way to interpret user needs
| and avoid the pitfall of taking user feedback too literally.
| I view JTBD as a flavor of Human-Centered Design that gives
| teams structure around the "Desirability" piece of the
| Desirability / Viability / Feasibility framework.
|
| We also hear the advice to "make a painkiller, not a
| vitamin," which is sort of a JTBD/HCD test in disguise.
| billmalarky wrote:
| Is there a way I can connect with you off HN? I'm a student
| of design/innovation though my background is in
| engineering. I'd love to be able to learn from you from
| time to time.
| neom wrote:
| I'd also recommend Elliot Parker who worked with Clay for a
| long time. His new book is a great read (I read a pre-print
| version, but I'd guess they are the same):
| https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Innovation-Efficiency-
| Unleas...
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| Exactly. Technology can be used to solve problems.
| Understanding a problem is the key. If you don't have the
| domain expertise to identify the problem you need to speak with
| stakeholders in the industry to grasp the problem and solve it.
| ericmcer wrote:
| The Mom Test is a great book around this. It really helped me
| (as an engineer) realize that the M part isn't a daunting sales
| task, it just involves talking to people about what they do.
| And people like to talk about themselves.
| nextworddev wrote:
| VCs have very much embraced content marketing
| bradhe wrote:
| Yeah was going to say...with this and the Sequoia article the
| other day...
| awad wrote:
| It should be noted that First Round have done a great job
| putting out content for many years.
|
| https://review.firstround.com is a great resource for founders
| niles wrote:
| My initial impression of this was poor, but I think that has more
| to do with the formatting of the slides not being conducive to
| mobile and the sheer volume of text.
|
| After reading through and watching the candid videos, I can say
| there are valuable things that early stage founders can pull out
| so it is worth powering through.
|
| I think more iterations and more depth on the case studies would
| be helpful for levels 1&2. Meaning, a broader sample of startups
| in the portfolio, and more tangible examples of changes that made
| a customer stop chrunning or sign up faster.
|
| Using hypothetical or anonymized case studies and too few largely
| keeps this framework in the level 1-2 quadrant, which is ironic.
| Almost like this document was built (a technology) rather than
| helping a specific reader (a problem + solution).
| from-nibly wrote:
| If you believe this I've also got a remote job where you just
| write a couple posts every day. I've pulled in $41,485 just this
| last month.
| darkhorse13 wrote:
| What do you actually write?
| haliskerbas wrote:
| I think it's sarcasm. It must be saying both the remote job
| and this article are not believable.
| light_triad wrote:
| Great they share specific metrics and give a sense of how they
| evaluate companies, although all First Round articles have this
| tendency to be so overdesigned it takes away from the content.
| The discussion on Lenny's podcast is easier to digest:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc1Uwhfxacs
|
| I think the 4 P's is a valuable framework for getting to PMF:
| Persona, Problem, Promise (Pitch), and Product. Usually startups
| that don't work have a fundamental problem with a few of these
| (they try to solve too many problems for too many people in a
| subpar way - i.e. they don't have a strong answer to: which
| problem are you solving, for who and why it is better than
| alternatives?). Startups that are willing to iterate over the 4
| Ps have a shot at getting to PMF, those that don't usually will
| struggle and then die.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| They talk about selling a dollar for less than it's worth as not
| being a PMF indication. However, this does not match with actual
| VC funding trends, as the vast majority of private unicorns are
| loss making. In fact if you can consistently sell a dollar for 90
| cents it's likely you can raise a lot of money on the back of
| that.
|
| It's funny also that their Ironclad example clearly describes
| fraud/dishonesty on the part of the founder and this is
| celebrated as hustle. Seems far too common that this type of
| behavior is not only tolerated but actually suggested by VCs.
| Cilvic wrote:
| I'd love to find something like this for "product-led growth"
| ideally not B2C but still B2B just not "sales led". Any ideas?
| neom wrote:
| Elena Verna is the name you're looking for. She's got a lot of
| stuff all over the place so might take a bit of digging, but
| imo there is nobody better, she's a PLG wizard for sure.
| svnt wrote:
| The tldr is provided in the article itself: > To be clear, pieces
| of this approach may exist here or there in different frameworks
| -- after all, all great ideas are built on what's come before.
|
| If you haven't spent much time seeking PMF in a B2B company there
| is useful information here, but to me it looks like a refactoring
| of what's come before.
|
| The article under-delivers on its promise, which is stated up
| front as:
|
| > Most people describe finding product-market fit as an art, not
| a science. But when it comes to sales-led B2B startups, we've
| reverse engineered a method to increase the odds of unlocking it.
| We've worked with some of the world's most iconic enterprise
| founders and distilled what they did in their first six months
| into a series of tactical sessions for taking a straighter path
| to PMF.
|
| And later on it even admits it doesn't actually do what it
| promised:
|
| > For example, a startup might be stuck at developing PMF, but
| later find that pivoting to a new buyer is the move that unlocks
| the next level. Or another company may have stumbled onto nascent
| PMF with resonant positioning, but then can't ship the correct
| product that delivers on its promise.
|
| > These levers, of course, fall more into the camp of how to go
| about finding PMF, which is not the focus of this essay.
|
| Isn't "tactical" advice supposed to be the answer to the question
| "how?"
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