[HN Gopher] The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)
Author : bhoops
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-08-13 15:22 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nishantsoni.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nishantsoni.com)
| 4pkjai wrote:
| _Another PMF-inspired practice in vogue is using Google Adwords
| to channel keyword searches to a dummy product site listing
| various features. The idea is to establish PMF before even
| beginning work on the product. A certain click-through rate
| establishes a clear need and a ready market to consume the
| product._
|
| I've always disliked this strategy. It doesn't feel good to start
| off your relationship with a customer with deception.
| nine_k wrote:
| It should not be deception.
|
| The landing page should say: "We are building this product, but
| it's in the early stages. Leave us your email if you're
| interested to learn about its progress and availability before
| your competitors do. Early adopters will get discounts / free
| plans."
|
| If this page gains any traction, subscriptions, interest
| expressed via the "Contact us" page, then the product is likely
| worth building past the feature list and a general idea of the
| architecture. You better have a prototype that will allow you
| to quickly demo some of your key promised features.
| lelanthran wrote:
| >>I've always disliked this strategy. It doesn't feel good to
| start off your relationship with a customer with deception.
|
| > It should not be deception.
|
| > The landing page should say: "We are building this product,
| but it's in the early stages.
|
| But you _aren 't_ building that product. You're _considering_
| building that product.
|
| IOW, it's still deception.
| nine_k wrote:
| If you have no idea how to build that product, no plans, no
| realistic way to do it, then yes, a deception.
|
| If you have a proof of concept, have put in some thinking,
| made UI sketches and flows, etc, you _have_ started
| building the product, because you can 't advance further
| without that. But you have to find out if it's worth
| putting more effort and money into it.
| barrell wrote:
| If the building of the product is contingent on the CTR,
| and the landing page does not mention that contingency
| but just says it's being built, it is deception plain and
| simple.
|
| Cleverly worded gotcha deception, sure. But deception
| none the less.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > If you have a proof of concept, have put in some
| thinking, made UI sketches and flows, etc, you have
| started building the product,
|
| I think that that bar is too low to move from "we're
| considering building $FOO" to "we're building $FOO".
|
| I mean, with the bar for "we're building $FOO" being
| "Investigate demand for $FOO", then the phrase "we're
| building $FOO" loses all meaning.
|
| It's the difference between "we're getting divorced" vs
| "we're considering divorce".
|
| "we're starting a new job" vs "we're looking for a new
| job"
|
| "we're building a LEGO deathstar" vs "we're buying a box
| of LEGO"
|
| I see no reason that "we're determining whether to build
| $FOO" is the same as "we're building $FOO"
| s1mon wrote:
| Email signups can be meaningful if the product doesn't cost
| the user much (e.g. ad-supported web or app), but for paid
| products, getting a commitment to buy something is more real.
| Even then, something can have a very successful Kickstarter
| (for example), but then the product itself is disappointing
| or fails in some way when it actually ships to the customers,
| and it never sells more than the initial batch.
| waprin wrote:
| > "Early adopters will get discounts / free plans."
|
| If you include this then you're not even validating to the
| extent that you think you are. Because you're validating that
| people will sign up to use it for a discount / free, which
| doesn't necessarily mean anyone will pay full price for it.
| XorNot wrote:
| The problem with this strategy is that the product that might
| exist is always better then what actually can exist.
|
| People building AI-powered things are doing this a lot: add AI
| and _clearly_ the product will now do <thing it's not clear
| you can actually deliver value on>.
| jamil7 wrote:
| Perhaps, but I'm not even sure this strategy really works
| anymore.
| usernamed7 wrote:
| There are ways to do this that are sleazy, slimey and sneaky.
| And there are ways to do this that are genuine. What and how
| you communicate to potential customers matters a lot. But this
| is one of the best way to develop startups.
| farhanhubble wrote:
| The product through its utility, asthetics, pricing etc shapes
| its market and market factors like consumer demography,
| competition, macro economy etc shape the product. So PMF can only
| be an incremental process.
| stackghost wrote:
| >Even if you are able to categorically claim PMF, it doesn't
| guarantee business success. There are a fair number of startups
| that are able to build out their product, raise investor funding,
| and gain early traction, only to peter out and never reach growth
| stages.
|
| To me it seems obvious that these startups achieved PMF only in a
| small subset of their target market. That is, they misidentified
| the market in which they had achieved fit and/or did not conduct
| an adequate segment analysis.
| carbine wrote:
| A great many things can still go wrong, even with a great
| product and PMF. The business economics don't work. The
| leadership make some catastrophic decisions. A competitor eats
| your lunch. Etc etc etc.
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| There is such a thing as taking product-market fit too far (and I
| agree with the thesis here that PMF is not a thing you achieve
| just once and then have forever). But when you actually work on a
| product, you _will_ feel PMF when it 's present, and you _will_
| miss it when it 's gone.
|
| I'll give a concrete example. I spent two years running
| Triplebyte's product near the end of its life. For the first
| year, working on it was like pulling teeth. It was one of the
| most frustrating and demoralizing experiences of my life, trying
| dozens of experiments and having every single one fall flat.
| Triplebyte had hundreds of company clients, hundreds of jobs,
| designers, salespeople, an established not-terrible brand, you
| name it. But none of those things could solve the fact that
| _people did not want what we had_.
|
| About a year in, we tried something different. It wasn't
| particularly polished. It was actually really ugly. It had plenty
| of problems. But when we showed it to users, they immediately
| went yes, this is a thing I want. People who were about to leave
| came back. Sales process close rates jumped by an _order of
| magnitude_. We actually had _more_ candidates getting attention
| in October 2022 than we did in January 2022, despite October
| being well into the most severe tech crash anyone 's seen in a
| generation. We felt better in the midst of our entire market
| falling apart than we had when it was riding high, because we at
| least felt like we had a product that did something.
|
| It wasn't ultimately enough to save us (and I'm not at all sure
| it would have been even if circumstances had been better; the
| product wasn't around long enough for many of its problems to
| play themselves out). But you could feel the difference in every
| meeting.
|
| Y'all watch the news lately? Look at how Democrats are covering
| the Presidential race right now versus how they were covering it
| three months ago, before the previous campaign self-destructed on
| live TV. On paper, the race isn't that different from the pre-
| self-destruct campaign. It's maybe a point or two more in their
| favor than it was before. But the energy, the "vibes", are night
| and day. There's hope, interest, energy. People are joking about
| it, having fun with it, making stupid memes rather than gritting
| their teeth and waiting for the end.
|
| Finding product-market fit is like that. It's palpable in the air
| when you have it. It greases over tensions because people aren't
| constantly arguing over why the product is broken. It makes
| people get excited about ways they can improve it, experiments
| they can run to make it better. It makes your sales and accounts
| teams feel like they're not trying to polish a turd. It shows up
| in your metrics, yes, but startups live or die on _people_
| getting really excited about something.
| alakep wrote:
| I had no idea the concept of product market fit was so new
| atoav wrote:
| Maybe it is me, but product market fit sounds like a term people
| would use that are far away from any particular market. Like
| adults who lost touch with their inner child trying to come up
| with games that would sell to kids.
|
| Sure in the end you need some term to explain whether a
| particular product at a specific price point within its context
| would do well on a market or not. But it still feels like
| something people would use who don't _care_ if it just makes them
| the bucks.
| esel2k wrote:
| As a PM I am constantly discussing this topic with our founder.
| And I agree that it is not a magical on time event.
|
| In our startup we have 3 or 4 large areas - on being data
| acquisition from legacy devices which gets us most of our B2B
| contracts. Yes there is a problem to solve as most of our
| customers don't want to do it and we have now building blocks.
|
| The problem: All our other areas like data analytics and other
| more fancy and higher margin areas we fail to achieve PMF and
| therefore since years we struggle to grow. What is it when only a
| small part of your company/product has PMF and another to expand
| (we can't go to kore customers as specific market)?
| ItCouldBeWorse wrote:
| There is no market fit for ICBM-Warhead controllers- that whole
| fairchild smart sand idea is a total state-driven bust.
|
| The problematic part is to think about finished products, instead
| of "developed capabilities" which might end up in a whole tree of
| products, in total different fields, after a slight pivot.
|
| Companies can starve to death, next to a grain storage, with a
| wall made out of concepts.
| nickm12 wrote:
| It seems strange to talk about PMF like it is a measurable,
| binary attribute. As a metaphor, I like the word "traction". It
| makes me think of a car tire or a shoe that is slipping around
| and then grips. Also, traction can be lost and on its own it
| doesn't do anything for you, but you can use it move forward.
| allenleein wrote:
| Product-market fit is a spectrum, as opposed to something you
| definitely have or don't
|
| - Every business is unique, and metrics frameworks apply
| differently. Focus on the metrics that matter for your product,
| and make sure they're clearly defined
|
| - Product Market Fit (PMF) can rise and fall as the product and
| market change and grow. It's not this static thing that once you
| get it, you always have it.
|
| _B2B_
|
| Every enterprise company should run a 30-day proof of concept
| trial. To make these trials productive, company usually requires
| the customer to agree to buy the product after 30 days if it
| meets expectations. But... pull the trial after 30 days (no
| matter what). Then:
|
| "If the customer doesn't scream, you don't have product-market
| fit because if they're not going to buy it at the end of 30 days,
| they're not desperate, and if they're not desperate, you don't
| have product-market fit."
|
| "The second biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make, especially
| in enterprise, is when they pitch a potential customer on an
| idea, and when the customer doesn't like the idea, they try to
| iterate on the product to build something the customer would
| want."
|
| "That's the absolutely wrong thing to do, even though it feels
| right. You want to find people who love what you're doing, not
| try to convince the 'no's' and turn them into 'yes's.'"
|
| _B2C_
|
| "The only way you know if you have product-market fit is if you
| get word of mouth" (and the best test of word of mouth is
| exponential, organic growth)
|
| Benchmark: Users scream for the product so you can screw
| everything up and still win (for a period of time).
| gumby wrote:
| This is why companies have product managers for different markets
| or solutions. Different contexts require different features.
| vonnik wrote:
| Some but not all of what the author says is true. PMF is a
| continuum, but also a threshold phenomenon below which it is
| better called wishful thinking. PMF is dynamic and can be lost,
| but that is more a question of the M in which it occurs, and the
| competitive forces there. PMF and defensibility are two quite
| different things.
|
| PMF is the sine qua non of startups. You should obsess over
| getting there. Once you have it, you hold a ticket to the arena.
| Then you have to fight to survive.
|
| The idea of PMF is explored much more helpfully here:
|
| https://pmf.firstround.com/
|
| I wrote about it here:
|
| https://vonnik.substack.com/p/how-to-be-lost
| nilirl wrote:
| Nice premise but unsatisfactory conclusion.
|
| Experimentation in these contexts is difficult to make good
| inferences from. I'd like to have read more about how
| experiments are designed to work well with uncontrolled
| environments, how to make inference for short-term prediction,
| and how to plan multiple small experiments to usefully exhaust
| a search space.
|
| Still, thank you for writing. I enjoyed it. I'd love
| recommendations for more procedural knowledge if you have any.
| gizmo wrote:
| I think this article misunderstands the concept of product-market
| fit. Many mediocre products sell and with enough sales effort you
| can create a big business that only sells mediocre products. This
| shouldn't surprise anybody because most products aren't that
| great and most businesses make plenty of money regardless.
|
| Product-market fit is not about that. It's not about whether you
| can find somebody who wants to buy your product. It's not even
| about whether you have very satisfied customers.
|
| Product-market fit is about having a product that fills such a
| deep need in the market that you get pulled into an exponential
| growth trajectory. Instead of growing because of your own
| marketing efforts you grow because you can't keep the
| customers/users away. It can be a viral app where every user on
| average invites more than one other user. It can be an app that
| every college student wants to be on. It can be anything. But
| it's always about having some kind of self-reinforcing loop. It's
| about push versus pull. Peter Thiel referred to Twitter as a
| clown car that fell into a gold mine. Twitter had such strong PMF
| that all their operational mistakes just didn't matter.
|
| Users make content. Content makes the platform better. Which
| results in more users. See step 1.
|
| This is fundamentally different from doubling your signups after
| you double your adspend. Most businesses don't have product-
| market fit in this way. Most startups don't. That includes most
| unicorns. But those that do end up getting huge, and that's why
| startup investors talk about product-market fit and network
| effects and viral growth all the time.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think you switched from a binary flag ("no true PMF ... ") to
| a scalar without realizing it:
|
| > Most businesses don't have product-market fit in this way.
|
| They'll have it to a lesser extent?
|
| The word "Fit" kind of implies a scalar relationship, and the
| disagreement over who has "it" and who "doesn't" comes down to
| size of market and suitability for that market. Why can't you
| can be perfect for a small market, or crappy for a market so
| large that you initially succeed but plateau.
| galenmarchetti wrote:
| "clown car that fell into a gold mine" is such a brilliant
| image. im not familiar with twitter in those days, but I've
| seen other companies that definitely match this description
| light_triad wrote:
| Good points but I think you're talking about 3 different
| concepts:
|
| - Network effect: does the product get better with more users?
|
| - Viral growth: does each user bring more users?
|
| - PMF: is there a correspondence between the market, problem
| and solution that results in market pull?
|
| You can have PMF without the other 2, which is not as strong.
| You can also have PMF for a niche that never grows to a mass
| market or have decent sales without PMF. Agreed having to buy
| your traffic and needing to go through the FAANG toll booth
| every time you want to access your audience is a problem.
| yobbo wrote:
| "That product doesn't fit this market" seems originally just a
| polite way of saying "we don't believe you will ever succeed"
| without explicitly criticising the product or the people.
|
| From an investor's perspective, it might be a condition for
| investing.
|
| As a model, it's not particularly useful in that it only predicts
| possible success if a condition for success (PMF) has been
| demonstrated. And PMF itself is defined in terms of success ...
| so it's tautological.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| I think the usefulness of it is in articulating that there's no
| such thing as a good product in a bad market. A product's
| goodness is defined _in terms of_ its fitness to a particular
| market.
| usernamed7 wrote:
| Not disagreeing that it can be a form critique, but it's true
| that a product built for one audience may not work out, but
| sold differently to a different audience may be a hit. It also
| may be the wrong thing for every audience.
|
| When you don't have PMF, you either change the P or the M.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Periodically I read articles or listen to podcasts where people
| assert that Product Market Fit isn't real, or is wrong, or is
| somehow broken.
|
| I wonder why? Maybe its part of establishing your own cleverness,
| "debunking" some popular concept.
|
| For my money, PMF is alive and well. Marc Andreessen is often
| quoted as saying that product-market fit is when "the market
| pulls the product out of your hands." and that make sense to me
| and I don't see its wrong or out of date. It's just very very
| hard to attain.
| bko wrote:
| This article argues that PMF doesn't exist. Oh and if it does
| exist, it's not clear when it is achieved. And if you have it,
| you can lose it. Oh and even if you don't lose it, it doesn't
| guarantee success.
|
| Whenever I hear arguments for or against something structured
| like this, I'm immediately skeptical. You see this with people
| promoting vegan diets. It's better for the environment, and
| healthier, and meat is gross and gives you ED, and... Sure maybe
| all those things are true, but what are the odds the author
| doesn't just have a point of view that he's trying to sell
| desperately.
|
| Product market fit obviously exists. In my experience, I was at a
| startup and we had pretty much no sales or usage for about 9
| months. Then we pivoted and pretty much overnight we had a few
| users and 100k ARR within a month or two. Does this mean it would
| succeed or we couldn't fumble and lose it? Of course not, but
| that's obvious.
|
| PMF a useful framework to think about your product and question
| the value proposition you're offering. Take feedback from the
| market. If no one is using the product, its possible the market
| has no need for your product.
| wslh wrote:
| Agree but there are important points that the article doesn't
| address while trying to be very assertive, including:
|
| - At the core of PMF is the idea that you are producing
| something novel in some business and/or technical aspect, NOT
| that your are selling a product or service that already exists
| and PMF is there. For example, if you want to compete with
| Salesforce you already know there is a PMF, it is a CRM! Your
| startup will have issues with GTM because PMF is already there.
|
| - PMF is always risky. Not only for startups but also for
| corporations. GSE is the top search engine and one day OpenAI
| eats part of their cake. This is the innovation dilemma at play
| all the time. It is obvious that a startup will have a
| different financial impact from a moving PMF.
|
| Finally, these discussions are fruitful when you start with
| more formal definitions [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product-market_fit
| lowkey wrote:
| Respectfully disagree with this comment
|
| "At the core of PMF is the idea that you are producing
| something novel in some business and/or technical aspect, NOT
| that your are selling a product or service that already
| exists and PMF is there. For example, if you want to compete
| with Salesforce you already know there is a PMF, it is a
| CRM!"
|
| PMF is not about building something novel. It is about
| ensuring your product solves a real and critical problem for
| your target segment. Only customers are the experts on their
| problems and priorities. Entrepreneurs are experts on solving
| problems but we too often solve the wrong problems in
| elaborate ways.
|
| Salespeople buy Salesforce today because everyone else buys
| Salesforce. CRMs come in all shapes and sizes. To find PMF
| for your CRM you need to niche down to find a segment that is
| underserved by Salesforce.
|
| You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews
| with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their
| experience around specific problem areas without ever
| mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific
| solution is likely to bias your subject. This is hard for
| founders as we tend to fall in love with our ideas and often
| slip into pitch mode mid-interview. This is a fundamental
| mistake.
| wslh wrote:
| I am glad to continue the discussion and narrow it as much
| as possible:
|
| Please forget the "novel" meaning for a while, and let's
| continue with the CRM example. I am a Hubspot customer now.
| As most companies we have used spreadsheets, vTiger [1],
| SugarCRM [2], among other apps. My main point was that if
| they are not/were succesful by the HN startup definition is
| because they had issues in the GTM not in PMF and this is a
| common confusion. There was always PMF for CRMs the problem
| is marketing/selling them. That market is so huge and known
| that thinking in PMF is deviating the attention from just
| selling! That is what my "middle east business side" says.
|
| [1] https://www.vtiger.com/
|
| [2] https://www.sugarcrm.com/
| svnt wrote:
| You are essentially saying that some people oversimplify
| and equate traction, GTM, and PMF.
|
| As you note, lack of PMF can be a reason why there isn't
| traction, but it isn't the only reason.
|
| You can have a good GTM and good PMF and still have poor
| traction for a number of reasons.
|
| Ultimately failure or success often comes down to
| traction, which is all of GTM, PMF, and customer
| retention/expansion working.
| wslh wrote:
| Thank you, and because you named traction, I remember the
| book from DDG's founder Gabriel Weinberg [1], that was
| previous to his success.
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-
| Explosive-Cu...
| lowkey wrote:
| "This article argues that PMF doesn't exist. Oh and if it does
| exist, it's not clear when it is achieved. And if you have it,
| you can lose it. Oh and even if you don't lose it, it doesn't
| guarantee success."
|
| I would argue that these claims are all accurate, but with the
| clarification that PMF does exist, but on a spectrum, not as a
| binary state"
|
| See my comment further downthread where I lay out a framework
| for determining your degree of PMF ideally BEFORE building
| anything, so you don't waste time/money/effort on building the
| wrong thing because you think you 'know what the market needs.'
|
| If the only way you can validate PMF is by building something
| and then realizing no one is using it, you have wasted time and
| effort that would have been better spent validating PMF before
| building.
| carbine wrote:
| Yes exactly, it absolutely occurs on a spectrum. You can feel
| the difference in a startup when no one wants what you're
| selling, when some people are pretty into it but most people
| don't care, and when everyone has to have it.
| cryptica wrote:
| I think there is some merit behind the idea of Product-Market Fit
| but my main critique of it is that it neglects the importance of
| social connections in achieving business success.
|
| It makes it sound like entrepreneurship is some kind of science
| whereby the entrepreneur interfaces directly with 'the markets'
| in search of optimum efficiency... It masks the reality that, in
| fact, entrepreneurship is a far more primal pursuit. Success in
| it has little to do with efficiency.
|
| Entrepreneurs will often claim that success in business is
| achieved via clear logical thinking that is free of emotions. But
| in reality, entrepreneurship is all about emotions and
| relationships. Entrepreneurs are often highly emotional and think
| emotionally, not rationally - Yet they think of themselves as
| rational; they call their social games 'strategy' instead of
| acknowledging that, underneath the surface, the game is far more
| primal.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This is misunderstanding basic elements of marketing. Early
| microwaves were a failure because they were huge and expensive
| machines promoted for institutional use. It was only after much
| study that smaller, cheaper, and easier to use models were
| offered which resulted in an explosion of demand. Marketing is
| what enables understanding not only of customer needs, but also
| their desires and the language they use and so on.
| ricokatayama wrote:
| The author apparently does not fully understand the concept of
| PMF. I mean, I understand that we don't necessarily have discrete
| events, but the pursuit is very clear. The article starts off
| wrong when it says that Marc created the concept. Steve Blank
| talked about PMF a bit earlier in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
| ricokatayama wrote:
| https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine...
| lowkey wrote:
| I tend to agree with the autho's point of view. PMF should be
| viewed as a point on a spectrum, not a binary state. You don't
| achieve PMF so much as you progress from no PMF to extreme PMF
| with respect to progressively larger and larger target market
| segments.
|
| Many pundits claim of PMF that you'll know it when you see it
| because the market will suddenly be clamoring for your product
| faster than you can make it. This is categorically wrong to the
| point of being harmful advice.
|
| You need a leading indicator of PMF so that you don't delude
| yourself into believing you have achieved PMF prematurely, only
| to scale and find yourself in the valley of despair where
| customer response to your value proposition is mediocre or churn
| is high.
|
| Clues you have product-market fit with a specific customer
| include:
|
| 1/ the prospect has the problem you think they have
|
| 2/ the problem is of critical importance for the prospect
|
| 3/ they know they have THAT problem, and not some adjacent
| problem or symptom
|
| 4/ they articulate the problem using the same language you use to
| describe it
|
| 5/ they have tried to solve the problem themselves and have
| allocated budget and time to solving it, but failed
|
| Too many entrepreneurs and product managers trick themselves into
| believing they have PMF when they do not - because they fall in
| love with their particular solution and try to sell prospects on
| their idea instead of actually doing customer discovery
| interviews - unbiased interviews where the prospect tells you
| about their experiences in the problem space without you ever
| mentioning your idea.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| "If you're going to quantify product-market fit I vote for: 'how
| much time are sales people spending apologizing for downtime to
| evermore hungry customers?'"
|
| https://forstarters.substack.com/p/for-starters-15-when-can-...
| jbs789 wrote:
| Going back to the original post, it sounds like the central
| argument is that as a VC investor, you care about the size of the
| market, which I read as the opportunity to massively scale. Then
| getting the right product into that market.
|
| So I think that's pretty valid from a VC investor perspective.
| Doesn't mean that some other approach isn't better by some other
| metric. Just that a VC investor is looking for those massive
| returns on a few investments to make up for the losses on the
| majority. It's such a skewed distribution if you don't believe in
| the ability to sell a product into a massive market then it's not
| a VC deal.
|
| Lots of great businesses find some demand for their product and
| do just fine, or great.
| navaed01 wrote:
| This article misses the mark on what product market fit is
| supposed to represent. It's one factor among many. It also seems
| to misunderstand how to identify.
|
| Just like becoming an Olympic athlete, inate skill is helpful but
| not enough, you need drive, environment etc.
|
| On a more meta note, I'm starting to see more substacks that that
| publish content that generally do not 'add value'. That don't
| either address an actual reality or meaningfully subvert a common
| idea. Maybe it's just me?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| > The fundamental premise of Marc's original post is that PMF is
| a discrete event and the journey of a company can be thought of
| as pre-PMF and post-PMF.
|
| I've literally never heard anyone else say this about PMF.
| Companies change, products change, competition changes and
| markets change. Your degree of PMF is ever-changing.
| j45 wrote:
| Very possible. The market can grow and you can grow with it.
| But what is in market (including your ability to grow with
| demands) can be a part of PMF.
| gowld wrote:
| The difference between having customers and not having
| customers is a subsantial transition.
| j45 wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's a myth. Just because we don't know how
| doesn't mean it's not possible.
|
| It is not easy, but the more domain experience you have through
| interactions with problems of customers, the increased likelihood
| of uncovering pain and demand.
|
| On the other hand, trying to create something, and then try to
| generate demand for it, or find a fit for it is much harder to
| find product-market fit, because it wasn't started with that in
| mind.
| usernamed7 wrote:
| I agree when the author says that PMF can change over time.
|
| Microsoft had 34% of the phone market in 2006, a number that
| dwindled to essentially zero due to changing consumer
| expectations and their own fumbles.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNEF1ujd2Mc
| evanmoran wrote:
| I would add that PMF is an investor signal more than a founder
| one. Basically it says the product is good enough and the company
| is executing well enough to show extremely strong traction. It's
| easy to spot this because the traction is too big to ignore, so
| any investor paying attention would be immediately interested.
|
| The challenge, is even with this obviousness, it's hard to run a
| company searching for PMF. All you can do is continue improving
| the product, its positioning, marketing, pricing, and so on,
| looking for strong interest and traction. This is what you're
| probably doing already (what else is there), so PMF usually is
| phrased as a cautionary tale of people who never talk to
| customers, or never set a price, or never launch, etc. These all
| will sink your startup for sure, but all PMF will tell you is
| investors won't be interested if you have no customers and no
| traction.
| light_triad wrote:
| Indeed PMF mostly comes up as a negative - you'll know it when
| you don't see it :)
|
| But I think searching for PMF should theoretically be the bread
| and butter of startups. You're searching for the right
| combinations in terms of the interaction between People,
| Problem, Pitch and Solution. Changing your Pitch and Solution
| is "iterating", changing People and Problem is "pivoting".
| Improve accordingly until PMF or die trying.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-15 23:01 UTC)