MAKE SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT
Jessica Livingston
“Identifying a compelling value hypothesis is what I call finding product/market fit. A value hypothesis identifies the features you need to build, the audience that’s likely to care, and the business model required to entice a customer to buy your product.” __Andy Rachleff
“When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens. If you address a market that really wants your product — if the dogs are eating the dog food — then you can screw up almost everything in the company and you will succeed”
Andy Rachleff
“The term product/market fit describes ‘the moment when a startup finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate with its product’.”
Eric Ries
“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. And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.”
Marc Andreessen
“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
Marc Andreessen
“You know you have fit if your product grows exponentially with no marketing. That is only possible if you have huge word of mouth. Word of mouth is only possible if you have delighted your customer.”
Andy Rachleff
3 Key Metrics for PMF
1. Returning usage – how many users return to use the product/service
2. Net Promote Score (NPS) – would you recommend this to others
3. Paying customer renewal rates
David Rusenko (Weebly)
“Product Market Fit is like a Tango dance between product and market.“
Mike Maples Jr.
‘WTF’ level features
“It also involves taking the most powerful and compelling aspects of the product and delivering them in the form of ‘WTF’ level features that are not merely compelling – they rise to the level of changing people’s points of view about what’s even possible and create intense delight in customers.”
a16z.com
“Getting product right means finding product/market fit. It does not mean launching the product. It means getting to the point where the market accepts your product and wants more of it.”
Fred Wilson
build-measure-learn iteration
Finding PMF is simple but not easy, build something, test it out in the real world, gather data and feedback and iterate on the product. If it’s that simple why do so many companies build products that no one wants? The process is simple but it takes speed, flexibility and a discipline of relying on data and not on opinions. I know this very well because I was a product owner of a few such products that were built in vacuum or built on very long cycles (iteration cycle was weeks or months and not fast enough).
