[HN Gopher] Product Market Fit
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Product Market Fit
Author : kevinslin
Score : 92 points
Date : 2022-10-23 16:28 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kevinslin.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kevinslin.com)
| andrewem wrote:
| A funny thing about this is there's an obvious typo in the quote
| from Mark Zuckerberg. It says "Twitter is such as mess" rather
| than " _a_ mess". Searching for that quote finds a 2013 tweet
| from Benedict Evans containing the typo, quoting a review of the
| book "Hatching Twitter" which also has the typo.
|
| That review describes a conflict between two of the founders
| which today I find baffling: "Dorsey saw Twitter as a way to
| update one's "status," the ability to say what you're doing the
| moment you're doing it. Williams saw Twitter as a way to describe
| what's happening in the world around you."
|
| https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/397814437014700032?...
|
| https://allthingsd.com/20131104/in-hatching-twitter-a-billio...
| Finbarr wrote:
| > A big part of PMF is timing and luck - factors that are for
| most parts,out of your control. This is why even other founders
| that have found PMF are of limited help.
|
| > What you can control is the _market_ , your team, and the
| unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a
| founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF.
|
| How can you control the market? The market seems like a timing
| and luck factor that's outside of your control.
| mark_undoio wrote:
| I guess you can control the markets you're focusing in - within
| reason. E.g. picking a particular sector to sell into. How much
| choice you get depends on the product you're building, so I
| suppose it's a bit circular.
| Finbarr wrote:
| Yea you can pick a sector to sell into. But any sector you
| sell into is constantly evolving. You need to correctly
| predict the direction things are moving in, which is somewhat
| a timing and luck factor.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| It's possible that by both of us choosing ecommerce we are
| making PMF harder for ourselves. I remember selling Shopify
| circa 2017 was like the easiest job ever. I bet it is a lot
| harder for their sales team to hit it's number now. Similar
| for Covid induced mega growth followed by defunding of
| ecommerce projects.
| samatman wrote:
| They meant the vertical.
| guiriduro wrote:
| Isn't Lean Startup and its derivatives about taking a
| systematic approach to going from cool idea but blind/no
| market, using Validated Learning to gain insight about a
| market, failing fast on what doesn't work, and (assuming you're
| in the ballpark of a viable market) move towards Product Market
| Fit? ie. not totally out of your control, nor totally within
| it.
| elefanten wrote:
| Interesting that is now short-handed as Lean Startup. Steve
| Blank pioneered that formula in the 90s under the term
| "customer-driven development". But it seems he adopted the
| "lean" terminology over time, as well.
| baxtr wrote:
| I think they mean you can control it by choosing where to play.
| indymike wrote:
| > How can you control the market?
|
| I think the phrase "control the market" in it's classical
| definition: a monopoly. It means control the definition of the
| market. By "controlling the market" your set constraints that
| should make it easier to get the product right, and then easier
| to sell after launch.
|
| > The market seems like a timing and luck factor that's outside
| of your control.
|
| There's a lot that is outside of control in any startup, or for
| that matter, when you bring a new product to market in an
| established company. Some of it is luck. Some of it is being
| able to quickly iterate and improve. Some of it is having the
| capital to stay on the playing field long enough. The timing
| part is the hardest, and is so complex that it might as well be
| luck. In the end, you control what you can, and have to be ok
| with riding the trade-winds and current on the rest of it.
| breck wrote:
| I highly recommend Ty Webb's talk on PMF.
| Greek0 wrote:
| Do you have a link where to find the talk?
| breck wrote:
| Sadly I don't. Not sure if there is one
| (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961)
| gm wrote:
| Is this a joke reply? All I could find on Ty Webb is a bunch of
| Caddyshack references (I can't stand golf, so was clueless).
| Can you provide a link to the talk you're talking about?
| breck wrote:
| Sadly I don't have a link. Not sure if there is one
| (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961)
| mikek wrote:
| Relevant article on how to zero in on Product Market Fit:
|
| https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine...
| hazyc wrote:
| Superhuman seems like an odd example because for an 8+ yr old
| startup it doesn't seem at all obvious that they have PMF yet.
| dcow wrote:
| Everyone I know tried Superhuman, thought the experience was
| cool, and then went back to their old inboxes because it
| turns out that shaving milliseconds off email workflows
| doesn't actually save that much time or materially change the
| experience. _Maybe_ it's game changing for EA type jobs where
| the day is primarily spent managing and navigating an inbox,
| but for the rest of us, that's just not the case. Superhuman
| feels like a feature not a product.
| gz5 wrote:
| Even if you get PMF, you don't magically sustain it and extend
| it.
|
| You need PMF and the business model*.
|
| Example: Yahoo search had PMF. Google search had PMF paired with
| the winning business model.
|
| *and much more, depending on your addressable market and
| aspirations...but PMF and business model are two legs of your
| stool
| shrisukhani wrote:
| Also very true! PMF for dog-dating apps (intentionally bad
| example) is virtually useless. OTOH PMF in the database market
| is frickin amazing and you're likely drowning in revenue! As
| much as people don't want to believe it, TAM is a very very
| real in a startup's success.
| jackblemming wrote:
| What was product market fit called before the new wave of jargon
| took over? "Building shit people actually want"?
| gm wrote:
| It was called "product market fit". Earliest mention was in
| 1972:
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=product+market...
| [deleted]
| indymike wrote:
| Building something people want is the first part of PMF.
| There's a big gap between "want" and "willing to pay for" and
| an even bigger gap between "willing to keep paying for". I
| think someone else here pointed out that PMF is an old phrase
| from the '70s.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Yea, so let's just say:
|
| - It's nice
|
| - It's useful
|
| - It's something I depend on
|
| - It's something my business depends on
|
| The jargoning is just saying the simplest things. So OP's
| statement is on a spectrum where the axis variable is "how
| badly you want something". We need to cut all this startup
| bullshit and just speak simply. Steve Jobs did that well.
| debarshri wrote:
| Product market fit is the context of an investible startups is
| quite different. You can always build shit people want. For eg.
| A static website hosting you know that market exists. But in
| case of an investible startups, you have a product hypothesis
| that has never been tested ever, validating the tech that is
| new, innovative gtm motion and business. The point I'm trying
| to make is the question whether the market exists for the idea
| is validated which is where the opportunity lies.
| hedora wrote:
| Even for static website hosting, it's unclear if a given
| product has market fit. Some other host could be well-known,
| strictly cheaper, more reliable and "better" in all ways
| customers care about.
|
| The product that loses on all dimensions is unlikely to find
| a market fit, even if it would have been competitive ten
| years ago.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| It's been called that for a long time...
| shrisukhani wrote:
| > Anything that is not in service of this does not matter in an
| early stage startup.
|
| This is too true and something I didn't internalize fully until
| maybe 6 months into my startup. If you have PMF, people can help
| you with everything else. If you don't, no one can really do
| anything for you.
| ripvanwinkle wrote:
| Feels like an overstatement to say that the only thing that
| matters is Product Market fit.
|
| Product market fit is certainly necessary but its not sufficient.
| Actually building and supporting the product (which includes
| culture, hiring etc) better than the competition also counts. FB
| vs Myspace could be an example.
| gm wrote:
| I think the point is: If you had no abilities, and only f*cked
| stuff up without outside help, but you had solid product market
| fit, that's the only thing that matters because everything else
| you can acquire (including funds to compensate for your
| shortcomings).
|
| At first it does sound wrong, but as I think back to all
| successful people I've known, including the ones that I could
| not for the life of me figure out how they got more success
| than I (eg, grade school dropouts, alcoholics, etc), I _can_
| see how they leveraged an insight about PMF to achieve many
| things that I've always wanted and never achieved for myself.
| Very enlightening, but still kinda sad, actually, lol.
| gretch wrote:
| Product-market-fit is also not everlasting. Especially in the
| tech industry, things change really fast and even if you
| achieve a strong fit 1 time, you need to adapt over time or you
| become irrelevant.
| rock_hard wrote:
| Yeah, finding product market fit for the machine that builds
| the machine is the only thing that really matters IMO
| beckingz wrote:
| Exactly. Gotta also build a company to deliver product and
| capitalize on the product market fit.
| JaggerFoo wrote:
| For serious analysis of "Product Market Fit", you are better off
| searching google scholar than reading this article.
| gm wrote:
| FYI, this article does not claim to be an analysis of product
| market fit.
| shrisukhani wrote:
| > What you can control is the market you're in, your team, and
| the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a
| founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF.
|
| Agree with everything here except (maybe I'm contrarian) the
| 'unique insight that you bring as the founder' part. I'm fairly
| convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing. In
| reality, the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to
| really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A
| pitch. There will almost certainly be plenty of competitors
| ripping you off and at least one or two funded by other top-tier
| VCs. If the only thing you have different is your 'authentic
| unique insight', you're going to lose anyway.
| ahaucnx wrote:
| Fun fact. We at AirGradient never had to find PMF.
|
| Why was that?
|
| Because the first 9 months it was a volunteer project fixing the
| air quality problem of the school our kids go to. During the so
| called "burning season" the school did not know if the air
| purifiers in the classrooms can keep up.
|
| So we developed a solution tackling exactly this problem spending
| many many days on campus and talking to teachers, administration,
| parents and operations.
|
| So instead of starting with an IDEA of a product/service, we
| started focusing 100% on fixing an existing massive PROBLEM on
| the ground.
|
| Another thing that worked for us was to early on offer an open-
| source version of our air quality monitor [1] that allowed us to
| see what adjustments the community came up with - as in many
| cases these adjustments made the monitor fit better to problems
| we might not have been aware of. So basically a kind of community
| driven market fit.
|
| [1] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/
| robocat wrote:
| Your comment seems orthogonal to the point made in the article.
|
| PMF is when your customers push or pull you along, helping
| accelerate your product into a market. Lack of PMF is when you
| are trying to push your customers - no acceleration - no help
| from customers.
| ahaucnx wrote:
| I would really like to understand your comment but I am not
| sure what you mean with "orthogonal" in this context. Could
| you please explain more?
|
| Our customer which was the school having this problem we
| tried to fix pulled us in and then along and we had constant
| interaction with them until our Product fit that Market (the
| school).
| TheOsiris wrote:
| you're describing how most startups are founded: find a
| problem, build a solution, find users. from what you're
| describing you're doing an excellent job at it.
|
| PMF is only needed when you're trying to build a certain type
| of company. if your goal is to build the next AirBnB or
| Coinbase, then you absolutely need it. if not, then you might
| not need it. you can build a "successful" company (in quotes
| because I learned that ppl define success wildly differently,
| sometimes) and wealth without needing PMF
| [deleted]
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