Ask HN: How to validate a product-market fit initially? • Hacker News Board

Post by kasrakhosravi2 » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

Finding the product-market fit is supposed to be one of the hardest problems initially that many founders fail to do it properly. I have had few failed startups from before and the main reason behind all was "Building People Did Not Want"

I want to make sure I get it right this time and I appreciate all your valuable input on this. How should one go about finding the product market fit? Both general and specific guidelines are welcome; but I am really looking for the nitty gritty stuff here.

How should I approach this process? Imagining that I am building a product in the NFT market, should I invite few potential customers for some chat? show them some demo or graphs and get their insight?

Post by neom » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 6:16 PM UTC

The general rule of thumb for PMF is if you're a business and someone is paying you for your product, your product is fitting into that market. So your first questions to potential customers (who you trust/have vetted) should be: If I built this, would you pay for it? Why? How much? Why? Ok, I'm going to build this and it will cost X, will you be my first customer please (/and sign an LOI/contract)?

More generally: this a very big and complicated question, PMF can feel very different in every business or org, and PMF might differ between Oxfam and Microsoft -for example. Either way, it's generally always distilled down to: the value exchange makes sense to everyone involved; so figure out how to validate that in your ideas.