The Real Product Market Fit
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The Real Product Market Fit
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Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#2Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#3Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
In your experience, what metric(s) is(/are) the best indicators of product-market-fit (or lack of it)?
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#4Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
I won't ask you how to identify these markets because I think it's fairly clear that it takes dedication, thoughtfulness, and experience.
I would like to ask if you believe there are many markets with unserved "hair on fire" customers. Are there thousands of these problems waiting to be solved? My intuition is that there are many people with hair on fire problems, but not many of those problems generalize to products that lots of people would want. What do you think?
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#5Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
Hey Michael! Great piece. Signs of product/market fit are often strong and unambiguous, and that needs to be emphasized.
That said, many startups get v1 wrong. Not necessarily because their MVP is too clunky, but because they fail to frame (or graap) the correct problem in the first place. Or because their solution to that problem just isn't the right one. (As you aptly put it, founders can get hung up on their solutions and take their eyes off of problems.)
I'd love to see a followup piece about where to go from there. Let's say you're a founder, and your v1 failed to achieve fit. Your v2, perhaps, failed to achieve fit. What is a creative, but rigorous way to go back to the drawing board for v3?
I've worked for some successful startups, and I've worked for some failed startups. None of them found fit right out of the gate. The difference seems to have been that the successful founders recognized it quickly and took intellectually honest steps to do something about it. The failures either avoided that reality, or floundered while trying to adjust.
So what are some effective methods for assessing and course correcting in MVP customer development and product development? We know that "getting outside the building," to use the Lean parlance, is critical. So is effective brainstorming. But what are the best techniques for doing either?
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#6Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
Good advice and thanks for sharing, Michael.
What would be your advice for a team that has clearly reached product-market fit, but the market is inherently small and their growth stalls out because they've put out most of the fires for people's heads in that space?
At that point it's tempting to diversify the product and start solving less dire problems for customers by adding new features, but that makes the product larger and might slow the team down.
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#7Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
I like the piece, but I liked the Marc Andreessen piece linked from the article even better. That's a classic.
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#8Makes me think of something I say occasionally... you need a problem so compelling that customers will pay for a buggy, incomplete solution, because a buggy, incomplete solution is what you're building.
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#9Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
To what extent is sustained exponential growth a sign of product market fit? And do you view it as binary?
Also what are your thoughts about the long term viability of this approach to building companies? As someone with a bit of a machine learning background I see this whole model as "greedy hill climbing" aka "gradient descent." That will work until we fill in all the micro-niches at the current macro fitness peak. Then these kinds of "lean startup" style fit-and-explode market opportunities will become depleted.
Re: The Real Product Market Fit
#10Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post
Thanks for writing this, one of your quotes "Founders often hold too tightly onto solutions and too loosely onto problems" really resonated.
If someone were evaluating their next opportunity to tackle, would you recommend they focus less on identifying a specific pain point (that they may know how to solve), and instead identify a large market and then search for inefficiencies (even if they have less domain expertise in it).
Obviously the intersection of the two would be better (large market with a pain point you know how to solve) but curious which you would optimize for if you had to choose.