Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Real Product Market Fit

themacro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#21

Post by mwseibel »

Wilduck wrote: post #4
mwseibel wrote: post #2

Hey 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…

I think there are tons of hair of fire problems - what's cool is that new products (if they are successful) often create new problems.

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#24

Post by mwseibel »

api wrote: post #9
mwseibel wrote: post #2

Hey 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.…

Exponential growth with retention over time is probably another definition of product market fit. I think the world is always creating new problems to fix and we aren't successfully tackling the hard ones yet (housing, healthcare, poverty, etc).

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#25

Post by kevinyun »

Hey Michael, awesome piece! When I started my first company [that made serious revenue relative to other projects], I didn't spend any money until we actually had sales. Getting to product-market fit took awhile for us, as growing the brand and reputation just took time, but now it's an awesome machine that churns well with some spurts of oil here and there.

I think you're spot on with the half-baked, v1, imperfect solution. Currently trying to do the same with a new startup (https://getbeau.com). Our v1 didn't do it for us, but we listened to the recurring feedback and just relaunched our v2 and are continuing to validate that the problem we solve for our customers is a serious (albeit first-world) problem.

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#26

Post by physcab »

melvinmt wrote: post #11
mwseibel wrote: post #2

Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post

This (and Andreessen's article) is quite insightful of knowing when you're on the right track or not, but it's more like a "you know it when you see it" kind of advice that is not very helpful in terms of how to get there, or how to design a process that allows you to methodically identify and jump into these market opportunities. Maybe a second article could dive more into that.

People tend to say the same thing about marriage. They say "when you know, you know". Not extremely helpful information. However, you can optimize for that scenario by dating as many people as you can. If you go on 3 dates a week for 6 months, thats 75 dates of worthwhile info you can use to get closer to that objective.

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#27

Post by beat »

gmarx wrote: post #13
mwseibel wrote: post #2

Hey folks - this is Michael from YC - happy to hear your thoughts on the post

It's a charming ideal that I think is vanishingly rare in real life. I also can't see how the hair on fire thing fits with any of the top startups and ex startups I know. In fact I dare say the rapidly rising user count is a separate story from the hair on fire story. The hair on fire tends to be a specialty business problem and still, against all reason, tends to require a pretty rigorous sales cycle. The problems I…

I think there are actually two aspects to the market question. First, there's the level of pain experienced by the customer, and second, there's the size of the market. Lots and lots of startups are solving "hair on fire" issues for relatively small markets - enough to generate millions in revenue, but not billions.

For a sad case in point, there's not a whole lot of research for a cure (or even a treatment) for ALS - a disease that is completely debilitating and almost always fatal. There just aren't that many patients (even though it's common enough to touch famous people like Lou Gehrig, Stephen Hawking, and Jason Becker). Meanwhile, tons of money are poured into Viagra and its competitors - not an actual lifesaving problem, but a huge market.

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#28

Post by gmarx »

mwseibel wrote: post #15
gmarx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a charming ideal that I think is vanishingly rare in real life. I also can't see how the hair on fire thing fits with any of the top startups and ex startups I know. In fact I dare say the rapidly rising user count is a separate story from the hair on fire story. The hair on fire tends to be a specialty business problem and still, against all reason, tends to require a pretty rigorous sales cycle. The problems I…

I know about Airbnb personally and it started with a hair on fire problem - a design conference where all the hotel rooms in the city where sold out. Brian and Joe hosted attendees in their apartment on air beds. That sounds like a hair on fire problem and a brick solution :)

I see your point but that implies that on rare occasions hotels are sold out at a specific time and place. I don't think that is the problem AirBnB solves

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#29

Post by beat »

cehrnrooth wrote: post #10
mwseibel wrote: post #2

Hey 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 expertis…

I think solving familiar problems is a curse of the startup community. Founders go after problems that are familiar, but trivial. Product finder apps for vanishingly narrow segments. Task management. Or my favorite category, startups that are supposed to help startup founders/investors evaluate startup ideas!

My recommendation is that if you're a "technical founder" - a programmer who wants to be CTO - don't look for problems to solve. Look for business partners who already have domain expertise and a problem that they can explain succinctly (so you see the value proposition), and work with them. There's a whole world of people who can see a massive problem that could make money with a good technical solution, but they don't know how to code and don't really know anyone who can code and is willing to help them.

Re: The Real Product Market Fit

#30

Post by nostrademons »

gmarx wrote: post #28
mwseibel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know about Airbnb personally and it started with a hair on fire problem - a design conference where all the hotel rooms in the city where sold out. Brian and Joe hosted attendees in their apartment on air beds. That sounds like a hair on fire problem and a brick solution :)

I see your point but that implies that on rare occasions hotels are sold out at a specific time and place. I don't think that is the problem AirBnB solves

I'm wondering if this may dovetail with another piece of common YC advice, "start by going narrow & deep".

I didn't start using AirBnB until 2013, and I used them because they were remarkably polished and made the experience super-easy. They weren't at all a "hair on fire" problem for me.

But I could imagine that at some point in time, there was a group of people who were so desperate for a place to stay that they'd crash on a couple of airbeds at a stranger's place. And that gave those strangers the idea that maybe this was something worth looking into and investing time into perfecting.

The importance of that initial core group of users may be feedback. I've had to give up startup ideas because I launch them and then there is literally nobody who cares. And then with no users, there are no guideposts as to which direction to improve the product in. It's all guesswork, and random ideas don't have a particularly high chance of success.

This may also dovetail with the known advantage that you get from solving your own problem. If it's your own problem, then you know at least one person wants it, and you can use yourself for feedback on improving the product. Then hopefully once it's good enough for you, you can find some other folks that'll find it good enough to try out, and use their feedback to evolve the product.

Post reply on HN