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The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

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Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#51

Post by usernamed7 »

yobbo wrote: post #26

"That product doesn't fit this market" seems originally just a polite way of saying "we don't believe you will ever succeed" without explicitly criticising the product or the people. From an investor's perspective, it might be a condition for investing. As a model, it's not particularly useful in that it only predicts possible success if a condition for success (PMF) has been demonstrated. And PMF itself is defined i…

Not disagreeing that it can be a form critique, but it's true that a product built for one audience may not work out, but sold differently to a different audience may be a hit. It also may be the wrong thing for every audience.

When you don't have PMF, you either change the P or the M.

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#53

Post by jvanderbot »

gizmo wrote: post #23

I think this article misunderstands the concept of product-market fit. Many mediocre products sell and with enough sales effort you can create a big business that only sells mediocre products. This shouldn't surprise anybody because most products aren't that great and most businesses make plenty of money regardless. Product-market fit is not about that. It's not about whether you can find somebody who wants to buy yo…

I think you switched from a binary flag ("no true PMF ... ") to a scalar without realizing it:

> Most businesses don't have product-market fit in this way.

They'll have it to a lesser extent?

The word "Fit" kind of implies a scalar relationship, and the disagreement over who has "it" and who "doesn't" comes down to size of market and suitability for that market. Why can't you can be perfect for a small market, or crappy for a market so large that you initially succeed but plateau.

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#54

Post by gowld »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #46

> The fundamental premise of Marc's original post is that PMF is a discrete event and the journey of a company can be thought of as pre-PMF and post-PMF. I've literally never heard anyone else say this about PMF. Companies change, products change, competition changes and markets change. Your degree of PMF is ever-changing.

The difference between having customers and not having customers is a subsantial transition.

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#55

Post by galenmarchetti »

gizmo wrote: post #23

I think this article misunderstands the concept of product-market fit. Many mediocre products sell and with enough sales effort you can create a big business that only sells mediocre products. This shouldn't surprise anybody because most products aren't that great and most businesses make plenty of money regardless. Product-market fit is not about that. It's not about whether you can find somebody who wants to buy yo…

"clown car that fell into a gold mine" is such a brilliant image. im not familiar with twitter in those days, but I've seen other companies that definitely match this description

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#56

Post by evanmoran »

I would add that PMF is an investor signal more than a founder one. Basically it says the product is good enough and the company is executing well enough to show extremely strong traction. It’s easy to spot this because the traction is too big to ignore, so any investor paying attention would be immediately interested.

The challenge, is even with this obviousness, it’s hard to run a company searching for PMF. All you can do is continue improving the product, its positioning, marketing, pricing, and so on, looking for strong interest and traction. This is what you’re probably doing already (what else is there), so PMF usually is phrased as a cautionary tale of people who never talk to customers, or never set a price, or never launch, etc. These all will sink your startup for sure, but all PMF will tell you is investors won’t be interested if you have no customers and no traction.

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#57

Post by light_triad »

gizmo wrote: post #23

I think this article misunderstands the concept of product-market fit. Many mediocre products sell and with enough sales effort you can create a big business that only sells mediocre products. This shouldn't surprise anybody because most products aren't that great and most businesses make plenty of money regardless. Product-market fit is not about that. It's not about whether you can find somebody who wants to buy yo…

Good points but I think you're talking about 3 different concepts:

- Network effect: does the product get better with more users?

- Viral growth: does each user bring more users?

- PMF: is there a correspondence between the market, problem and solution that results in market pull?

You can have PMF without the other 2, which is not as strong. You can also have PMF for a niche that never grows to a mass market or have decent sales without PMF. Agreed having to buy your traffic and needing to go through the FAANG toll booth every time you want to access your audience is a problem.

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#58

Post by light_triad »

evanmoran wrote: post #56

I would add that PMF is an investor signal more than a founder one. Basically it says the product is good enough and the company is executing well enough to show extremely strong traction. It’s easy to spot this because the traction is too big to ignore, so any investor paying attention would be immediately interested. The challenge, is even with this obviousness, it’s hard to run a company searching for PMF. All you…

Indeed PMF mostly comes up as a negative - you'll know it when you don't see it :)

But I think searching for PMF should theoretically be the bread and butter of startups. You're searching for the right combinations in terms of the interaction between People, Problem, Pitch and Solution. Changing your Pitch and Solution is "iterating", changing People and Problem is "pivoting". Improve accordingly until PMF or die trying.

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#59

Post by wslh »

svnt wrote: post #50
wslh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am glad to continue the discussion and narrow it as much as possible: Please forget the "novel" meaning for a while, and let's continue with the CRM example. I am a Hubspot customer now. As most companies we have used spreadsheets, vTiger [1], SugarCRM [2], among other apps. My main point was that if they are not/were succesful by the HN startup definition is because they had issues in the GTM not in PMF and this i…

You are essentially saying that some people oversimplify and equate traction, GTM, and PMF. As you note, lack of PMF can be a reason why there isn’t traction, but it isn’t the only reason. You can have a good GTM and good PMF and still have poor traction for a number of reasons. Ultimately failure or success often comes down to traction, which is all of GTM, PMF, and customer retention/expansion working.

Thank you, and because you named traction, I remember the book from DDG's founder Gabriel Weinberg [1], that was previous to his success.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

Re: The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)

#60

Post by RaftPeople »

ricokatayama wrote: post #34

The author apparently does not fully understand the concept of PMF. I mean, I understand that we don’t necessarily have discrete events, but the pursuit is very clear. The article starts off wrong when it says that Marc created the concept. Steve Blank talked about PMF a bit earlier in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

> The article starts off wrong when it says that Marc created the concept. Steve Blank talked about PMF a bit earlier in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Maybe I'm off-base here but when I read those 3 words "product market fit" I assume that is a concept that has been around since the beginning of any free market.

I don't see how it could have only been recently recognized, that doesn't seem right.

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