Startup Journeys E01: Founder-Market Fit
(Written by Kaushik Srinivasan, edited by Arpit)
The world of startups is highly dynamic and unpredictable, owing to new product innovations and rising customer expectations by the day. While the success stories add on to the glamour of the industry, topics like startup failures and founder depression are seldom spoken about. There is an interplay of multiple factors that affects a startup’s prospects and more often than not, founders tend to get overwhelmed leading the venture to its doom.
Stripping down bare, the crucial elements that determines a startup’s success are its Team, Product and Market. The team and product are two elements over which a founder can exercise control. Hence, it is essential for there to be a close correlation between team and market (founder-market fit) and product and market (product-market fit) for a startup to scale.
Founder-Market fit
Founder-market fit implies the rationale behind why a founder/team is apt to solve a specific problem. For a fit between the founder and the market, it should be a match made in heaven. This can be identified with the experience under the belt of the core team working on the problem —
having sufficient experience in a field arms one with key insights and resourceful contacts and the right roadmap to the solution. This maybe key to a startup’s success.
The key point of connect between a founder and a market is a deep, almost native, understanding of his target audience. The ability to relate and empathize holds the key to building a great product, since empathy is a key to offering the simplistic solution possible to the customer. Such luxuries can only be afforded by teams that have experienced the problem themselves.
Lack of Founder-market fit is one the main reasons behind majority of startups failing within their first year. Such teams tend to spend time and money in learning about the industry and customer pain points, eating into the finite resources of the startup. Moreover, the implementation practices differ from sector to sector and digressing from them would result in demise.
As Vaibhav Garg, ex-founder of IndieHaat Ventures says, “In most scenarios, the way one envisions his/her startup to be is not how it finally transpires to be. A lot of pivots tend to happen along and if you don’t relate to the problem or haven’t experienced it yourself, then it might fail eventually”.
Once you are confident that there’s some degree of founder-market fit, the next step is to figure out whether you can achieve the product-market fit. That’s a topic we cover in the next post in this series.
(Startup Journeys is a series of posts covering experience of startup founders, especially those who failed in their journeys, putting in context of what could be done better. If you are an ex-founder and looking to find your next great work, feel free to reach out to me at aa+founders@blume.vc)
