Find your Product’s Smile Moment

Knowing when you’ve found product-market-fit should be simple. Product-market-fit is said to be achieved when your product truly resonates with your target demographic; when users don’t just like, but love what you’ve made.

All too often however I see products being launched that have not achieved product-market-fit, even those that have gone through several Alphas, Betas and Pilot periods beforehand. I attribute these false-positives of a product-market-fit on a combination of overly kind feedback from testers and confirmation bias from entrepreneurs.

One thing I’ve found to be fairly effective in gauging the existence of product-market-fit is using what I’ve coined as the “Smile Moment”. It’s hard to fake a genuine smile, and when people use a product they really enjoy, they form a literal smile on their face.

While testing your product, try to look for what part of your product triggers this Smile Moment in your testers. If you don’t find that your testers ever seem to be engaged enough with your product, it may be time to re-evaluate what it is that your product’s unique value proposition is. On the other hand, if you do find something that brings out that Smile Moment, do everything you can to amplify whatever that something is.

When you’ve truly found product-market-fit, getting your target demographic to buy into your product becomes remarkably easy. Especially when they can’t help but smile.