WTF is product-market fit
Into the beautiful world of misconception and buzz words.
“What’s you growth hacking strategy? Wait, what, you’ve got none ?! Ok but at least, you have an acquisition strategy… right?”
Growth hacking there, growth hacking here … I’ve got the title “Growth Hacker” on LinkedIn and until I updated my profile telling people that I was building Captain Data, I received a lot of propositions coming from founders asking me to become part of their startup. Thank you, I’m touched, really.
But what I noticed was the fact that most of these startups had not reach product-market fit.
Know your users
I’ve started developing skills as a growth hacker back in 2015 in a startup selling B2B leads. It was the rise of growth hacking (journalistically speaking) and I was asked to work on user acquisition.
However, the company had no clue on who to target. Let me tell you right here right now how useless this is.
You’re spending money to reach out to an unknown audience
Of course, it can be very interesting to run a few ads on Facebook or Adwords to test out demographics, get a sense of who is most interested.
But you don’t ask someone to run a growth strategy if there’s actually nothing to grow.
The key to running successful ads reside in the knowledge of your users, and you cannot simply invent it, you have to find it out, iterate and test different messages, and mostly, you need to talk with them.
The same goes for any type of marketing, might it be cold mailing or guerilla marketing. You will simply waste your time if you don’t know your users.
You want to acquire a lot of users/customers…
… even though you didn’t take the time to do a private beta with handpicked users.
It seems like common sense to start small to grow big, yet everyone wants to start big: building a product with many features, targeting many different segments (yes, you want to make a ton of money) and so on.
But if you really think about it, most successful companies in the past ten years started in a niche: Airbnb, Facebook etc. So why the hell would you succeed building a do-everything product? Well, it’s simple, you won’t.
I know it’s tempting to “think long-term" because “SEO takes time" and so on, but again, think about it: you’ll just end up having bad metrics, few conversions and it will get you down. Which is a shame, because you might be very good at it, but you’re simply taking the problem the wrong way.
Take the time to build a small community, reach out to them one by one and build your product a step at a time. Are you really sure those two weeks will change everything? Do you really think people are longing nights and days for the official release?
You don’t really know what you are measuring
Not only you don’t know what you are measuring (remember, you don’t have users), but you probably didn’t take the time to set up correctly analytics tools either.
It’s fine if you don’t have setup Mixpanel, Hotjar and Google Analytics the very first minute. Remember, you are behind their screen or over the phone with your first users, why bother?
Product-market fit
Product-market fit is not just a buzz word that sounds cool. It’s a reality, and while many (tech) entrepreneurs might know the significance, few actually understand what it really means.
There’s a before and an after
Actually, it may not be your fault if you are getting confused. When you read articles talking about growth, you never see the disclaimer “post product-market fit advice". It’s either taken for granted or the author does not know either…
Are you finally going to spit it out ?! What is it!
Ok, so here we go :
Product-market fit is the tipping point when your users are 100% aligned with what you are selling and cannot imagine one second living without it.
Hooray! You are now on the winning path, you actually demonstrated that people are more than ready to buy your product and that you’re not building a product that nobody gives a shit about. Great news, you can now search for a growth hacker, you’re going to need it! Bad news, there’s not many on the market, should you know what a GH really is ☺
This graph is rather common amongst entrepreneurs, and I find it corroborates very well with the definition I just gave you. The tipping point represents the inflection point on the curve, “The Chasm”.
You can clearly understand that you need to know your first users, the innovators and early adopters, to grow faster, better, stronger!
Hope all this will help you build your next billion dollar company. I’d love having your thoughts on this too ;)
