One Easy Way To Know If You Have Product/Market Fit
Finding Product/Market Fit can be a gradual process especially if there’s no obvious business opportunity yet. Scaling too soon or missing an optimal time to grow can spell death for your startup. Reaching Product/Market Fit can seem back-breaking, but measuring it doesn’t have to be.
Product/Market Fit, originally coined by Marc Andreessen, according to Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup, is “If you have to ask whether you have Product/Market Fit, the answer is simple: you don’t.” To know Product/Market Fit you must first understand lean startup principles:
- Most startups fail by wasting money on a product no one wants
- Instead, launch early and test business model hypotheses with a minimum viable product
- Pivot when a hypothesis is wrong
- Repeat until you have Product/Market Fit
- Don’t scale until you have Product/Market Fit
Product/Market Fit is being in the right market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can’t be all things to all people and sometimes even having the most reputable investors can’t save a startup from mismanagement.
Drone startup, Airware, is a cautionary tale of startup overspending in hopes of finding Product/Market Fit. Airware recently shut…
