How Startups Use Their Resources to Find Product-Market Fit
Maximize the minimum and the viable in your product
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The tricky thing about launching a new product to market is that it’s barely even a milestone worth celebrating. What comes next is a series of chicken-and-egg problems and snap decisions on the way to product-market fit.
Then on to traction, scale, and ultimately growth.
One of the most difficult decisions a leadership team needs to make is what to do with the resources that built the product now that the product is built.
Do you focus those resources on strengthening the infrastructure that sells and supports the product? Or do you push them to keep building a better product that brings in more customers and keeps those customers around longer?
Obviously, the answer is both. So here’s how to prioritize.
Chicken (infrastructure) and egg (feature set)
An MVP will, by its own nature, have a lot of gaps and flaws. If your team has done that first phase right, those gaps and flaws will mostly impact the infrastructure side, with very little friction for the customer.
In other words, the product should work great, maybe even perfectly, as far as the customer is concerned. You got that product to market quickly by cutting corners in the infrastructure that produces, sells, and maintains the product — processes like transaction, fulfillment, and support that are now mostly manual and probably not scalable.
Now you’ve got time to go back and harden those processes.
However, the product you’ve released, while close to perfect in the customer’s eyes, is only enough of a product to prove that the product deserves to exist, not to scale, not to completely solve the problem you’re trying to solve, not to produce a big windfall to your bottom line.
But the more features you add, the more weight you put on the infrastructure, which could cause the whole machine to collapse.
