Want Product/Market Fit? Double Your Effort to Understand Failure
As a startup founder or new business leader, you’re probably laser-focused on finding a product-market fit for your idea. Most entrepreneurs believe that you are looking for a positive correlation — that is, the feature/positioning or price point that will magically start making your product grow organically. This is like drilling boreholes to locate oil in the early 20th century. You’re stumbling around the desert, making vain attempts to strike gushers by brute force. And when you finally find something that works, you want to put all your effort into exploiting that plot of land.
But what often gets lost in the mix is the importance of focusing on the negative. This means looking closely at what’s not working in an effort to make it function better and uncover your product’s true value to its users. We’ve seen plenty of startups (including some of our own) with promising — but underperforming — products and services. After looking at hundreds of them, we’ve come to a startling conclusion: many new products and services fail not because of a lack of good stuff, but rather due to an overabundance of bad stuff.
Take Amazon, for example. In 2003, Amazon was aggressively trying to grow its e-commerce business in all sectors. They realized however that there were a lot of problems leading to high customer…
