3 lessons from zero to product-market-fit in 9 months

This is a newsletter I write to reflect… and counter startup myths and hacks peddled by “influencers” who prey on early founders.

This week I’m digging into the past 9 months - three lessons I’ve learned from finding product-market fit and scaling a business during the pandemic.

The pandemic killed our business

When the pandemic hit, our business went to zero. Our customers - commercial janitorial firms in big cities - didn’t need our software anymore. When everyone works from home, nobody needs to clean offices. So their revenues were down 50%+, and they were likely to stay down for at least the next year.

Of course, just when we were starting to figure out how to sell & deploy. Sigh.

Back to square one.

We had to figure out: (1) Who should we sell to? (2) What should we sell them?

Fast forward to today, and we are selling a new product to a niche we’d never served. We onboarded our first customer in this niche in early August 2020, and have expanded ~250x since then. Many of our customers are coming inbound and through referrals, sales cycles are insanely fast, and our pace is only speeding up.

And… this isn’t an industry where companies “just scale fast”.

We’ve caught lightning in a bottle. This is the closest I’ve ever been to experiencing product-market fit.

This is far from a victory lap, though. We’ve been insanely lucky. And we’re FAR from “out of the woods” - there’s a lot left to build & prove.

But if nothing else, the past ~9 months have taught me a few lessons I want to write down. I hope they’re helpful to you!

Lesson #1: Catch a wave

Selling is hard. It’s hard to convince someone to change when nothing in their world is pushing them to change. But when people are running facefirst into a new scary situation, it’s a lot easier to sell.

If you want to grow fast, you have to catch a wave: Find a group of people who are headed facefirst into a new situation and about to experience a new pain point.

Last week I wrote about designing products that are bought, not sold. It is about designing some part of your product as a response to a spiky pain your customers face.

To acquire customers fast, you design for the wave:

• A product that’s a clear response to a spiky, situational pain your customers face

• A bunch of people who are going experience that spiky, situational pain… ideally for the first time

You’re looking for a tour group going on a casual kayaking trip for beginners who don’t realize they’re going to run into Class 5 rapids.

Which means when evaluating new business opportunities, think from this starting point:

As [TREND] happens, more and more [TARGET NICHE BUYERS] will experience [SITUATION] which will cause [PAIN]; they will look for [PAINKILLER].

Lesson #2: Be meaningfully different

You see a wave coming. Great!

What do you do?

Design a product that’s meaningfully different in the eyes of your customers.

Duh. It seems obvious, self-evident. But being different is hard.

I submit as evidence: All startup websites look the same; Every product promises “simplicity”; hand-wavey responses to “why YOU vs. [an alternative]?”

It is easier to blow a lot of money acquiring customers with a “plain vanilla” message and a copycat product than it is to find a meaningful point of differentiation.

The latter creates value; the former creates an expensive, zero-sum, competitive land-grab.

Cool, so how do you build something that’s meaningfully different?

A few things we’ve done unintentionally, then intentionally exploited:

• Figured out what customers’ alternatives are and how they actually use these alternatives

• Designed around the new situation (see Lesson #1), not the old solutions

• Leveraged assets that others have ignored

• Done a bunch of research & experimentation (see Lesson #3)

• Talked with companies that COULD become “competitors” to figure out how we could be a complement

• Talked with enough customers until THEY could explain why were different in a few words, after we explained what we did in a few sentences

This is the creative step; it is magic when your brain looks for science.

I don’t believe it can be reduced to a framework or how-to guide. This requires walks, deep thought, inspiration. In my experience the solution boils down to something simple, usually inspired by a question out of left field like: “What if we didn’t care about X?” “What if the real value is Y?”

Above all, listen to good music. I prefer metal.

Lesson #3: Find what’s real, not what feels right.

We all lie, most of all to ourselves.

And so we build copycat products that we tell ourselves are different. We see ripples and imagine waves. We hear what we want to hear and see what we want to see.

The only thing that matters is customer behavior. The only thing that’s real is customer behavior. Words are distractions, lies, half-truths.

Do they pay you? What are they really buying? Do they use the product? Do they churn? Why?

This is real. Your job is to find what’s real.

When you are on a mission to find what’s real, you lean into the uncomfortable-but-necessary things like asking for money. Like selling, like asking questions that risk everyone thinking you’re a total idiot.

And you build differently when you can realistically appraise what you do and don’t know. You hack together no- or low-code solutions and rebuild them every few days until they’re right and only then (maybe) pave over with real engineering. You hire slowly. You structure your thinking, ask a lot of questions, and figure out where the real problems actually are.

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There’s more to write, but it is Saturday and I have stuff to do. I’d love to hear from you - was any of this helpful?

Rob