On Product-Market Fit
My three lenses
Hey all!
Huge news - the first PMF Camp was awesome (65% of founders said it was the #1 thing they’ve ever done for their startup). So… I’m about to launch the next version, and am working to make it 10x better than the first!
More info is at PMFCamp.com. I would love your help with the launch! Here are 3 concrete ways you can help:
Apply for the camp if you’re interested! I’m capping the number of attendees, so please apply soon + email me at rob@reframeb2b.com if you have questions.
Share pmfcamp.com with any founder communities you’re in! Random founder Slack groups, etc. to help get the word out.
Repost my LinkedIn announcements next week! Help spread the word and save founders from pre-PMF hell.
Today, I’m writing about Product-Market Fit - and three lenses for thinking about PMF that might be helpful for you.
“The only thing that matters” (that nobody understands)
You’re not crazy. Despite the consensus that PMF is “the only thing that matters” for startups…
There’s no clear definition for PMF besides, “you’ll know when you have it”
Nothing in the startup community is focused EXCLUSIVELY on PMF
All the advice out there is either pure theory (not helpful), pure tactics (not enough), or historical fiction (aka: every startup story)
So we’re all out here scratching our heads hearing, “do things that don’t scale”, and thinking - uh, so WTF do I actually do?
Or we see something like the viral Superhuman article on PMF and think - uh ok but that’s nothing like my business, what’s the theory here?
Again - you’re not crazy. The startup community is undefeated in failing founders.
This is why I am obsessed with product-market fit. I find it endlessly fascinating, challenging, and criminally underexplored.
Here’s how I think about PMF, and what it means for founders (and you specifically).
The Surface Lens: Elements of PMF
PMF is, on the surface, quite simple once you have it. You just need three things:
One kind of customer (what I call, “demand”)
Buying what you sell (what I call, “supply”)
And a way to repeat this (what I call, “distribution”)
This doesn’t require a lot of moving parts, a big team, or a huge budget. Example: That guy from Retention.com, for example, just did outbound email to one kind of Shopify store with one sales rep for one product pricing tier. One rep, one approach, and one offering got the company to $10M ARR.
Here’s where you get wrecked:
What’s most important? DEMAND. It’s also the thing we least understand. We do rational-sounding customer research. Then we do shitty “customer discovery” in hopes that by mainlining the Mom Test we’ll be able to understand customers. We spearfish for pain points. This is LARPing.
In B2B, demand is best expressed as: “Your prospective customer has a goal / project that’s on their critical path.” Understand this goal/project & how they’re thinking about their options for accomplishing it, and your product becomes intuitive. When you don’t - you’re crushed under infinite optionality and never-ending pre-PMF purgatory. You speak in a different language to our customers, which means you never have a chance of finding PMF.
Unfortunately for everyone’s sanity, everything in the startup world starts from the perspective of SUPPLY (our product, and their pain points as they relate to our product). This is true of Lean Startup, High-Output Management, and nearly every other business book that gets recommended to founders.
The Deeper Lens: Them buying vs. us selling
The real test of product-market fit is based on effort. That is: When a deal is closed-won, is it because customers buy or because you sell? Are you pushing, or are they pulling? (And obviously, do they keep buying - aka not churn and/or upsell and/or refer others?)
Nailing this is an art form. You ask yourself weird questions like:
“What were they REALLY trying to buy?”
“They said they wanted X… what if we gave them the OPPOSITE of X?”
“Do they actually want less? Do they want to pay more?”
“What if we sold something totally different?”
“Well, they hate us now. Should we lean into that?”
“Should we add more friction?”
As you do this, you see into your buyers’ souls as you find a way to uniquely serve them - through your product & GTM & everything else about your business.
And as a result, more and more of the energy comes from them buying rather than you selling.
As you might infer, this work is never done. I talk to founders with $1m - $50m ARR and they STILL don’t feel like they’ve nailed it. Many of them stray from PMF as their companies grow — traditional scaling, GTM, & product playbooks only make sustaining PMF harder.
The Meta Lens: GTM unfolds PMF
There are people who claim they have “the 21 steps to Product-Market Fit.” They give you full confidence you’re on the right path, while you drive at full speed into a brick wall.
As Charlie Munger said, “Every great business is great in their own way.”
Which is to say: There’s no one path to greatness, as there is no one path to product-market fit.
It kinda works like this: You learn something, uncover some insight. It might be on the demand-side, or on the supply-side, or on the distribution-side. And that insight “unlocks” some other insight. And this continues, until you have a business that’s uniquely itself (where buyers buy rather than you sell, of course).
These insights aren’t predictable. In my experience they often emerge as you work alongside customers & prospects.
Sometimes they hit you in the head: Nearly every customer I onboarded would tell me, “I don’t want to pay for employee recruitment, I want to pay to retain the employees I already have!” (Eventually, I actually listened.)
Or these insights happen as a result of painful churn. Or awkward sales conversations. Or customers buying in one call, and you’re not sure why.
The point: Product-market fit unfolds over time. And it unfolds as you work hand-in-hand with customers. It is unknowable ex ante (yes, even through one round of customer research). So: Sell & deliver something that’s kinda right, to earn the insights that get you closer & closer to PMF.
Stay sane,
Rob