The five levels of product-market fit

And other nonsense

Random Thing #1:

“I don’t believe in measuring things or spreadsheets… I think almost all measurement (aside from top-line ARR) is complete garbage and leads to bad long-term decision making in favor of optimizing in the short term for whatever metric you’re going for.” - Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com

(My sense - we should all be doing more of this vs. “measuring everything” + “OKRs”)

Random Thing #2:

PMF Camp Week 1 of 3 is down. The good news: I can *feel* PMF Camp becoming THE thing every B2B founder needs to go through. The bad news: True to form, I haven’t been outside yet this week.

Main Thing:

This week, I was talking to the awesome founders of Sparkwise, Vince + Romain.

They mentioned that they “have a really high bar for Product-Market Fit.” Everyone internally knows what their definition of PMF is. Vince & Romain have reinforced it through multiple presentations and offsites. And nobody doubts that it’s the most important thing - or that it’s really damn hard.

My take: This “high bar for PMF” is one of the main reasons they’ve been so focused… and why they’re making so much progress.

I’ve noticed very few founders have a solid definition of PMF. Or, perhaps more useful - a checklist for PMF that’s more concrete than “you’ll know it when you have it.”

So here’s a very simple PMF checklist. If you don’t have ALL of these things, then you don’t have PMF. You’ll notice: they are sequential “levels,” and the bar is higher than you might expect from traditional PMF lore.

• Level 1: Two or more customers who LOVE you & renew/upgrade (your “Hell Yes” customers), because you provide some sort of unique value

• Level 2: A list of at least 100 potential customers (“perfect-fit prospects”) you can sell the EXACT same unique value to

• Level 3: A NEARLY-IDENTICAL process to sell the EXACT same thing to perfect-fit prospects that will turn each of them into “Hell Yes” customers

• Level 4: A way to consistently get sales meetings with perfect-fit prospects that can scale (or if not “sales meetings,” then trials, etc.)

• Level 5: Customers do most of the effort in Level 3 + Level 4, because it’s such a “Hell Yes” for them

What level is YOUR business at?

When I was a founder, I got close to level 1 and said, “PMF baby!!!! Let’s scale this bad boy!!!” And that led to years of suffering, putting my soul through a wood chipper. Avoid that fate for your own sake.

It is 1,000% better to have a tighter definition of PMF than to go all loosey-goosey on the only thing that matters.

-Rob

PS - for another day - as things in the market change (competitors, market conditions, etc.), you often have to go back to level 1 and reframe, reframe, reframe.