The simplest way to think about product-market fit
I've been looking for this description for 8+ years...
Oooookay, here it is. What I’ve been searching for the past 8+ years in startupland, and have never been able to find.
If you’ve been following my slow-moving mental unwinding, you know how frustrated I am with traditional startup “wisdom”, whether from the venture-backed or bootstrapped world. None of it works, because none of it clearly articulates what product-market fit is and how to find it!
If you don’t have a coherent mental model for product-market fit, nothing else matters. Seriously. Product-market fit is the ONLY thing that matters, and you should focus on PMF and nothing else. But how can you possibly do this if there’s no coherent way to think about PMF? How do you know what NOT to focus on?
We know what PMF, in theory, feels like. It feels like moving from “push” to “pull”, where you’re trying desperately to keep up with demand. Cool. That doesn’t tell me what to do, or what not to do. Worse, it leads me down the path to copy what “hip” startups do, which is obviously counterproductive.
I’ve articulated what’s minimum essential for PMF. If you’ve seen my 72-slide deck on PMF, it boils down to just 3 things:
One kind of customer (“demand”)
One thing you sell them (“supply”)
One way to connect demand and supply (“distribution”)
This framing is good. I believe it’s wildly helpful for founders - and I’ve used it to get 50+ startups un-stuck, and many to their first $1M ARR. But even with this framing, something’s missing. This minimum essential framing isn’t prescriptive - it doesn’t tell you exactly where to focus or what exactly matters.
Today’s framing for PMF does just that. It is the result of years of soul-grinding. Enjoy.
What is PMF?
PMF is the ability to replicate a customer case study.
That’s it.
The “customer case study” describes an end-to-end journey:
Why the customer needed to change
What options they considered, and why one option stood out from the others
What they chose & what success they achieved
How it worked (and what your product did to help them accomplish that success)
How they thought about price vs. value
How they got to success
When they knew they were going to be successful
This end-to-end journey is the atomic unit of your startup. The goal is simply to replicate this case study. When you do, you’ll be able to repeatedly get customers successful - the true measure of PMF, after all, is customer retention.
This should simplify your thinking about PMF and what matters - most importantly, what’s irrelevant.
More to come.
Love,
Rob