So How Do You Find Product/Market Fit

The idea is that by working with the market early on, you’re developing a product and business model that the market not only wants, but gets excited about and happily pays

The concept is fairly straight forward:

• Write down who you think your customer is.
• What you think their problem is.
• And how you propose to fix it.

Then write down all of your assumptions about the market and pick the riskiest. Decide how you’re going to test that assumption, and determine how many people saying “Yes, I have this problem” is necessary in order for your assumptions about the market to be valid.
Once you have that, find a couple of people within your market and start asking questions.
Trevor Owens, the founder of The Lean Startup Machine and Javelin shares how he used this process to find the right market and positioning to rent & sell scooters.
If you want to get a comprehensive example of how the validation board method works, you need to watch this video.

“Some companies achieve primary product market fit in one big bang. Most don’t, instead getting there through partial fits, a few false alarms, and a big dollop of perseverance.”

Why Do You Need Product/Market Fit

The concept is simple enough, but the question is, “Why.”
At a very basic level, these processes are designed to have some safeguards to ensure you won’t sink of time and money into building a store that nobody wants.

But beyond that, it’s to make sure you’re building a solid foundation on which to grow profitably and sustainability.
In Sean Ellis’s article titled “The Startup Pyramid” he emphasizes that product/market fit should be achieved before switching gears to growth.

Given that product/market fit is a fairly abstract concept, he also provides a metric to help gauge whether you’ve achieved it.

“In my experience, achieving product/market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be “very disappointed” without your product.”

For an ecommerce store, this would mean 4/10 paying customers saying they’d be very disappointed if your store did not exist.
He says you should be measuring this as early as possible, because it will significantly impact how you operate your business, and that until you reach this number pretty regularly, that it is critical you operate at a slow burn and focus on improving the percentage of customers who say they need you.
Sean also cautions against bringing in VP’s of Marketing & Sales to try and solve the problem, because ultimately they’re just going to cost you more money, and like I said earlier, even the best marketing in the world won’t help a sell a product nobody wants.

“Instead, you (the founders) should engage existing and target users to learn how to make your product a “must have.”

Sometimes it is as simple as highlighting a more compelling attribute of your product – but often it requires significant product revisions or possibly even hitting the restart button on your vision.”
This means talking to and collecting feedback from people as much as possible during different points the customer experience.

The Case for the Minimum Viable Product and Minimum Viable Distribution Channel

Let’s take a step back.

Another common challenge I see are when ecommerce founders have invested in having a ton of stock and warehouse space and other areas of their infrastructure, but no plan to move any of it.
In The Lean Startup, one of the core principles is to develop a minimum viable product based on validated market feedback, and sell in a way where you can get the maximum amount of learning with a minimal time investment.

success.