Product market fit

Marc Andreessen, describes product market fit as Market Pull:

when customers are banging down your doors, demanding your product and the happy to use a really crappy first version,

because the problem that they’re facing is so painful and that there are no good alternatives.

Y Combinator describes this as:

Your hair is on fire, the best solution is a bucket of water.

However, if somebody gave you a brick,

then you’ll use the brick, bang it against your head to put out the file because the problem is so painful.

A good resource to check out is the Product Market Fit Series by First Round Capital,

where you can read 20 first hand stories that detail the exact steps taken by unicorn companies like Air Table and Web Flow to reach product market fit and the pivots they made along the way.

The next thing to test and de-risk before you build the product is:

Will people buy it?

With ContactOut, we couldn’t actually get people to buy the product before we built it,

but we did manage to cold email, a lot of recruiters and have them sign up to a waitlist,

then we spent four weeks building a prototype and we were able to sell that,

more on that story later

Here’s some other examples of validating if people will buy your product:

Edrolo provides learning resources to high schools like recorded lectures, lesson plans and homework assignment templates.

They sold to schools using a PowerPoint presentation,

and closed thousands of dollars in business before they had any learning resources created.

Schools planned curriculum in advance for the following year, so they then had six months to go hire a team and create the learning videos.

Shaving brand Harry’s is another example where:

they had a pre-launch signup that they promoted via press releases and influencers on social media.

After people signed up, they would encourage them to invite their friends to get free product like shaving cream or an additional razor.

The budgeting and personal finance app Mint started as a possible finance blog,

where they talk about credit cards and budgeting and they managed to sign up a hundred thousand uses in six months.

You can read about the case study on Noah Kagan’s blog.

Another good example of validating terms of validating, how would I reach my customer

is the makeup brand live tinted, where they built a Instagram following of 250,000 before they launched any products.

Hence de-risking their acquisition strategy.

I’ll share our process for building product next part.