Here’s Marc Andreesen’s take in the original article which coined the term “product-market fit”:
The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.Lots of startups fail before product/market fit ever happens.My contention, in fact, is that they fail because they never get to product/market fit.
He goes on to say that you can pretty much ignore everything else until you have product market fit, because that’s the only thing that matters to the business.
up and to the right: how we like our curves
Once you genuinely have product market fit, you stop working on it. So there is no balance.
Or to be even more precise: first get product market fit. Then work on scaling. Any time you spend on trying to scale a product that doesn’t have product market fit is kind of a waste of time.
The style of working also changes once you begin to scale. For example, Brian Chesky of AirBnb says:
At scale, you have to learn how to move from intuition to data. When you are first starting a company — data is not the most important thing. Pre-product market fit — data wasn’t important for us — it was much more about the person-to person interactions with customers.
Be ready for a totally different challenge once you begin to scale. But it doesn’t make sense to prepare for it or start early, because you might be scaling a product turd. Or not have the right team. Just because it might be tempting to jump to scaling, heading to the quantitative stage before you have exactly the right product for your market is just premature optimization. And a waste of resources—(your) time.
One of my natural tendencies as a creator is to create broccoli products. Namely, products which I think people should consume, and which are good for them, but which they don’t want to consume. Imagine a loud voice in your head saying “Eat your broccoli”. Even though I initially felt queasy about foisting my sense of obligation on others, now I realize broccoli products are best placed placed further down the customer journey. Existing customers will be more open-at that point-to engaging with you. And you earn the satisfaction of truly serving your customers.
At first, I thought landing page testing served to filter out my broccoli product ideas. This is what landing page testing is designed to do: optimize a single step in a journey. If each step is optimized, then the whole system is optimized. Using real data about actual preferences, not declared or imagined ones. But I’m beginning to realize that isn’t necessarily true in this case.
A big factor in successful journey design is knowing where to put which piece. The order of operations. Remember grade school arithmetic, where 2+3*4 wasn’t the same as 3+2*4. All the same parts. And the same operations. But they give a different outcome.
Lead with something that addresses an immediate pain point. Then fully solve the (small) problem for them. Then upsell them on broccoli. Or something else. But at least you have their attention and you’ve earned your credibility, rather than trying flash in the pan trickery to extract their credit card details.
Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.
The initial offer can’t be a “should have” but a “must have”–in their opinion. And it needs to address a current issue the prospect is actually having. Without this, your front-end conversion will be a lot lower than it could be. But after that, you have a lot more leeway.
We recently watched a movie from 2004 called Shattered Glass, a movie about about Stephen Glass. He was a journalist who made up stories in the nineties, and passed them off as fact. At the time, he worked for the New Republic, a well-known and influential magazine. Most of the staff were recent grads trying to make a name for themselves, so they didn’t get paid much, but they partied hard. Somehow he circumnavigated their fact checking process, and managed to blag his way into story after story. Until his editor caught wind of what was going on…
Most journalism is based on improving what we already know, by building on what we already know. You need to use external inputs as data points to your own investigation. In school before the internet existed, there was a lot of emphasis on minimizing plagiarism. Cite your sources. Make it clear what is your thinking and what you got from somewhere else.
Robustness
At a high level, the same is true of the scientific process. Academics cite other papers, to then extend the state of the art with their own thoughts, data, and investigations. Cite your sources. And document your experience. With popular approaches like Lean Startup, the scientific method has been simplified into experiment-based entrepreneurship.
In both cases, this is about robustness and reliability of information. If we can’t trust what we see and hear from others, it undermines most of the “systems” in society. Media. Political systems. Business. Education. Research.
Check your source’s credentials
I bring this up because there is a flavor of advice and advisors in the entrepreneurial world who just repeat smart sounding soundbites from others. But not necessarily based on their own experiences. They are “plagiarizing” from an intellectual perspective. Which seems like it’s not that big of a deal. It’s academic. A white lie. In business, it’s not that important to credit others, especially in marketing material, right?
Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.
More importantly, though, advice plagiarizers are not able to go deeper and explain the logic and trade-offs which are relevant. They only Know; they can’t Do. They get the dopamine rush of looking smart, without needing to actually do their own work. In short, they benefit themselves without necessarily benefiting their advice takers. Or worse, harming their advice takers by giving inappropriate or irrelevant advice, causing additional problems if followed.
The real issue here isn’t plagiarism; it’s pretending you are saying something from experience when you haven’t earned the right to do so.
There was an article about the bullshit industrial complex a few years ago, which is what really pointed out how important this is. If everyone is just endlessly repeating advice they hear somewhere else (and often passing it off as their own) then we pretty much have a big echo chamber. No one is doing any original thinking or work or testing from direct experience. It’s all just received wisdom, which is just naff.
Dog-fooding
In contrast, we have dog-fooding. Dog-fooding is a hard concept to swallow. [pun intended] My sister is actually an expert in dog food as a veterinarian, but that’s not really what i’m referring to.
“Around these parts we eat our own dog food”
First of all, it’s about actually taking your own advice. There are a lot of things I want to try out in my own business, and that sound good, but I haven’t yet. So I don’t mention them to clients.
About to start a greenfield project?
Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.
And then only passing on the advice, if it benefits the advice taker. This s a form of integrity. And it’s a high bar to clear, before you give or sell advice. Like in professional hockey. They count an “assist” only if someone else if they score a goal. And it’s nice they track assists too for pro players.
assists only count if someone else scores a goal
In this case, dog-fooding refers to keeping the high bar of only recommending things I’ve tried myself. Ideally this would be something I’ve been successful with. If I haven’t had great success at something, I think it’s my duty to say that too.
I know what it feels like to get advice from people, who have no direct experience with what they are advising. They are just repeating what they heard or read elsewhere. So why would I knowingly do the same to people who I want to help-in theory?
Examples
For example, I thought I had all the answers about what kids should and shouldn’t do and how they should behave–before becoming a dad. I would spout my opinions on unsuspecting parents.
Things change. It’s surprising how quickly.
I realized how wrong I was, once I became a dad. I am still wrong about parenting frequently. Now if I do say anything about parenting, I try to reference a specific incident which backs up exactly why I think so. And give the context. All of this means that whoever gets the advice can decide for themselves if they want to take it.
It’s the same for “birthing” new products. I’ve done this enough times in enough variations, that I can usually find some kind of example of either having done it myself or having worked though a problem with a mentee. Then I feel ready to give advice. If I can’t give advice, I offer hands on hands on help if appropriate and I have the bandwidth.
All in all, this isn’t hard. It just requires paying attention.
Key Takeaways
Check your source credibility, before you take on information. Particularly in your business.
There is a massive volume of raw data being produced every day, with much of it being irrelevant, false, or biased based on incentives of the advice giver.
Try to make it clear when you are giving advice from experience and when you aren’t
And cite your sources, even though your high-school english teacher isn’t checking, because society depends on it.
There are a number of ways to think about designing a business. There is the traditional business plan, which is defined up front and then used as an accountability mechanism. There is the business model canvas, where things are mapped out and tested one by one, until you get to a decent and self-sustaining business.
The Business Model Canvas as way to articulate a business model
And then most recently, Megan Macedo pointed out that business forms are useful as business prototyping tools. In other words, in what form does your business show up? What structure does it have? And what is the resulting customer experience? This is largely defined by setting certain boundaries and then converging on something specific.
Creative Forms
The original source of this “WhatIf” was her own creative process. The benefits of creative form are easiest to understand by starting there.
For example, the sonnet. 14 lines. Iambic pentameter. Like it, love it, or despise it, it is a very particular structure. And it has been used to get across different types of messages: love, coming of age, nature. The form was the same, but with very different messages, reader experiences, and external outcomes.
Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.
Or the Haiku. Also a clear structure of 5-7-5. Used for a large variety of messages.
Novels and non-fiction books have a form, too. And some are better than others. Frameworks like Story Grid help authors create a structure or form that feels intuitive. Or authors like John McPhee literally map out a novel’s structure visually before writing it–as part of the creative process.
Or song lyrics. Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus etc.
From a business perspective, your key business slogan could live in any of the above forms. A podcast intro. A business novel like the Goal. Probably even a sonnet if you gave it a proper shot.
You can choose to broadcast a message across in any of the above forms. And they could work, or not. In other words, the form doesn’t tie down the message to anything in particular, but as the delivery mechanism–it’s part of the message. And part of the audience experience.
Physical Forms
Or physical forms, to get a bit more concrete. For example, at the moment, the main form my business exists in is that of my book, Launch Tomorrow. In fact, it is only sold at the moment in electronic form. So the “physical form” is that of a kindle. That is the main way customers experience Launch Tomorrow.
About to start a greenfield project?
Have Launch Tomorrow run an in-house "riskiest assumption workshop". Remote delivery options also available. Discover where to prioritize your validation efforts, to get to market fast.
Consulting is another form Launch Tomorrow exists in. At the moment, consulting is remote only for reasons outside of my control. So the physical form there is a computer screen and headphones.
Create an explainer video for your complicated new product.
Make sure your audience understands it, without being overwhelmed by technical details.
These are physical objects that structure the business, without really tying down the “content” of the business.
Each of these delivery vessels also imply a way of finding customers, and who those customers are, and pricing structure, and all the rest of it. There are lot of assumptions that everyone has around any given physical object. So choosing a physical form piggy backs on those assumptions, and makes the experience more tactile.
Business Form
Megan Macedo tells a good story about Doug Sohn, who ran a gourmet hot dog stand in Chicago. He wanted to make sure that everyone had the experience of eating amazing food, even if it was a hot dog. He’d work long hours, charge low prices given the quality of what he was doing, and pretty quickly had a long line of customers at his stand.
He didn’t go for the big location scale-up, or turn his business into a franchise, or follow any other received wisdom around the restaurant business. He just did his thing.
He did write a book, as a passion project. He later opened up a second stand near the local Cubs baseball stadium. Probably due more to his wanting to be with the fans than purely a foot traffic (read:business logic) thing.
And then, one day after many years, he closed shop. He’d had enough. Just wanted to do something else.
We choose our own containment
The key message I found in Doug’s story is that we choose our own containment. And it can be liberating–a way to create something unique. It might not be the “go big or go broke” approach which VCs will expect you to take, as laid out Peter Thiel’s Zero To One. But it can be a lot more rewarding and fulfilling.
In Doug’s case, the business form was a hot dog stand. And he really played it out. until the end. Trying things which hot dog stand owners wouldn’t, like offering gourmet food. Thus becoming unique. And globally famous, since a lot of his customers were tourists who’d just come to have one of his hot dogs, sometimes even as repeat customers.
This story also shows how all of the traditional advice around business can be a type of containment. A form, in and of itself. One which some people will love, others will feel imprisoned by. And Doug knew himself enough to make sure that his successful business existed as an extension of his life, and not the other way around.
Isn’t is all artsy-fartsy clap trap?
You’re probably thinking that I’ve been in lockdown for too long by now.
From a traditional business lingo perspective, the form is the product. How something is productized. You need to accept design constraints to create it. And then turn it into a both a delivery mechanism. And ultimately, a customer experience.
Source: Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
In terms of software or technology, Geoffrey Moore’s Whole Product model shows how much more there is to “product” than just getting the technology bits and bytes to work. Of course, having a working technology is a necessary condition to reach early adopters. But as you start scaling the product up and out to the larger market, you will need all of the above to make the product usable and relevant. So that it “sticks” in the customer’s world.
Essentially, we are talking here about the form that a customer engages with it.
Is it a SaaS app?
Is there a community of power users in forums to help answer questions?
Is it available via the App Store?
Do you need a particular type of cable to get it work?
How do you configure it and apply it in your particular case?
These are all “form” decisions, in the context of a technology product. And notice that most of them don’t require deep engineering knowledge, even though they are super relevant to customers. If anything, they require a deep knowledge of customer needs.
Taking advantage of the momentum
Like Doug, we need to choose our own box, before starting to think “out of the box”. This is just as much a note to self, as anything. That simple act of choosing is paradoxically empowering.
Aligh Remotely, a book on remote team leadership
Taking my own advice, the form that I am exploring is that of audio, for my upcoming book Align Remotely. This is a book to share my experience in managing remote teams, which will hopefully come in handy during the lockdown (and whatever remote friendly regime we’ll have afterwards). I’ve spent close to a decade either participating in partially or fully remote teams as a software guy and author. And most recently, I ran a remote program for a client, with 3 sub-teams of around 30 people.
At the moment, I am starting to release it for free, chapter by chapter, on LeanPub. Or pay what you want, if you insist. Eventually, there will be a lower bound of the price; but it’s free for now.
From a “forms” perspective, if you grab a copy, you will get details of how to get the audio form of the same content.
