Finding product / market fit before building products

I have been on the founding team of 3 very different startups;

Fluxible (now https://refalent.com/)
Joblift UK (https://joblift.co.uk/)
Chosen AI (https://chosen.ai/)

The three startups are now in very different places (one pivot, one series B, one acquisition).

Surprisingly the lessons I have learnt across the three projects have been incredibly consistent with the advice that is given in most start up blogs and books.

The main lesson being that all of these businesses went product first and determined product/market fit later. This is the expensive way round to do it and the biggest risk.

Most businesses can be sold before the real product needs to be built. Kickstarter's whole business model relies on this. The products are sold and the money raised is used to build them. Then the products are shipped a good while later.

This also works with many other products, even AI products. If the AI product is an intelligent education tool that writes essays based on a title and scanned revision notes then why not create a $5 website on Wix or Squarespace, buy some Google ads for $10 and then write the essay yourself based on the notes submitted if it sells?

You haven't spend more than $15, you've made $20 and you will get feedback on the quality of the product.

I'd recommend doing this more than once - the more feedback the better.

Another way to create cheap MVP products is to sell pdf or ExCel files like https://www.gradinterviewprep.com/ I am pretty sure any business that sells information or data can be tested using document downloads. The fundamental product will be the same but pdf's and Excel documents are the crude, ugly versions.

Once you know you have product market fit then you can scale.

And you will be able to scale with the revenue made from the MVPs you sold. This means you don't need to chase investment and give away large chunks of your million dollar idea.

If you do want to take investment then the positive revenue generation will be a massive tick in the investors mind.

And, even better, if your cheap MVP doesn't work then you've only cost yourself $15.