How did you reach Product-Market Fit?

In an ideal world, you'd have a good idea there was some kind of product fit before you even start building the product. Research, anecdotes, qualitative, quantitative, etc. Something to tell you it's worth pursuing.

But it's never that easy. Users are elusive, unreliable, and often don't know exactly what they want until they see it.

Having 100-300 users is a really good sweet spot for indie product makers to start refining product fit. It's enough users to weed out the edge case feedback and outliers, but not so many to where parsing through research and feedback is impossible. It's not easy work, but it's more fruitful than guessing who your audience is.

I work in a specific ecosystem, so everyone I'm marketing to has a baseline interest by default. From there, it's just a matter of getting enough feedback to narrow down the fit. Listen, learn, iterate, repeat. Pay attention to the specific language they use, it's a goldmine.

It's always hard to know if you've even reached product market fit because we're all sitting around thinking "This thing should definitely have more customers..." 😅

To be entirely honest, I just built Bear Blog for myself, and since I was the market, it fit. There happened to be others who had the same pain points.

Ah, yes, product-market fit ... the elusive holy grail of every startup lol.

Did you reach it when you get so many new customers, that you can't handle them anymore? Probably.

But what if you had a great product, customers love it, but growth is simply a bit slower, e.g. because the product simply is not viral? Is that still produt-market fit? Not sure. 🤔

"Product Market Fit" is a term that isn't super well defined. Y Combinator says it's something like

• "When growing your start up is no longest your biggest problem"
• "When you have so many customers you're struggling to support them"

I haven't reached that point yet, maybe I never will. I do have paying customers and some sort of growth. Here's a few things I learnt since launching.

1. Get people using it, even if you need to lose money running ads to get users. You need real users to improve the product.

2. Track a lot of the user actions, and analyse them to figure out where people are dropping off.

3. Talk to the users, call them up on the phone.

4. Monitor every crash in your application and fix those crashes. Crashes piss off your users.

The best way to get to PMF is to build in the already existing category with a painful problem that people are paying to solve.

I made this mistake myself and try to "build a new category". Even raised VC funding from Jason Calcanis. And failed. Now I believe picking a good market is half the battle. And that's why I research growing software trends for my newsletter. (categorysurfers.com)

Life as SME has both caused me to completely overthink PMF and move so far past where I needed to skate to that I lost valuable time. Biggest lessons i learned was to stop thinking like a SME and think more like the lowest common denominator, the largest slice of my target demographic, not the most mature. Oh and lots of listening. That said, I still struggle with not trying to outsmart the market and keep the concepts simple. Engineers are bad at simple.