How to achieve PMF without rolling out an MVP?
The question describes what I'm struggling with. If you have got an idea, then user interviews/competitor analysis are the only things that you evaluate. Can anyone share their thoughts on the same?
The question describes what I'm struggling with. If you have got an idea, then user interviews/competitor analysis are the only things that you evaluate. Can anyone share their thoughts on the same?
I don't think it's possible to find product market fit without a product. You can validate your idea without a product, but PMF is another beast.
Hey @jimbisenius, how do you validate your idea without a product?
Put up a landing page with a Stripe checkout link, and try to pre-sell your idea
Hmmmm... Forgive my nativity but some of these concepts sound strange to me. If you put out a Stripe checkout link without a real product, won't you come as "fooling" or duping your customers? How does this really work?
No worries - great question!
The goal is not to fraudulently sell a product that does not exist to a customer, but rather to find a customer who is willing to pay for something that knowingly does not exist yet.
If you can't find someone with a big enough problem to pay for a solution before it exists, your problem is probably not worth solving.
Thanks for your help @jimbisenius. Now this sounds more insightful. Practically, does this mean I somehow add some kind of awareness for the buyer to know the product does not exist (yet) before asking them to make a purchase?
You can make a landing page as if it exists, and then on your "Buy now" button, redirect them to a waitlist page that says something like "You're here a bit early. We're not ready yet, but fill out our form below to reserve your spot on our waitlist!", and then link them to a Stripe Checkout link which is clearly listed as "WAITLIST" or "RESERVATION".
For my last startup, I charged a one-month membership fee ($3) to reserve a user's spot on our waitlist.
Wow, wow, wow. Wished I could bookmark this. It is so insightful. Thanks for sharing! I'll have to find a way to put this where I can easily reference it. It's a life lesson. Thank you again.
I've written a post yesterday answering this exact question but it didn't receive even one upvote. Not sure if I am doing something wrong (offtopic, maybe someone can explain to me if I did something that makes my post invisible or something).
Anyways, here's my indiehackers post answering most of your question.
Hey Bengin,
You ain't doing anything wrong per se. It's just a bit random sometimes what gets picked up and what gets ignored.
I've posted things that have got ignored then posted the same topic a few weeks later and its become wildly popular.
Keep going
Thanks, I also didn't want to put it as an attention seeking "why not me".
I was just wondering cause I rather post a few longer, more in-depth posts instead of posting many smaller posts hoping for one of the many smaller posts to get attention, that's why I was wondering.
Thanks for your explanation :)
No worries. It's the same with LinkedIn, Twitter etc. :-) some hit, some miss
Sorry this didn't get the recognition it deserved. It's an informative post and I did check out validate.run. I think it's a good idea. Solves a very specific problem. Will consider it when validating/starting out my next project..
Thanks Elijah :D I don't necessarily think it "deserves" something, I was just wondering why some posts that are barely a link go viral while posts that other users wrote that are reaaaally in-depth and helpful just won't. Was confusing.
Also if you try Validate out at some point, be sure to tell me what worked and what still doesn't feel alright :)
Hi, I checked your post. It's quite informative.
Here's what I think you can do to maximize the visibility & engagement of your future posts:
Success requires risk. I understand your desire to minimize the risk, but it has a limit where you've got to put the time and money and do something to test your idea.
You've got to build a product to get to a "product" market fit. It may not be an easy task, but if it was that easy many people would have likely just done it.
No, that's not possible. Even if you have an MVP, you usually have to talk to many users until you find product-market fit. I think what you need to do is ask people how to better validate the idea, which includes a fake product or screenshots of your product that doesn't exist. In my case, before creating the MVP, I made two videos of the product to validate the idea and observed people's reactions and click rates.
Honestly, I have read a lot of ways to validate an idea without a product, but finding a PMF it's different.
May be, if you already have a community, pre-sell something to them? It would be a way to validate a PMF without a MVP? It's just an idea, I don't know if I am right
It's "Product" Market Fit, so by definition product is necessary.
But if you are familiar with Alberto Savioa's pretotyping technique, you have plenty methods to check if the user actually has that certain problem you're trying to solve. Check it out!
MVPs are so small that you barely notice they've "rolled out" at all. MVPs should work in a matter of days not months. It's called Value Innovation in the book UX Strategy by Jamie Levy. Where by reducing the number of features into a MVP we can charge less. While offering the single missing feature the market does NOT have we find PMF. Comp analysis tells you what not to do, not what to do. User Interviews tells you what problem people share, not how to solve it. I imagine if you listen to peoples problems you'll likely come up with a variety of solutions. Instead of packaging it all up in to an "all in one" fallacy, try solving the problem as a service first. Then begin to work your way from service to automated overtime.
Building an MVP is a critical step in achieving product-market fit. It's the only way to receive authentic user feedback, which will help you shape your product's future direction. Launching an MVP provides you with valuable insights that you simply won't get otherwise. By not building an MVP, you risk creating a product that doesn't meet your users' needs and ultimately fails. I speak from experience when I say that building an MVP is a must-do step. You'll learn so much about your users and how they engage with your product. It will open your eyes to new use cases, markets, and opportunities you may never have considered. So, always prioritize launching an MVP on your path to PMF.
I strongly think that yes, interviews or brainstorming sessions with your potential clients are very useful but it doesn't mean that you will get PMF. You can have more advanced levels of commitment by creating a landing page or doing a product hunt launch but until someone does not actually pay you won't know PMF.
recently I launched my side project plugindragon it is a website where you can download envato elements at the lower price, the idea behind this website is when you create an account in https://plugindragon.com it will automatically create a common account in envato with someone who already has an account in plugindragon and has no account partner. If you have any tips on how to improve please don't hesitate to leave a feedback
I don' think you can. Its right in the name 'product market fit'. Your goal is to pre-identify a fit, but really it's just a best guess until you have the product half of it in place.
My recommendation is to truly dig down on what an MVP is. If your product idea is some new approach to a problem, just spend a few days trying to build the approach, not weeks, months or years. Do not build fancy marketing, do not build a fancy website, do not spend time on branding etc. This can all be done iteratively. You can fake most of this stuff by interacting human to human to build more data points for PMF.
Can you clarify your question a little?
The headline speaks to PMF. This is something that you need to measure only after you've launched a product. There are a few ways to measure it, but it can't be achieved without a product.
Your body text talks a little bit more about idea validation, so I'm a tad confused by your question.
Even if you find a perfect solution to a perfect problem, there is always a product risk. Can you build the product that you have got the validations for. There might be a way to increase the odds that you will find PMF, but it’s probably not possible to get PMF without the actual product.
I don't know if there's any one way to realize PMF. Even the best ideas have to iterate multiple times on a product , while incorporating user feedback to get to PMF. I think it's possible to validate an idea without a tangible product but I don't know if PMF can be reached without some version of it.
I’m a big fan of Rob Walling, check out his YouTube channel. He validated all his ideas with a simple landing page before building anything complex.
Does he send paid traffic to target some conversion rate for proof of concept? I'd be curious what people would consider good CR for PMF.
I also wonder about getting the targeting right with that approach. Could spend quite a bit getting thr right ad audience?
I don’t think he does paid ads at that point. Part of the validation process is testing whether you can reach your target audience in a cost effective way. Personally I tend to avoid ideas where I don’t know how to reach my first ten customers without paid ads.
That makes a lot of sense actually. Thanks for your insight.
Just sell the thing. Who do you think the buyers are for the idea, where will you find them? Find them and attempt to sell them before anything is built. Once they start saying no, you'll find out why. If they're willing to slap down a few bucks (relative to the price) then there you go. 10 people paying $100 towards a $1,000 thing is so much better than 100 people saying a thing is "cool" and they'd be "interested" once it is "ready" is not much of anything, IMO. And, this might be 100% wrong for you (though it has been my startup template since 1989) Good luck.
I think we will never know. Success in startups is very hard to predict and even PMF is probably not a metric sometimes. Go with your gut!
Copy existing idea?
Hey,
PMF is a trap truth be told.
You don't need it. Here's a popular post I wrote about it quite a well back on here - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-this-startup-lost-2-million-and-how-to-avoid-the-same-fate-b0b2b0c9e7
I read your post. It seems that quest never found PMF, so wouldn't that emphasize OP's point/desire for it? Curious what your take is.
Hey Daniel,
Thanks for the reply.
So, most startups already have PMF - they already have a product that the market is willing to pay money for. Very few startups are creating something brand-new that has never been seen before. There is almost always existing demand.
The problem is that they don't realize this. They erroneously think that the reason that they aren't growing is because they don't have PMF.
But the truth is that they are not growing because they are selling only their product which is an ineffective growth strategy.
They kind of end up in a dog chasing its own tail situation - burning time and money without ever addressing the real issue that they aren't growing (using an ineffective growth strategy).
Hope that makes sense?
Best
Chris
Yeah I reckon you can be confident of product market fit for a product you haven't developed yet. However I'd say you haven't really achieved it until you actually build the product.
This is really interesting. I always wonder about the MVP method vs what you hear about - throw up a landing page and see if it converts. Perhaps the landing page is an MVP of sorts.. 🤔
Exactly. We end up burning cash to get the MVP rolled out. Yes, there are a couple of no-code apps out there, but even they have their limitations. What if they can't be used for the MVP
There is also an important point that market has to be tested. In order to test MVP would be necessary. The critical point in my opinion is speed and doing the minimum required to see the market response and then investing more heavily if there seems to be a chance of success. The right amount of balance seems key to me.
Market behavior is often not predictable.