How to find product market fit (part 2)

In Part 1 we talked about what product market fit was and why it's so hard for indie hackers to find it. Now let's dive into a method for finding PMF that does work for indies.

Let’s say we’re trying to find PMF for an imagined voice activated calculator app. I don’t know if it’s a real thing, but it’s good enough for our thought experiment.

This calculator is an amazing technical achievement. It has accurate voice recognition even in noisy environments, it supports multiple accents, it can do both simple and very complex calculations and it reads out the results in a crystal clear voice. Months of meticulous design, coding and AI model training have gone into it. Everyone we show it to is duly impressed. They say things like “I’m sure lots of people would want this” and “That would have been awesome for me in college” but nobody’s is buying - even after we drop our price to $5 lifetime license with a 90-day trial period.

We obviously don’t have product market fit yet. But we also haven’t targeted our calculator to any particular group of people. Like any other team of excited developers, we believe that this calculator is going to be useful to anybody who needs to calculate anything. From kids in elementary school to college students, from builders to bakers, from structural engineers to soccer moms. This is going to take over the world of calculation and have thousands of usecases and millions of users.

While we may have the best thing since sliced bread on our hands, people don’t know about it yet and can’t see all the possibilities that we can. And we don’t have the money to put up sexy half-time ads and huge billboards to get through to a million people.

Our only alternative is to focus, find a small niche with a amazing fit and establish a beachhead. Once we have a good hold on a well defined niche, we'll be able to expand to other niches and eventually take over the world (muhahaha! 😈).

A perfect early stage niche for a bootstrapped product needs a few things:

1. People in the niche need to have the problem we're trying to solve, be aware of it and be actively looking for a solution.
2. The niche needs to be large enough to sustain the business. 100 people worldwide is usually too small, 1 million is usually too large. 5 to 20 thousand people is usually the sweet spot.
3. We need to be able to find these people in sufficient quantities, say 100 at a time. Maybe they follow certain accounts on Twitter, maybe they are on a particular Discord server or maybe they go to the same church. If we can’t find them in bulk, we won’t be able to talk to them, and if we can’t talk to them, we won’t be able to figure out how they think and what they need.
4. These people need to have money and the willingness to spend it. I once spent 6 months building a course for building consistent habits, but my niche turned out to be poor students from India and Pakistan. I had 10k karma on Reddit to show for it, but exactly $0 in revenue. Not good.

In order to find the right niche for our voice activated calculator, we first need to figure out exactly what it can do and why that matters. Copywriters call it the feature/benefit analysis. We start by listing the features of the product (what it does) and then figure out the benefits each feature has for our potential users (why that matters).

Let’s start with the (a very partial) list of features:

• It’s a phone app
• It’s voice activated
• It works with various accents
• It works in noisy environments
• It supports decimals and fractions

It can be easy for us builders to confuse features with benefits since the benefits are so obvious to us. It’s a phone app, which means it’s always with you and you can use it on the go. The former is a feature, the latter is a benefit but the translation happens so quickly in our minds we don’t even notice it. Finding product market fit requires that we slow down that process and pay attention to it.

With that in mind, let’s figure out the benefits for each of those features:

It’s a phone app

• it’s always with you
• you can use it away from your desk / office
• you can use it on the go, in your car and on a job site

It’s voice activated

• you can use it if your hands are busy or dirty
• you can use it if you’re holding something heavy or slippery
• you can use it if you’re handicapped or injured and can’t use your hands

It works with various accents

• you can use it whether your American, Irish, Australian or Indian
• you can use it if English is your second or even third language
• you can use it if you have a speech impediment

It works in noisy environments

• you can use it on a construction site
• you can use it under fire
• you can use it in a busy kitchen

It supports decimals and fractions

• you can use it with imperial units (for e.g. building and baking in the US)
• you can use it with metric units (for e.g. building and baking in Europe)

The full list of features and benefits for our voice activated calculator is going to be much longer. Any product worth its salt is going to have dozens of features large and small as well as benefits for each feature.

But this is a good start. Can you see how these benefits are pointing at some unexpected use cases? I’m seeing carpenteres, soldiers, sanitation workers, bakers, surgeons, recovering patients and weightlifters as possible people to explore here. I’m also seeing migrant workers in English speaking countries, as well as Americans working on construction projects in the rest of the world.

The trap here is to think that our little calculator can fit all these people equally well. But that's not entirely true, is it? A rugged military ballistics calculator that works on a locked down milspec mobile device is going to be very different from a baker's voice activated unit converter for their personal iPhone. The basic tech is the same, but the fit will be different.

These are a lot of niches to explore here. But where do we start? Which one of those niches will have people eager to use our calculator, have the money to pay for it, and the inclination to talk about it with other people?

The answer is prioritization and experimentation.

And we'll explore that in depth in the next part.

I write a bunch about finding PMF and early paying customers on Twitter @finereli, come follow me there and DM me if you need help.