No market need - still #1 reason of startup failures

Hey,

Yes, I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I went on research mode lately and decided to study product to market fit. I think the first step is understanding some fundamental concepts before using tools.

Here, I'm going to share some of the best resources I came across recently.

#1. Ryan Levesque books \ courses

I found out that a guy called Ryan Levesque publishes one of the best resources on fining an excellent product to market fit. The guy wrote two books so far, and I recommend both of them. You can Google him and listen to all the podcasts, articles, YouTube videos. The guy is a direct-response marketer, and he's not very popular in the startup niche, but he has some exciting ideas.

#2. Brian Balfour article

Well, this is the guy who helped HubSpot grow tremendously. He published this article: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/hubspot-growth-framework-100m

It consists of a series of fundamental ideas, and somehow Brian maps out to journey to $100 M company. I found it pretty engaging.

#3. A talk on Y Combinator by the founder of Weebly

It's a brilliant talk. Product-to-market fit takes hard work, and it took Weebly quite the effort to achieve it.

Check out the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LNQxT9LvM0&t=2125s

When it comes to a step-by-step process or tools, it would highly depend on the stage of your project. It would highly depend if you have any audience, or starting from scratch.

If I was starting out I would do the following process:

Step #1:

You can find a clear step-by-step process in the book by Ryan Levesque called Ask. You can elaborate on the idea of the surveys, and developing strong customer avatars if you read a book by Dan Kennedy called Ultimate Sales Letter.

Step #2:

Create product hypothesis: what is your (MVP) product, what does it do, who is this for

Step #3:

Create a customer avatar: who is your perfect customer, dig deep...

Step #4:

Pitch your product to your perfect customer, sell it.

Step #5:

Evaluate & Reapeat.

Yes, I could write for hours... haha :)

I hope this helps!

Cheers,
Niko :)

I've used several methods to validate https://shreddo.io and the landing page needed many iterations. The objective right now is to determine the market need and if there is a market need, determine who is the first smallest audience.

Face to face interviews with people on my close network.

• Upsides: See the emotions real time. Brainstorm on ideas real time.
• Downsides: Can be biased. Also, face to face, I can explain them more if they didn't get the product first time. That is not the case when communicating with someone who judges your product by its landing page.

Online communities: pioneer.app & IndieHackers

• Upsides: Much more candid feedback.
• Downsides: Few people respond to follow up questions. Finding the appropriate audience may be hard.

Up until now I've determined people already using checklists in their daily routines are really interested in the product, so I iterated my landing page towards capturing that audience. May need more iterations though.

Maybe there are more online communities. Let me know!