Product market fit isn't enough
I was reading this https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enough yesterday and it resonated with me.
Indiehackers are told that when you have PMF (solving a real problem) everything starts to magically work. And I'm feeling firsthand how that's not really true.
Wasn't familiar with Brian's work, but it definitely helped reading through that. One of the products I'm working on, unblokd.com, is built on a real, urgent problem - people get stuck learning to code.
I've got lots of good feedback with the MVP, so I've built the whole platform. I've got users signing up, and everybody seems to be praising both the idea and the execution. But it doesn't feel like it has pull yet. I've been spending the last month wondering why. And reading that, I basically knew that I have work to do on finding new channels to push it through. And maybe even do some heavy work on the model.
As someone focused on the build side, finding clear reasoning behind marketing and growth helps a lot because that always feels like an unknown.
Wanted to share the article with everybody, I think many of us are in the same position. I'm seeing lots of good products that don't get traction and I've always wondered if that's something that somebody looked into.
Hi Steph,
As you've discovered, PMF isn't really that important.
You can build a very successful business without PMF (HubSpot being a great example - even the founder said that the product sucked for the first few years. Didn't stop them building a passionate community and generating tens of millions in ARR at that point).
And, as you point out, you can have PMF and still not grow.
As such, PMF is a bit of a waste of time and a trap for me. You can spend a lot of time and money looking for it. And this, as I wrote in an article on here not too long ago (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-this-startup-lost-2-million-and-how-to-avoid-the-same-fate-b0b2b0c9e7) kills a lot of startups.
That's not to say that PMF never works. It clearly does. But its a lot of work, and is very expensive. The solution then? As I say in the aforementioned article, is to copy the strategy of businesses that have succeeded without PMF (like HubSpot). It's cheaper and easier to do. What's more, it will give you a skillset (being good at marketing) that you can take to any entrepreneurial endeavour you undertake in the future