Still Looking for Product Market Fit - When To Stop?
Hey everyone,
I've spent a few weeks trying to find product market fit and wondering when enough is enough, how many variations of an idea is enough before stopping and moving along to the next idea? What's best practice on this matter? Is there a tool that you can use to validate your idea with ease?
You've reached product market fit when you have enough paying customers, and low churn. PMF includes pricing.
It could easily take years.
EDIT:
I really like this graph: https://image.slidesharecdn.com/leananalyticstudygroupch5ch6-140317050553-phpapp02/95/lean-analytic-study-group-ch5ch6-9-638.jpg?cb=1395033012
You reached product market fit when you have solved acquisition and activation (people like your value proposition, sign up, use your product and happily pay you), and you are starting to think about retention and growth
Thanks for the feedback I appreciate it! Yea I think we may have to change our pricing plan to be more affordable.
If I've mischaracterized your current position, I apologize in advance. I assume though, if you are "weeks" in as opposed to "months" or longer you're still working on product-solution fit.
This is important as metrics and actions associated with finding fit at these stages will be different. If you're confident that your solution is well suited to solving the problem that you've confirmed is real and monetizable then I guess I'd be curious as to how you're measuring engagement and with what frequency you're measuring?
Thanks for this! So we've been testing out the waters for about 2 months now and we've been dancing around different variations / end users who could potentially use our solution but it hasn't been crystal clear who our ultimate end user is, we know of different segments who could use it but still not entirely sure which one is best. I'm a first time founder so not sure what an appropriate amount of time is to spend on this before moving on.
I see - so it sounds like a more important metric than "time spent" is "people talked to".
If it isn't crystal clear who your end user is then it's going to be difficult to achieve product market fit. This is usually best addressed by engaging with the people you think might use your product because you know they have a problem.
If you understand the problem then you're positioning yourself better to build a viable solution that you can, well, make them pay for. Otherwise you've built a solution and now you're looking for a problem where it fits.
So what's your story? What are you building?
It's only been a few weeks and you've iterated multiple times? Perhaps you're changing too much too fast. You need to talk to your customers. Is the product meeting their needs?
I don't know if I should say iterated the business but the way we are selling it, perhaps that's the difference I should of specified! Product is still the same but the way we market it is different.
Yeah, even with marketing, it takes a while to see or understand results. it's all about slow incremental changes. Don't get caught up in the hype.
Thanks I appreciate it! Gotta love the support network we got on indiehackers! Saw your company by the way looks neat haha
aw thanks!
If you find a definitive answer to this, let me know. Until then, how many possible customers have you spoken to?
Well we have 80 people who signed up for our platform in the last few months but not sure how many are active users or not. Also they are mostly on our free plan. I think the idea has potential but there are too many use cases that I think we are spreading ourselves too thin and not addressing one niche in particular.
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Not sure to be honest, just general feedback from users, I guess if people love the idea from the get go it's a good sign but if it's just meh to them then not good enough!
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Thanks for sharing the article makes total sense, some things need time and if I mess with it all the time it's not doing me any good, especially when I have consistent new users for the product.