product-market fit

“All of these things are things that are not writing code or talking to users. Which means, with a few exceptions that I'll try to note, you can ignore them until after you have product market fit.”

“Most of these things for most companies become important between months 12 and 24. But it's really more about stage than anything else. These are things that usually hit around 25 people, ah, and definitely post product market fit.”

“I'm not going to raise money until I have strong product market fit and I know what I'm doing.”

“The folks who do fundraise too early typically get into real trouble cause they never are able to get the product market fit.”

“Everything that's not working on your product and finding product market fit is a waste of time. Like that's the only thing that you should be doing.”

“If you can't find some niche that is absolutely like fanatic about your product then you likely don't have strong product market fit.”

“If you're building out, having teams that are working on like six, seven different projects, it's hard to figure out that, that really strong product market fit, which is what most startups fail.”

“Stripping it down for me again, I think about it from a consumer standpoint, product market fit has to do with the fact that you're solving their problem. You're solving their problem, the friction that they experience in their lives so well, so completely tha…”

“Number one, there's only one thing that matters. Think about that startup journey from idea to growth stage. Focus only on the thing that gets you to that next stage. Don't focus on anything else. Don't go to conferences. Don't like write blog posts. Don't rea…”

“It is usually a lot harder to build a product that a lot of people really, really want than it is to figure out how to make money from that product.”

“Your NPS, some people say 40, I think about 50. If it's above 50, then you probably achieve product market fit.”

“And I'm convinced that there's basically, ah, only two hard things. Number one is finding product market fit. It's really, really, really hard. Most companies will not be able to find product market fit. It's incredibly challenging. Number two is hiring and bu…”

“And it feels very much like losing control, right? Like, Previously, you're like building a thing, and you roll it out, you're building a thing, and you're pushing it out, and all of a sudden you like put a thing out there, and people start running away with i…”

“The problem with the first product And product market fit is that you can move the product and you can move the market because it's fit between these two things. And so what's unclear and they move in some crazy multidimensional space. And so what's the issue …”

“I don't think minor changes that it will make the difference. Now, once you have product market fit, then sure you can optimize the messaging.”

“I don't think you discover product market fit from the no's. I think you only discover it from the yes's. So, I think when you get no's, there's a lot of reasons people could give, be giving you no's, and I wouldn't even necessarily believe, you know, the reas…”

“You need to be so brutally honest with yourself and with your team about what's working and not working. I think startups are so hard that there is Almost like as a human being, you want to be happy. And so you don't necessarily want to face every reality caus…”

“And when we launched we were basically immediately bottlenecked on sort of being able to serve user demand rather than generating user demand. And I think sort of directionally that's kind of the sort of the inversion that happens where sort of, you know, in t…”

“The main thing that I think companies screw up at the pre-product market fit stage is sort of speed of iteration.”

“Generally speaking, I think that sort of pre product market fit metrics are actually relatively unhelpful. I think you sort of, you really want to bias very strongly towards kind of as much sort of inspection and kind of high throughput qualitative feedback as…”

“It's more important in the early days to be able to Iterate quickly, and usually that comes from using the technology that you know the best and building things in a modular way such that once you actually find that product market fit and know what your audien…”

“If your product is broken and people are still using it very actively, or you have high retention on a broken product, that's a clear sign of product market fit. When Twitter was constantly going down in the farewell days, and yet nobody moved off of Twitter, …”

“If you're a SaaS company and you have major brands finding and using you organically and paying for your product that's a sign of product market fit.”

“People tend to discount growth off of small bases, even though the growth is compounding. So if you're growing organically, 20% a month, even if you're going from a hundred to a 120 users, That is a real sign of product market fit that a lot of people tend to …”

“If they get a huge round of funding before they have product market fit, it kills the company. Like it because it's just too hard for the founders to resist That, because actually going out and dealing with the fact that you don't have product market fit is re…”

“It took us a year and a half to understand that product market fit.”

“If you have to ask the question, you definitely don't have it.”

“Paul Graham's definition for product market fit is when you've made something that people want. Marc Andreessen also has an amazing blog post about product market fit where he describes it as when the product is just being pulled out of you, when you no longer…”

“I think that the best way to figure out if product market fit is to use data, unbiased data to understand if you basically have made something that people want.”

“Something that should be a paid product, you're giving away for free, is not a good sign of product market fit. Like, you want to figure out if people are willing to pay for it, because price, if someone says, I love this, if it's free, but if it costs money, …”

“It's because working on growth before you have product market fit and good retention is not a good idea.”

“Product market fit is a stepladder. So, you're going to have it for a little bit, and then you're gonna suddenly lose it, and then you have to change your product again, and so, that's really how it is.”

“Instead of iterating on the product, like building more features, they actually iterate on the market.”

“More often than not in this pre-product market fit phase, the mistake is that there's the wrong person in the company, not there aren't enough people. The mistake is like, you've got an engineer that no one wants to work with, or no one's measuring any of the …”

“If you have time to wonder about it, if you're like, gee, do I have product market fit? Let me, let's pontificate on this. That probably means you don't.”

“Spending more money allows product market fit to happen faster.”

“I'll say you find that eventually though, it's a little bit like taking out debt, honestly, where it's like maybe early on as a second time founder, like maybe the seed rounds easier, maybe even a series A is easier, but the later, the longer you work in your …”

“Tech debt is totally fine. You gotta get comfortable a little bit with that heat of your tech burning. Totally okay. You're gonna fear the right things, and that is towards getting you product market fit.”

“You know, there's a lot of advice out there to kind of stick with it, Keep going. Don't give up. And I think it's terrible advice. I think if it's not working, like give up immediately.”

“The more people, the slower you get to product market fit. Because you become slow, there's a lot of inertia that you have to fight against. Like if you have a big team, then comes the problem of like, hey, and you want to pivot for whatever reason, then you h…”

“When startups get funded, every single dollar, every single energy effort should go towards trying to find product market fit, which usually is The two founders or the three founders, their computers, their apartment, and maybe one more engineer who's also pro…”

“When you're pre-product market fit, to your point, The only goal is to find product market fit, and money can't help with that. The only thing money can buy you pre-product market fit is time to figure it out. Every time you increase your burn, you're decreasi…”

“Don't have a hire for sales or marketing until product market fit.”

“There's a funny thing about, I call it true signal, but, or heat, you know, about the right product, the lightning in the bottle moment. When you have it, you know it. And when you don't know. What I mean is, you don't know it's not. You know positively when y…”