#40: How To Find Product Market Fit Before You Run Out Of Money

#40: How To Find Product Market Fit Before You Run Out Of Money

Read time - 4.5 min

Big Announcement
Going forward we will now run two founder led sales cohorts concurrently. One will be focused on B2B mid market / enterprise sales. The other will be focused on B2C / SMB transactional sales. We’ve made this decision as there is quite a bit of difference in GTM sales motions in both B2B and B2C. We are now onboarding founding teams for our next FLS B2B cohort which will begin on March 6th, and our B2C / SMB cohort beginning on March 28th. 

These accelerators fill up extremely fast, as we have limited spots available and we keep them very intimate. If you’re ready to level up, do not procrastinate. Go ahead and book a call with me here. 

Today I’m going to discuss how you want to think about finding PMF (product market fit) and going from 0-1.

The good news is the framework is easy to understand, and even easier to follow. The bad news is, it’s a lot tougher in application, especially if you don’t have processes in place to greatly increase your odds of being successful.

I typically see founders focusing on the wrong things. Three of the biggest mistakes are: (1) Avoiding sales and any GTM motion altogether. (2) Spending way too much time building something that hasn’t been validated. (3) Not focusing on demand / lead generation channels to keep the reps coming in.

^{Build Something People Want}

^{~YC Motto}

It’s important that you focus on things that matter.

What are the things that matter?

If we apply the Pareto principle (80/20 rule) we’ll see that 80% of your results will come from these two activities (20%) — lead generation and selling. If you get these two right you will be well on your way to either finding PMF, or figuring out what the market really wants, and pivoting, or scratching your idea altogether.

The best way I’ve identified on how to focus on the things that matter is through the acronym DISCOVER. 

Let’s unpack it!

Define Goals:
Clearly articulate your goals and what success looks like in terms of product market fit. You don’t need to be super granular early on, you just need to have a good understanding of how you define success.

Identify Market Needs:
Understand the pain points, use cases and needs of your target market. Understand the current way most companies are handling these problem(s). This is where pre-product you can do your user interviews to get an idea on whether not there is a clear need. Ask yourself this question. Is this a “nice to have” product, or a “must have” product. The former is hard to scale, the latter is “easier”.

Survey the Landscape:
Know who the players are. Analyze the competitive landscape. Identify competitors, their strengths, weaknesses, and any gaps in the market. Find the long tail that is being overlooked that you can exploit and carve out a niche. In other words, there are a millions of personal trainers, but very few who work with first time mothers who are looking to loose the 20-30 lbs they gained during pregnancy. This is drilling down on a niche.

Create a MVP (Minimum Viable Product):
Your mvp should be clunky. Many of our clients were crushing sales before they even had an mvp ready to ship. They were demoing figma mock ups, and still closing. You want to test the core features and value proposition with early adopters. The goal is to sell, test and find some validation before you build. For paid POC’s you can build before you go live.

Optimize User Experience:
Continuously improve and optimize the user experience based on feedback and user behavior from paid POC’s, not user interviews and product discovery calls. Big difference. Doesn’t mean you should disregard not paying usage data. But when a company has skin in the game it’s a lot different.

Validate with Early Adopters:
Seek feedback from early adopters to understand their perspective, validate your initial assumptions about the market, and use the gathered insights to refine and continue building. This is the idea of “selling before you build.”

Experiment Continuously:
It’s imperative you test different messaging, content, ICP’s, value propositions to understand and improve. Single variant testing is imperative.

Refine and Iterate:
Iterate based on feedback and data. The best data will always come from paying users. Keep a doc to map out the customer buying journey. What this means is, look at the buyers / users of your product. What are their titles? What problems / use cases did they have? How did your product help them? Where did it fall short? Map out the customer journey of all your users, and you’ll begin to see patterns. The data starts to talk to you. Refine your product and strategy as you learn more about your market / user.

Understanding and incorporating these practices will put you on the fast track to uncovering more and more.

As I noted earlier, you need to focus on the things that matter. To have the highest odds of succeeding, you need 2 things. Consistent leads coming in, and a sales framework to get the “at bats” so you can uncover this information before you run out of cash.

You don’t get good at surfing by running on the beach with a log attached to your hip. You get good at surfing by being in the water and understanding how the ocean works. By putting in the reps and taking a licking.

You have to be in the arena.

Key Takeaways

• Define

• Identify

• Survey

• Create

• Optimize

• Validate

• Experiment

• Refine
  

That’s it for today folks.

See you all next week!

Darren


P.S. If you’re ready to level up you can book a call with me here.