Product-Market Fit

“Start by assuming you no longer have product market fit, because you had product market fit in a different market. It's a different market now, so you have to start over. If you just assume you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, you're going to be wrong, because your entire customer base changed.”

“They started with a really narrow early focus. It was a single persona, single context, single use case - developers building applications using Node.js who wanted to ensure that the open source dependencies they were pulling into their apps were secure.”

“If you don't have product market fit, and if you don't have a good enough growth strategy for at least one side of your marketplace, just forget about all this marketplace stuff. Focus on this core exchange of value, go deep with one side of the marketplace and see if you can rely on some crutch, some hack for the other side for time being.”

“The most important thing is looking at the leading indicators in fast-moving markets. What matters a ton is actually figuring out what are the new markets, the new pockets of demand that are changing very quickly where the wealthiest customers in the world are willing to pay whatever it takes, and how do we focus on the leading indicators of those markets.”

“Let's say that you're still on your way to product market fit and you're a strongly enterprise oriented product. You have the opportunity to do customer advisory boards, which is really convening even smaller circles of ideal fit users and making sure that they are connected to each other as well as you, and then incentivized to provide you with feedback. Those folks can end up growing into your biggest evangelists.”

“If founders are lucky/good enough to find product-market fit, they've usually built up all this intuition that's really hard to explain and may even be subconscious. I've seen some founders be like, 'Cool. I need to let these experts own these areas and get out of their way.' That's actually the opposite of what you want. None of these people know the business as well as you. You actually need to direct them until they show you they've really got it and are making better decisions than you would.”

“There is this concept called resonance. When you apply a certain frequency to an object and you get pretty close to its natural frequency, you see a disproportionate increase in the amplitude of how that object vibrates. The way to think about it in the context of strategy is selecting that frequency to achieve resonance between the product and the market.”

“The holy grail of product work is really a reference customer. This is somebody that has used your solution or your product, loves it enough to tell people about it.”