Entrepreneurship is a lot like fishing.
You are pushing out lots of mini experiments, and then you can feel a tug from fish.
When you feel that tug, you fish more in that area, and you adapt your style.
Product market fit is when you feel a pull from customers.
Your profits are rising and accumulating in your bank.
You have no complaints and lots of happy customers.
When something isn’t working, it’s tempting to try harder, but often it’s a better idea to try fishing in the right area.
“In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup.”
Marc Anddressen
https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html
But the market is always changing, and so you need to move and adjust your product to fit with the market.
Let’s introduce Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success:
The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
And you can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it—or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house. You could eat free for a year at Buck’s.
https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html
