As a growth strategist I often start by asking leaders about their product market fit (PMF). Which you may find a little interesting because we tend to think of growth as about running ads, attending events, marketing and PR and so on — but just like a good health coach will first look at your nutrition before advising you exercise, I look at the company’s product before advising marketing. Because if the foundation is weak, then we’ll be building on shaky ground, and that is not good.
Finding PMF is literally the make or break decision for the product if not the entire organisation.
First to market seldom matters. Rather, first to PMF is almost always the long-term winner. — Andy Rachleff
Finding PMF is hard, and is made even more difficult by the fact that we often have a limited time to prove PMF to investors or executives, depending on the context in which we’re building.
We can think of PMF as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market,” a definition popularised by Marc Andreessen.
How exactly do you achieve PMF? That is a whole science in itself, but a good way to start is by knowing certain critical details beforehand — these need to be first defined and later refined:
- Problem to Solve: What problem are you going to solve
- Target Audience: Who are you going to solve it for
- Value Proposition: How are you going to solve the problem
- Competitive Advantage: What makes you uniquely positioned to solve the problem
- Growth Strategy: How will you solve it for more people over time
- Business Model: How will you package all of this together into a business