The Golden Goose

When you have product market fit, everything feels easy. You grow fast, get customers who love your product, and get great results from your marketing. It's the golden goose that every company wants, but it's also fickle. Just when you become complacent, you stroll into your goose room and POOF! It's gone.

Ok we'll drop the goose metaphor now.

These articles will cover what product market fit is, how it feels, and how you can gain confidence around it.

Getting to Product Market Fit

There are a thousand ways to get to product market fit. Talk to any startup founder and they'll tell you a different story. Some companies are created from pure emotion; frustration or anger motivating the founders to build a solution. Some are created after careful customer validation and discovery. Some are simple opportunity - the right person is in the right place with the right talents.

We don't hold strong opinions on how you first achieve product market fit. If you're struggling to find initial product market fit, we recommend reading up on the basics of Product Management, and getting stuck into some discovery calls.

Be wary of gurus in this space. Initial Product Market Fit is a messy process, and the vulnerability you experience while you're trying to achieve it can often attract people selling workshops at a hefty price.

So what exactly is Product Market Fit?

It's really tricky to pin down a definition for Product Market Fit, mainly because it's not a metric that you can measure. It's more of a feeling. Here are some ways people define it across the industry.

Or from Mark Andreesen
"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."

Or Rahul Vohra

"Ask your users how they’d feel if they could no longer use your product. The group that answers ‘very disappointed’ will unlock product-market fit."

We think the most accurate description of Product Market Fit is from Brian Balfour. He claims there's not really such thing as Product Market Fit. That "feeling" that you're looking for comes from a fit of Product, Market, Channel, and Model.

Of course, the Rough approach to Product Market Fit is centered around alignment. A well aligned company, focused on customers, will understand Product Market Fit significantly more than a company that is not well aligned.

Why does Alignment = Fit?

Early on, you have a very small surface area to the market. You may not have enough exposure to confidently define exactly what your market is. Even when you do, you need to juggle responsibilities so that confidence may only last until the next user signs up. This is why getting to Product Market Fit can look so different for each company.

That changes as you grow.

As some stage you have enough people interacting with the market that your problem is no longer exposure. Your problem becomes communication. You may have sales or product people speaking to customers every day. You might have marketing thinking of distribution in every waking hour. You have sufficient surface area to the market, but that doesn't make your decisions easier, it makes them way harder.

Understanding who exactly your customer is, how their opinions are changing over time, and what the future of your product looks like is an ever shifting target. You can't build confidence in your Product Market Fit without first building confidence in the four Pillars of Alignment.

Don't get us wrong. We aren't saying that if your team is aligned you magically obtain Product Market Fit. We're saying that you will start to understand what you need to do to secure it. There might be a lot of work to do in order to get where you need to, but at least you'll no longer be guessing.

This doesn't apply to us, because we already have Product Market Fit!

This was me once upon a time. My first company hit Product Market Fit almost overnight. We had all the signals you can expect. Signups, revenue, buzz! The only problem is that we never developed the right approach to product development, thinking we could do no wrong. When the signals started to wane, we were left floundering, trying to understand a market that we never put the effort into empathizing with. Our once amazing growth rate tapered off, stagnating and then declined.

This may not be you. If you feel confident in your market and your teams alignment then you should definitely continue doing what you're doing.

Rough is purpose built to help teams build the empathy they need with their customers so that if this situation pops up in your future, it doesn't cause as much of an impact as it did for me.