Webinar: Finding Product Market Fit - Five Traps to Avoid
Recently, I gave a talk to India-based tech founders who are looking to enter the U.S. market. The talk was hosted live by the SaaSBoomi community.
Introducing the Online Course: Speeding Up Product-Market Fit
Based on positive feedback, I am launching a 2-week cohort-based online course in December for tech founders/leaders on Speeding up Product Market Fit - A Structured Approach.
The course will help tech leaders break down the key success factors to finding PMF and help them speed up the time to reach growth stage.
Join or share with others.
Below are the talking points from the webinar. Check out the video for full discussion.
What is PMF in B2B, Anyway?
Product Market Fit (PMF) is a complicated topic for first time entrepreneurs. In B2B markets, even at the basic level, “product market fit” can mean many things: is it product-buyer fit? product-user fit? product-category fit? When we say, product do we mean MVP (minimum viable product) or the whole product offering, including pricing?
What are we trying to fit? Against what?
Five Common Traps
There are five common traps that founders fall into as they assess PMF.
These are:
Unclear category
Fuzzy customer profile
Incomplete product offering
Unproven go-to-market
Hopeful hiring
To avoid these traps, I define five factors of PMF, each requiring a different type of fit.
These five factors are:
Market to Category Fit
Category to Customer Fit
Customer to Offering Fit
Offering to Growth Fit
Growth to Talent Fit
I ask twenty simple, but not easy, questions to check for PMF across each of these factors. These questions can help answer gaps.
Twenty Simple (Not Easy) Questions
Market to Category Fit
What is your target market?
What’s your category? Existing or new?
What’s your market-category hypothesis?
What’s your insight to win in this market & category?
Category to Customer Fit
Who are your early adopter accounts in the U.S.?
Who’s your buyer champion?
Who’s your ideal user in an account?
What’s your value promise to each?
Customer to Offering Fit
What’s your whole product offering (pricing, deployment, support, etc.)?
How’s that different from others?
How does it deliver buyer value?
How does it deliver user value?
Offering to Growth Fit
What’s your GTM hypothesis?
What’s your unit economics?
Which growth paths do you need? Product, Account or Channel Led? In what order?
How do you validate each?
Growth to Talent Fit
What talent do you need in the U.S.? Role in PMF?
How are you building the local team? Top down, bottom up?
What will attract them?
How will you support them?
Finding PMF Requires Iterating Across All Five Factors
Companies need to iterate across all of these factors to achieve PMF. Ideally, they need to do so simultaneously to ensure they are not falling into a trap.
For bonus content on how to transition from PMF to Growth stage, check out the video.
Introducing 2-week cohort based PMF course.
I’m launching a 2-week, cohort-based online introductory course for tech founders/leaders.
Speeding Up Product Market Fit - A Structured Approach.
Dec 5-15th, 2022
Please join or share with others who may be interested.
Finding Product Market Fit - Five Traps To Avoid