This document discusses achieving product/market fit (PMF), which is when a company creates a product that satisfies customer needs in a specific market. It emphasizes that PMF is an iterative process involving building minimum viable products (MVPs), testing them with customers, gathering feedback, and refining the product. The key steps are understanding customer problems, designing MVPs to address those problems, testing MVPs to validate hypotheses, and deciding whether to pivot or persevere based on learnings from testing. Achieving clear PMF is difficult and takes a systematic approach involving many validated MVPs over time.

1. Achieving
Product /
Market Fit
(PMF)
@TathagatVarma

2. Why?

3. Make
something
people want.
-Paul Graham

5. The only thing
that matters is
getting to product
/ market fit.
-Rachleff’s Corollary of
Software Success
https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee204/ProductMarketFit.html

6. http://oplaunch.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ford-model-T-production.jpg

7. Product / Market
Fit means being in
a good market with
a product that can
satisfy that market.
-Marc Andressen

8. When you have PMF…
“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.” – Marc Andreessen

9. Good fit

10. When you don’t…
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. – Marc Andreessen

11. Bad fit?

13. Your BMC on Day 1?

14. Achieving PMF
• Not an event….but a long (and
painful) process!
• It is an iterative process.
Iteration leads to feedback on
MVP, which gets revised.
• When your MVP is valuable,
easy to use, etc., you have
found PMF!

15. 1. Who?
• Who are your “customers”
/ target segment?
• Create “personas” to
identify and describe your
target customers - who
are you designing for?
• Start with hypotheses, test
it, and refine based on
learnings

17. 2. What?
• What are their pain
points? their unmet /
underserved needs?
• How are they solving
those problems today?
What workarounds or
hacks seem to work?
• What is your
opportunity?

19. 3. How?
• How do you plan to
address the current
pains and needs?
• How do you plan to
provide unique value?
• How do you know your
plan will work?

22. 4. Design MVPs
• How will you test your
value proposition in
minimum time, effort
and cost?
• Does you MVP solve
your problem or your
customer’s problem?
• What are your options?

24. Get out of the building!

25. 5. Develop MVPs
• What is the purpose of
developing the MVPs?
• How do you know if you
have unequivocally
proven a hypotheses?
• How do you ensure your
investment is
commensurate to
inherent risks at a given
point?

26. Prototyping spectrum

27. 6. Test MVPs
• A good MVP comes
back with lots of battle
scars!
• Cull our insights and
decide next steps
• A key decision is to
Pivot or Persevere?

28. Series of MVPs…
Roman Pichler

30. Measuring PMF?
• NPS
• Retention
• 40% test
• …

31. PMF Myths
• Product-Market Fit is always a discrete, big-
bang event
• It’s patently obvious when you have product-
market fit
• Once you achieve product-market fit, you
can’t lose it
• Once you have product-market fit, you don’t
have to sweat the competition
http://blog.pmarca.com/2010/03/20/the-revenge-of-the-fat-guy/

32. Recap
• Product-market fit is all about creating products that
customers want!
• However, startups fail over 90% of times! Developing
products without validation is too costly!
• Achieving PMF is a systematic process to understand
user needs and designing MVPs around it, and testing
them incrementally and measuring the fit.
• A series of validated MVPs leads to a solution that can
eventually be marketed to the target segment.

33. References
• https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee204/ProductMarketFit.html
• Startup Playbook - Sam Altman
• http://svpg.com/product-market-fit/
• https://www.slideshare.net/evanish/getting-to-product-market-fit
• https://medium.com/lean-startup-co/a-playbook-for-achieving-product-market-
fit-434a644a9b91
• http://andrewchen.co/when-has-a-consumer-startup-hit-productmarket-fit/
• https://hbr.org/2013/07/three-ways-to-scale-b2b-sales
• https://gigaom.com/2010/11/26/accelerate-your-startup-get-the-right-
productmarket-fit/