This presentation comes from a lecture/workshop I gave to the Brinc.io startup accelerator program. The lecture was focused on outlining the journey a startup goes through from MVP to Product-Market fit. It highlights what the different stages are, ideas on what you should measure as well as some of the key challenges startups will face.

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The Journey: From MVP to
Product- Market Fit

2. Agenda
1. A couple of key principles to remember
2. MVP
3. Product-User Fit
4. Product-Market Fit

3. A couple of key
principles of to
remember

4. The journey: a couple of key principles to remember
Fred Wilson. Union Street Ventures
CRAWL, WALK, RUN

5. 1. Product - get the product right first
2. Strategy - then lock down the strategy of the business
3. Business Model - then figure out the business model
Fred Wilson. Union Street Ventures
The journey: a couple of key principles to remember

6. 6
The journey: a couple of key principles to remember
The path to Product-Market fit is a process of building
stronger market validation and proving your value
hypothesis. Proof of concept, building prototypes,
launching an MVP and finding Product-User Fit are vital
stages along the way.
Market validation is the way to confirm that your idea is
a solution to a problem people actually have.

7. The journey: a couple of key principles to remember
Executional
Risk
Idea Risk
Fundraising /
Investors /
Partners
MVP /
Product / User
Market Fit
Team
Scale
acquisition
Develop and
refine the
product
Attractive Unit
economics
Business
Development
Scaling to fast
False Promises

8. Love Money Pre-seed Seed Series A Series B Series C and
beyond
When should
you raise
Idea At Launch (MVP) Product-User Fit Product-Market Fit Growth and Scale
(line of sight of
profitability)
IPO or Sale
Traction
(monthly net
revenue)
Negligible Negligible 10K – 50k 50k – 250k 200k – 1m 500k +
From Whom Family Friends Angels / Pre-seed
funds
Seed Funds Series A & B funds Late Stage +
growth funds
To do what Build MVP and
early team
Launch Reach early scale Scale Aggressive Scale
and / or
profitability
Prepare for IPO /
Sale
Pre-money
valuation
$1 – 3M $3 – 5M $6-12M $15-30M $40-80M $100 – 200M
The journey: a couple of key principles to remember

9. The journey: a couple of key principles to remember
“We get paid for our finishes — how we see
things through — not the starts. If we really want
to hang our entrepreneurial trophies on the wall,
we should be 100% focused on how we get
things past the finish line first”
Wil Schroter, Startups.com

10. MVP

11. What is it
• MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is the first working version of a product, with just enough features to satisfy
potential clients and collect & analyse their feedback for the next product version, with minimum effort and
resources required. The next, complete product version is developed after elaborating on the initial user feedback
• It allows you to collect the maximum amount of validated learning around the hypotheses you created, including
your value hypothesis (defn: tests if a product or service is valuable to customers once they are using it. about
customers with the least effort)
• In the words of Eric Ries, an MVP is “the minimum set of features necessary to engage with early evangelists to
start the learning feedback loop”
• View an MVP as an experiment and a cycle of learning. Create your set of hypothesises (inc your value
hypothesis) then utilise the learning from you MVP to help validate the hypothesis you create
• Y-combinator mentions an MVP is all you need to get your initial customers in the door, interacting with you, and
offering the feedback that will inform your next iteration
MVP

12. MVP
How do you measure it
• Start validating Hypotheses (inc value hypothesis) / Capture Learnings - were you able to prove the
hypothesises you established? Were you able to get the right amount of feedback for you to move forward?
• Demand / Use / Share - You want to prove that people care and that you can create demand and value from it.
What you want to be looking for is will people seek, sign up for, use, and share the thing you created?
1. That you can attract and convert demand
2. That people will use, stick with, and refer others
3. Look for quantitative (A/B tests), qualitative (survey’s / talking to customers / user feedback) data
4. For food tech products think about testing your MVP across taste, distribution, packaging, price and unit
economics

13. MVP
Best Practices and Challenges
• Start-ups should launch their product as soon as is possible; for the simple reason that this is the only way to
fully understand customers’ problems and whether the product meets their needs
• Surprisingly, launching a mediocre product as soon as possible, and then talking to customers and iterating, is
much better than waiting to build the “perfect” product
• Do things that don’t scale
• Don’t to lose sight that the most important tasks for an early stage company are to create product and talk to
users
• When testing your MVP from a food tech perspective create hypotheses thinking about the following areas
taste, distribution, SKU, size, packaging and price
• Be innovative and flexible regarding how you bring your MVP to market. There is no one way

14. Product-User fit

15. What is it
• The extent to which you’ve built the right product for a set of users / power users
• Product-User fit is an important step in the journey to Product-Market fit, in which nailing the product to
win over essential user / power user (a small set of users)
• Power users are the biggest sign of Product-User fit. To understand product-user fit is to understand why
your power users are power users, their user behaviour, and how to evolve the product to create more
power users
Product-User Fit

16. Product-User Fit
Key Metrics
• When looking at Product user fit you should be looking at the following:
• Super User validation
1. Durable retention – dig deep to find out why power users stay around
2. Engagement depth – how does the usage of power users map to what usage you would expect from an
engaged user
3. User testimony that evangelises the value - Does the qualitative feedback from users reflect that they are
desperate for your product? Do they talk about it as if it’s affected them in a really positive way? Is it up
to 10x better than the status quo
• Validate Hypotheses (inc value hypothesis) / Capture Learnings
• Demand / Use / Share
• NPS (net promoter score) - is used to gauge the customer satisfaction with a company's product or service and
customer loyalty to a brand

17. Product-User Fit
Best Practices and Challenges
• Using Product User Fit can be a very useful stepping stone in the journey to Product-Market Fit. It gives
you an opportunity to put another stake in the ground, so to speak and validate your progress
• As the leap from MVP to Product-Market Fit is so large it makes sense to be able to break up the
journey so the concept of Product-User Fit makes a lot of sense

18. Product Market fit

19. Product-Market Fit
19
What is it
• Marc Andreessen's blog post, The Only Thing That Matters, he describes Product-Market fit as “being in a good market with a
product that can satisfy that market.”
• You have reached Product-Market fit when you are overwhelmed with usage, usually to the point where you can’t even make
major changes to your product because you are swamped just keeping it up and running
• “The term Product-Market fit describes ‘the moment when a start-up finally finds a widespread set of customers that resonate
with its product’.” Eric Ries
• The path to Product-Market fit is a process of building stronger market validation throughout the journey – MVP and Product
User fit are vital stages along the way.
• “A value hypothesis is an attempt to articulate the key assumption that underlies why a customer is likely to use your product.
Identifying a compelling value hypothesis is what I call finding Product-Market fit” Andy Rachleff
• Knowing you have reached Product-Market fit typically isn’t a clean cut answer. It is a line that is always moving

20. 20
Product-Market Fit
How do you measure it
• Measuring Product Market Fit is notoriously as is as much an art form as a science as a (head, heart, gut feel). You
wanted to still be looking for further validation of your value hypothesis as well as the other metrics mentioned
previously
• A couple of further methods for helping you understand if you have proven your value hypothesis and reached
Product-Market Fit include:
• The must-have survey - Sean Ellis developed a metric to help establish product market fit -
https://pmfsurvey.com/ / https://www.startup-marketing.com/using-survey-io/#
• Product-Market Fit Process – Rahul the Founder and CEO of Superhuman wrote an article outlining a rigorous
approach/process for establishing and growing Product-Market Fit. It built on Sean Ellis original survey approach
to understanding product-market fit https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-
product-market-fit
• PMF Checkpoints by Brian Balfour – Brian created a series of tests that help you measure product-market fit
https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit

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Product-Market Fit
Best Practices and Challenges
• As you move toward Product market fit it is important remember that:
• It’s it never obvious when you have product-market fit
• You can lose it
• 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
• Getting product right means finding product-market fit. It does not mean launching the product
• “The term product-market fit describes ‘the moment when a start-up finally finds a widespread set of
customers that resonate with its product’.” Eric Ries
• “First to market seldom matters. Rather, first to product-market fit is almost always the long-term winner.”
“Time after time, the winner is the first company to deliver the food the dogs want to eat.” “Once a company
has achieved product market fit, it is extremely difficult to dislodge it, even with a better or less expensive
product.” Andy Rachleff

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Q&A

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Adrian M Odgers
Founder
Growandco
Thank you