As an entrepreneur, we all want our products and services to be sold and availed by consumers in the market. As Marc Andreessen rightly defines Product-Market fit as, ‘Being in a good market with a good product that can satisfy your market’.
Being in a Product Market Fit is absolutely necessary for any start-up to have a sustainable long run. Before we get into how to PMF your start-up, let us understand the basic concept of Product-Market Fit.
What is the concept of Product-Market Fit?
A Product Market Fit is basically a concept that connects the company’s products to its right market and to the right customers. It sees to it that the company’s products are being delivered to its customers in accordance with the demand generated by the market. As Marc Andreessen mentioned, this gives us a good market with a product that satisfies its needs.
There are three basic components that make a product-market fit. A PMF is a proper alignment of all these pieces. Product - Distribution - Consumers. All these factors are truly important for any start-up to achieve a Product-Market Fit.
How to find your Product Market Fit?
Not every startup can concentrate on a product that is designed for a specific market. For this, an entrepreneur should have a willingness to alter his/her work. Here is how you can achieve the product-market fit sooner.
Iterate often
If you know your product is failing to make an impression in the market, then, iterating your product is an easy option. There are various reasons which contribute to a product being successful and unsuccessful in the market. However, if you get attached to your product and the method your product is being branded, adapting to changes is difficult for you. You close the doors for any possible improvement in the near future.
Instead, you should take on every opportunity to adjust your product for positive adoption. This is just what Slack did and won the battle. Just by tightening the feedback, boosting user satisfaction, and iterating the product faster, the app grew from 15000 daily active users when launched in February 2014, to 4 million in October 2016. Interestingly, this was all done by spending a minimum marketing budget.
Working through established channels
Establishing a proper connection between the product and the market is the two biggest challenges. As the co-founder of Dropbox, Drew Houston, devised two successful methods to find their fit. First, he made a four-minute video and shared it with all the ranking news aggregators. Second, he started a viral Ferrell campaign.
The digital age provides various options for distributing information and entrepreneurs can exploit it to their advantage. Rather than coming up with something new all the time, sometimes, just doing it the simple way helps.
Exploring new options sometimes also risks the products which are not beneficial for an entrepreneur. So, adopting the tried and tested methods always helps.
Solution-based positioning
Making a lot of noise does not help. Being a personal voice for your consumers is the key to making an impression on them. Giving them solution-centric answers on how to tackle a particular problem or issue will bring you closer to your consumers.
Always give your consumers what they want, not what you have in your kitty for them.
To be successful you have to make a product-market fit, which should be the center of your business strategy. one question that should always keep going in your mind is making your business consumer specific.
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