May '24 • 📣 Updates
Customer-Solution fit > Product-Market fit
While it's always tempting to focus on scaling our startups to mass market adoption, I've found that the best way to ensure scale is viable is to make sure that my solution is able to truly resonate and find "fit" with an audience of 1.
It’s easier to scale something that a customer rates 9.5/10 than something they rate 7/10. It sounds simple, but when you start building, the hunger to launch many things and monetize can become so great that both product and revenue suffer.
Here’s how I approach these two concepts:
Customer-Solution Fit → Does One Customer Love It?
- This is something that founders who get deeply involved in their customer discovery tend to appreciate quickly. To convert your leads, solutions must meet specific customer expectations. If they don't, you end up with a bunch of "forever leads" - people who are interested but never fully commit.
Here's what I’ve noticed helps founders improve their customer-solution fit:
- Solve a Real Problem: Ensure your solution addresses a genuine pain point, whether it’s making more money, saving money, drastically improving an experience, or reducing risk.
- Deep Engagement: Regularly interact with your customers to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points.
- Iterative Improvement: Use customer feedback to make continuous improvements. Be agile and ready to pivot if necessary.
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Product-Market Fit → Does Everyone Want It?
- The definition of product-market fit has been diluted over the years. It used to mean “so much demand our system might break,” but now it often just means “some sales.” Taking a look back at Marc Andreessen’s “The only thing that matters” blog post, here's how he defines it "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." This is quite a difference to "some sales."
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Practical Advice for Fellow Early-Stage Founders
- We owe it to ourselves to build things worth building - not just build things for fun that fail to get adoption. And in order to do that, customers have to have strong demand for what we're building. Staying hyper focused on the single customer experience vs. a huge market can sometimes be all the difference.
Comment below what's the one thing your solution offers that a customer would "love"
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Customer-Solution fit > Product-Market fit
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