What Product-Market Fit feels like (Ricky Weekly #56)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
Took a long walk with a friend and ended up at GGP’s roller skating area and thought everyone looked so cool!
Thing on my mind:
Product-Market Fit is this term that gets tossed around a lot in startup land, and I’m sensing strong early PMF with Flow Club, more intensely than I’ve ever felt with my previous two startups, even though Crowdbooster brought in over $1M ARR and Upbeat serviced over 500 businesses. Why do I feel so strongly? What does PMF feel like?
Over the last year when we were iterating through various consumer ideas, David pointed out how the idea needs to sell itself because obviously 1) short attention spans and 2) we don’t really know what we want, but we know it when we see it (like porn). I brushed him off as I was pushing Palcast on to people by presenting them various use cases and failing most of the time. With Flow Club, enough people immediately grasp the value (we can still do a much better job), but more importantly, after they’ve experienced it, they start to dream for us and proactively show us all the places Flow Club could go. In just a few weeks, I’m able to sit back and not just play “creator” but “editor” of our users’ ideas and suggestions. That’s a sign that the idea has been embraced. If user feedback is oxygen, we’ve created a livable atmosphere.
Many people forget the “market” part of PMF. It’s not too difficult to make something someone would use or pay for, but that feels like just product-fit to me. The market part suggests either there’s a lot of people who’d want this or that there’s a lot more you can do to help solve the underlying problem people are now turning to you for. Ideally both. With Palcast, which was an asynchronous, topic-based audio app, we found users who thought it was fun to use the app to talk about about random current events while taking a walk or driving around during the pandemic, but we couldn’t find them easily, and barely anyone was offering us ideas on what more we could do for them. There was no imagination because we didn’t tap into a deep-seated need from which a market can emerge. With Flow Club, there's a very clear sense of yearning from our users for more. More focus, agency, fulfillment, camaraderie, etc.
I think everything I’ve said so far applies to b2b startups also, but maybe with more caveats. Our last startup, Upbeat, helped more than 500 companies get in the press by offering them tech-enabled, on-demand PR, but that’s all people came to us for. Whenever we tried to expand the surface area, we failed at getting more adoption. That’s different from our first startup, Crowdbooster, where we started by helping companies analyze their Twitter accounts, then we moved to Facebook Pages, then over to helping agencies manage multiple clients’ social accounts, then to global teams of social media managers. The professionalization of the social media manager role was happening at the same time and a market was emerging around us, pulling a product out of us. That was closer to PMF.
Piece of content I recommend:
Stop. Breathe. We Can’t Keep Working Like This. on The Ezra Klein Show
I loved this interview Ezra Klein did with Cal Newport discussing his new book, A World Without Email. They clearly described how the way we work today is strongly influenced by technology we have at our disposal (email, Slack, Zoom, social media, etc) and yet they have stopped serving us. We are probably at peak collaborative ease, but it doesn’t feel like we are anywhere close to peak productivity as a society, and definitely nowhere close to feeling fulfilled personally.
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website.My primary focus (and where I focus) is on Flow Club.