Why you need Product-Market Fit BEFORE you try to scale

When you have P/M fit, you will know because customers come “flowing out of the ground like oil”, demand will be accelerating in a way that is hard to keep up with.

But trying to scale customer acquisition without product-market fit can be a costly and time-consuming process.

Before you have that fit, growth levers like paid media, affiliate programs, and partnerships are useful only when engaged as part of a learning program, driven by the symbiotic relationship between product development and marketing goals.

How do you get there?

🔬 You need to run smart experiments
📢 that marry marketing activities
👷‍♀️ 📲 with product discovery
🤔 💡 that drive learning

Here are a few key principles we apply when growing early stage businesses:

1/ Understand your target market and customer segments:
Take the time to research and understand the emotions, needs, and wants of your target user. By clearly doing this you can tailor your product to meet the specific needs of your customers.

2/ Develop a clear value proposition focused on the needs of your target user:
Once you understand your target market, develop clear value proposition that focuses on the needs of your target user. A value proposition is a statement that explains the unique value your product offers to your customers.

3/ Focus on Painkillers not vitamins:
When developing your product, it's important to focus on solving a specific problem or need of your target market (painkiller) rather than providing a nice-to-have feature or benefit (vitamin). This way you are addressing a specific problem that will inspire action

4/ Launch early and fail fast
Once you have a basic version of your product, it's important to launch it as soon as possible. By launching early and often, you can gather valuable feedback from your target market and iterate on your product. No-one is going to copy your idea until you become successful.

5/ Create rituals to gather and analyze customer feedback on an ongoing basis:
Gathering customer feedback should be an ongoing process. Create rituals to gather customer feedback regularly and analyze it to understand what your customers like and dislike about your product. This will help you identify areas for improvement and make necessary changes to your product to achieve product-market fit.

BUT If you only remember one thing remember the importance of customer feedback 💬 .

Your customers will tell you whether or not your product or service is meeting their needs and wants... listen to them!