There are several good lessons learned presented that are generally applicable: "We should have spent more time figuring out what the problems were with existi

There are several good lessons learned presented that are generally applicable: "We should have spent more time figuring out what the problems were with existing solutions and who specifically had those problems." "The customers we targeted needed to be willing to pay for our solution." "We hadn’t been committed to learning as much as possible about the market and the customer. We were making educated guesses instead of coming to well researched conclusions. This led us down the wrong path twice." In his fourth point he correctly decides to benchmark against the status quo but does not talk to people who are paying for an analytics solution but are using Google Analytics, which was free at the time they were conducting interviews. "We needed to stop building what we thought the market wanted and get back to basics. Instead of writing code, we went out and talked to customers. We spoke with people who used our largest competitor, Google Analytics. We asked them questions to better understand their needs and the current problems they were having with analytics software. They had a lot to say, so we listened." But they do find a pain point people are willing to pay to solve: funnel design and management. So far so good. But the next mistake is instead of focusing team execution purely on requests from customers and prospects who match their target, Hiten Shah tries to move faster by coming up with a stream of ideas (called "Hiten bombs" in the text). He was slow to switch focus from exploration / discovery to execution / delivery. Which is understandable because it was exploration that uncovered the "billion dollar opportunity." His summary is good and also points out a painful reality about "product-market fit." It's not a one time winner take all event. Your early traction invites competition that copies your success, building on it to raise the bar against you. "You can’t just capture the market once and expect to keep it. You have to do it over and over again and faster than everyone else if you want to keep distance from competitors coming up behind you and disrupting you. That’s how you get ahead of the market. We forgot the process that helped us deliver that initial amazing product [listening to prospects and customers]."