10 ms·

Product Market Fit

157 points by kevinslin 4y ago

ripvanwinkle 4y ago
Feels like an overstatement to say that the only thing that matters is Product Market fit. Product market fit is certainly necessary but its not sufficient. Actually building and supporting the product (which includes culture, hiring etc) better than the competition also counts. FB vs Myspace could be an example.
- rock_hard 4y ago
  Yeah, finding product market fit for the machine that builds the machine is the only thing that really matters IMO
  - beckingz 4y ago
    Exactly. Gotta also build a company to deliver product and capitalize on the product market fit.
- gm 4y ago
  I think the point is: If you had no abilities, and only f*cked stuff up without outside help, but you had solid product market fit, that's the only thing that matters because everything else you can acquire (including funds to compensate for your shortcomings). At first it does sound wrong, but as I think back to all successful people I've known, including the ones that I could not for the life of me figure out how they got more success than I (eg, grade school dropouts, alcoholics, etc), I _can_ see how they leveraged an insight about PMF to achieve many things that I've always wanted and never achieved for myself. Very enlightening, but still kinda sad, actually, lol.
- gretch 4y ago
  Product-market-fit is also not everlasting. Especially in the tech industry, things change really fast and even if you achieve a strong fit 1 time, you need to adapt over time or you become irrelevant.
Finbarr 4y ago
> A big part of PMF is timing and luck - factors that are for most parts,out of your control. This is why even other founders that have found PMF are of limited help. > What you can control is the market, your team, and the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF. How can you control the market? The market seems like a timing and luck factor that's outside of your control.
- mark_undoio 4y ago
  I guess you can control the markets you're focusing in - within reason. E.g. picking a particular sector to sell into. How much choice you get depends on the product you're building, so I suppose it's a bit circular.
  - Finbarr 4y ago
    Yea you can pick a sector to sell into. But any sector you sell into is constantly evolving. You need to correctly predict the direction things are moving in, which is somewhat a timing and luck factor.
    - rogerkirkness 4y ago
      It's possible that by both of us choosing ecommerce we are making PMF harder for ourselves. I remember selling Shopify circa 2017 was like the easiest job ever. I bet it is a lot harder for their sales team to hit it's number now. Similar for Covid induced mega growth followed by defunding of ecommerce projects.
- guiriduro 4y ago
  Isn't Lean Startup and its derivatives about taking a systematic approach to going from cool idea but blind/no market, using Validated Learning to gain insight about a market, failing fast on what doesn't work, and (assuming you're in the ballpark of a viable market) move towards Product Market Fit? ie. not totally out of your control, nor totally within it.
mikek 4y ago
Relevant article on how to zero in on Product Market Fit: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine...
- hazyc 4y ago
  Superhuman seems like an odd example because for an 8+ yr old startup it doesn't seem at all obvious that they have PMF yet.
  - dcow 4y ago
    Everyone I know tried Superhuman, thought the experience was cool, and then went back to their old inboxes because it turns out that shaving milliseconds off email workflows doesn't actually save that much time or materially change the experience. Maybe it’s game changing for EA type jobs where the day is primarily spent managing and navigating an inbox, but for the rest of us, that’s just not the case. Superhuman feels like a feature not a product.
    - 2arrs2ells 4y ago
      Making an app you spend significant time in every day more useful & powerful can be a path to PMF (see Slack vs Hipchat, for example) I’d argue Superhuman does have PMF - just in a smaller market of email power users.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    I'm seeing tons of ads on FB and wondering what the strategy is. If you have a waitlist of 400k prospective users, why advertise on FB?
breck 4y ago
I highly recommend Ty Webb's talk on PMF.
- Greek0 4y ago
  Do you have a link where to find the talk?
  - breck 4y ago
    Sadly I don't. Not sure if there is one (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961 https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961)
- gm 4y ago
  Is this a joke reply? All I could find on Ty Webb is a bunch of Caddyshack references (I can't stand golf, so was clueless). Can you provide a link to the talk you're talking about?
  - breck 4y ago
    Sadly I don't have a link. Not sure if there is one (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961 https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961)
jackblemming 4y ago
What was product market fit called before the new wave of jargon took over? “Building shit people actually want”?
- gm 4y ago
  It was called "product market fit". Earliest mention was in 1972: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=product+market+fit&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cproduct%20market%20fit%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cproduct%20market%20fit%3B%2Cc1 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=product+market...
- debarshri 4y ago
  Product market fit is the context of an investible startups is quite different. You can always build shit people want. For eg. A static website hosting you know that market exists. But in case of an investible startups, you have a product hypothesis that has never been tested ever, validating the tech that is new, innovative gtm motion and business. The point I'm trying to make is the question whether the market exists for the idea is validated which is where the opportunity lies.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Even for static website hosting, it's unclear if a given product has market fit. Some other host could be well-known, strictly cheaper, more reliable and "better" in all ways customers care about. The product that loses on all dimensions is unlikely to find a market fit, even if it would have been competitive ten years ago.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  It's been called that for a long time...
- indymike 4y ago
  Building something people want is the first part of PMF. There's a big gap between "want" and "willing to pay for" and an even bigger gap between "willing to keep paying for". I think someone else here pointed out that PMF is an old phrase from the '70s.
andrewem 4y ago
A funny thing about this is there’s an obvious typo in the quote from Mark Zuckerberg. It says “Twitter is such as mess” rather than “a mess”. Searching for that quote finds a 2013 tweet from Benedict Evans containing the typo, quoting a review of the book “Hatching Twitter” which also has the typo. That review describes a conflict between two of the founders which today I find baffling: “Dorsey saw Twitter as a way to update one’s “status,” the ability to say what you’re doing the moment you’re doing it. Williams saw Twitter as a way to describe what’s happening in the world around you.” https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/397814437014700032?lang=en https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/397814437014700032?... https://allthingsd.com/20131104/in-hatching-twitter-a-billion-dollar-company-that-almost-wasnt/ https://allthingsd.com/20131104/in-hatching-twitter-a-billio...
ahaucnx 4y ago
Fun fact. We at AirGradient never had to find PMF. Why was that? Because the first 9 months it was a volunteer project fixing the air quality problem of the school our kids go to. During the so called "burning season" the school did not know if the air purifiers in the classrooms can keep up. So we developed a solution tackling exactly this problem spending many many days on campus and talking to teachers, administration, parents and operations. So instead of starting with an IDEA of a product/service, we started focusing 100% on fixing an existing massive PROBLEM on the ground. Another thing that worked for us was to early on offer an open-source version of our air quality monitor [1] that allowed us to see what adjustments the community came up with - as in many cases these adjustments made the monitor fit better to problems we might not have been aware of. So basically a kind of community driven market fit. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/ https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/
- robocat 4y ago
  Your comment seems orthogonal to the point made in the article. PMF is when your customers push or pull you along, helping accelerate your product into a market. Lack of PMF is when you are trying to push your customers - no acceleration - no help from customers.
  - ahaucnx 4y ago
    I would really like to understand your comment but I am not sure what you mean with "orthogonal" in this context. Could you please explain more? Our customer which was the school having this problem we tried to fix pulled us in and then along and we had constant interaction with them until our Product fit that Market (the school).
    - robocat 4y ago
      Sorry. On rereading your comment I think you are saying you have PMF, and just giving your own example? Maybe I misread you, but it is not clear that you are saying you have PMF. Or are you just saying you have a little? Having customers is not necessarily PMF. My misreading was mostly that your comment began on the topic of your first customer. One customer would not usually be called a market? Oddly, you then did a similar thing in your reply “our customer” and “that Market (the school)”. I mostly wanted to play with the metaphor: “PMF is when your product is pushed by a crowd of customers, a herd, almost uncontrollable. Sometimes going with the crowd is surprising and productive, and sometimes you have to try your hardest to go your own desired direction against the flow”. “Orthogonal” meant going off on a tangent to the core topic - maybe “peripheral” as a synonym (odd that my chosen words also have STEM meanings). Your comment feels a bit like a self-promotion. To reply to the core topic of the article would be to discuss “chasing the boulder”. This comment has also drifted along another different dimension, sorry.
JaggerFoo 4y ago
For serious analysis of "Product Market Fit", you are better off searching google scholar than reading this article.
- gm 4y ago
  FYI, this article does not claim to be an analysis of product market fit.
gz5 4y ago
Even if you get PMF, you don't magically sustain it and extend it. You need PMF and the business model*. Example: Yahoo search had PMF. Google search had PMF paired with the winning business model. *and much more, depending on your addressable market and aspirations...but PMF and business model are two legs of your stool
- shrisukhani 4y ago
  Also very true! PMF for dog-dating apps (intentionally bad example) is virtually useless. OTOH PMF in the database market is frickin amazing and you're likely drowning in revenue! As much as people don't want to believe it, TAM is a very very real in a startup's success.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > Also very true! PMF for dog-dating apps (intentionally bad example) is virtually useless. OTOH PMF in the database market is frickin amazing and you're likely drowning in revenue! As much as people don't want to believe it, TAM is a very very real in a startup's success. TAM?
    - lifeplusplus 4y ago
      market size, total addressable market
- daniel_iversen 4y ago
  Yes! Decent execution (incl. your Go-To-Market strategy) combined with PMF = likely some success. Great attempts at execution combined with poor PMF = almost impossible.
- akiselev 4y ago
  I thought the whole point of product market fit was finding a product with a value proposition the market thought was worth paying for?
shrisukhani 4y ago
> Anything that is not in service of this does not matter in an early stage startup. This is too true and something I didn't internalize fully until maybe 6 months into my startup. If you have PMF, people can help you with everything else. If you don't, no one can really do anything for you.
shrisukhani 4y ago
> What you can control is the market you're in, your team, and the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF. Agree with everything here except (maybe I'm contrarian) the 'unique insight that you bring as the founder' part. I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing. In reality, the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A pitch. There will almost certainly be plenty of competitors ripping you off and at least one or two funded by other top-tier VCs. If the only thing you have different is your 'authentic unique insight', you're going to lose anyway.
- 2arrs2ells 4y ago
  Your argument is a “unique insight” isn’t enough to provide an enduring competitive advantage (or “moat”). But that’s not what the OP is talking about. A unique insight (and great timing / market) is often enough to get to early PMF (and - like you mention - to Series A).
  - enos_feedler 4y ago
    unique insights come from your perspective. It is your unique perspective which is a _factory_ for unique insights that allow you to solve a series of problems that hit your startup/company in succession. It is this durable perspective that has built up through long term experience that can't easily be copied/duplicated that makes you win a market.
- robocat 4y ago
  > I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing Ask HN: do the great majority of competitors improperly understand the core insights behind a product? When I have been involved with successful products in the past, most competitors were ineffective because to me it seemed they missed something critical to the success of our product. Effective competitors are rare in my experience. Are startups in this decade better at grokking the core insights and improving upon that? Disclaimer: my experience is in the wopwops on the edge of the world (New Zealand), and I am also out of date. Also, it is my impression that what everyone “knows” is important to a product market is often well off the mark (morphic-resonance gone wrong ;-). If lucky, we all finally catch up with the insight that a founder had, but only after the insight has lost its unique value (maybe a few years). The cliché of yelling a valuable idea and nobody hearing it (part of the insight’s value is often that it is misunderstood - sometimes even though it has already been proven valuable!). Obviously the only competitor that would matter is the one that understood the insights. But does that competitor always exist… In a complex dynamic market the efficient market theory is wrong in practice I believe.
jwtnb 4y ago
What is the point of sharing this blog post?
- voxl 4y ago
  Given the author, the obvious answer is self-promotion. Given the upvotes, the obvious answer is that people enjoyed and resonated with it. What remains is for your to explain what the point of this comment was
Semaphor 4y ago
> Conversely, you can do everything right but if you don't have PMF, it doesn't matter (eg. Google Wave). Google Wave did everything right, but had no PMF? Maybe I’m seriously misremembering things (very possible), but didn’t they have a product that many people thought was an amazing idea with many uses, yet the UX and UI were so bad that it never got traction? That sounds more like having decent PMF, but doing things wrong.

157 points by kevinslin 4y ago

Feels like an overstatement to say that the only thing that matters is Product Market fit. Product market fit is certainly necessary but its not sufficient. Actually building and supporting the product (which includes culture, hiring etc) better than the competition also counts. FB vs Myspace could be an example.

rock_hard 4y ago
Yeah, finding product market fit for the machine that builds the machine is the only thing that really matters IMO
- beckingz 4y ago
  Exactly. Gotta also build a company to deliver product and capitalize on the product market fit.
gm 4y ago
I think the point is: If you had no abilities, and only f*cked stuff up without outside help, but you had solid product market fit, that's the only thing that matters because everything else you can acquire (including funds to compensate for your shortcomings). At first it does sound wrong, but as I think back to all successful people I've known, including the ones that I could not for the life of me figure out how they got more success than I (eg, grade school dropouts, alcoholics, etc), I _can_ see how they leveraged an insight about PMF to achieve many things that I've always wanted and never achieved for myself. Very enlightening, but still kinda sad, actually, lol.
gretch 4y ago
Product-market-fit is also not everlasting. Especially in the tech industry, things change really fast and even if you achieve a strong fit 1 time, you need to adapt over time or you become irrelevant.

Finbarr 4y ago

> A big part of PMF is timing and luck - factors that are for most parts,out of your control. This is why even other founders that have found PMF are of limited help. > What you can control is the market, your team, and the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF. How can you control the market? The market seems like a timing and luck factor that's outside of your control.

mark_undoio 4y ago
I guess you can control the markets you're focusing in - within reason. E.g. picking a particular sector to sell into. How much choice you get depends on the product you're building, so I suppose it's a bit circular.
- Finbarr 4y ago
  Yea you can pick a sector to sell into. But any sector you sell into is constantly evolving. You need to correctly predict the direction things are moving in, which is somewhat a timing and luck factor.
  - rogerkirkness 4y ago
    It's possible that by both of us choosing ecommerce we are making PMF harder for ourselves. I remember selling Shopify circa 2017 was like the easiest job ever. I bet it is a lot harder for their sales team to hit it's number now. Similar for Covid induced mega growth followed by defunding of ecommerce projects.
guiriduro 4y ago
Isn't Lean Startup and its derivatives about taking a systematic approach to going from cool idea but blind/no market, using Validated Learning to gain insight about a market, failing fast on what doesn't work, and (assuming you're in the ballpark of a viable market) move towards Product Market Fit? ie. not totally out of your control, nor totally within it.

mikek 4y ago

Relevant article on how to zero in on Product Market Fit: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine...

hazyc 4y ago
Superhuman seems like an odd example because for an 8+ yr old startup it doesn't seem at all obvious that they have PMF yet.
- dcow 4y ago
  Everyone I know tried Superhuman, thought the experience was cool, and then went back to their old inboxes because it turns out that shaving milliseconds off email workflows doesn't actually save that much time or materially change the experience. Maybe it’s game changing for EA type jobs where the day is primarily spent managing and navigating an inbox, but for the rest of us, that’s just not the case. Superhuman feels like a feature not a product.
  - 2arrs2ells 4y ago
    Making an app you spend significant time in every day more useful & powerful can be a path to PMF (see Slack vs Hipchat, for example) I’d argue Superhuman does have PMF - just in a smaller market of email power users.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I'm seeing tons of ads on FB and wondering what the strategy is. If you have a waitlist of 400k prospective users, why advertise on FB?

breck 4y ago

I highly recommend Ty Webb's talk on PMF.

Greek0 4y ago
Do you have a link where to find the talk?
- breck 4y ago
  Sadly I don't. Not sure if there is one (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961 https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961)
gm 4y ago
Is this a joke reply? All I could find on Ty Webb is a bunch of Caddyshack references (I can't stand golf, so was clueless). Can you provide a link to the talk you're talking about?
- breck 4y ago
  Sadly I don't have a link. Not sure if there is one (https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961 https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1583587203338280961)

jackblemming 4y ago

What was product market fit called before the new wave of jargon took over? “Building shit people actually want”?

gm 4y ago
It was called "product market fit". Earliest mention was in 1972: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=product+market+fit&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cproduct%20market%20fit%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cproduct%20market%20fit%3B%2Cc1 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=product+market...
debarshri 4y ago
Product market fit is the context of an investible startups is quite different. You can always build shit people want. For eg. A static website hosting you know that market exists. But in case of an investible startups, you have a product hypothesis that has never been tested ever, validating the tech that is new, innovative gtm motion and business. The point I'm trying to make is the question whether the market exists for the idea is validated which is where the opportunity lies.
- hedora 4y ago
  Even for static website hosting, it's unclear if a given product has market fit. Some other host could be well-known, strictly cheaper, more reliable and "better" in all ways customers care about. The product that loses on all dimensions is unlikely to find a market fit, even if it would have been competitive ten years ago.
Mikeb85 4y ago
It's been called that for a long time...
indymike 4y ago
Building something people want is the first part of PMF. There's a big gap between "want" and "willing to pay for" and an even bigger gap between "willing to keep paying for". I think someone else here pointed out that PMF is an old phrase from the '70s.

andrewem 4y ago

A funny thing about this is there’s an obvious typo in the quote from Mark Zuckerberg. It says “Twitter is such as mess” rather than “a mess”. Searching for that quote finds a 2013 tweet from Benedict Evans containing the typo, quoting a review of the book “Hatching Twitter” which also has the typo. That review describes a conflict between two of the founders which today I find baffling: “Dorsey saw Twitter as a way to update one’s “status,” the ability to say what you’re doing the moment you’re doing it. Williams saw Twitter as a way to describe what’s happening in the world around you.” https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/397814437014700032?lang=en https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/397814437014700032?... https://allthingsd.com/20131104/in-hatching-twitter-a-billion-dollar-company-that-almost-wasnt/ https://allthingsd.com/20131104/in-hatching-twitter-a-billio...

ahaucnx 4y ago

Fun fact. We at AirGradient never had to find PMF. Why was that? Because the first 9 months it was a volunteer project fixing the air quality problem of the school our kids go to. During the so called "burning season" the school did not know if the air purifiers in the classrooms can keep up. So we developed a solution tackling exactly this problem spending many many days on campus and talking to teachers, administration, parents and operations. So instead of starting with an IDEA of a product/service, we started focusing 100% on fixing an existing massive PROBLEM on the ground. Another thing that worked for us was to early on offer an open-source version of our air quality monitor [1] that allowed us to see what adjustments the community came up with - as in many cases these adjustments made the monitor fit better to problems we might not have been aware of. So basically a kind of community driven market fit. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/ https://www.airgradient.com/open-airgradient/kits/

robocat 4y ago
Your comment seems orthogonal to the point made in the article. PMF is when your customers push or pull you along, helping accelerate your product into a market. Lack of PMF is when you are trying to push your customers - no acceleration - no help from customers.
- ahaucnx 4y ago
  I would really like to understand your comment but I am not sure what you mean with "orthogonal" in this context. Could you please explain more? Our customer which was the school having this problem we tried to fix pulled us in and then along and we had constant interaction with them until our Product fit that Market (the school).
  - robocat 4y ago
    Sorry. On rereading your comment I think you are saying you have PMF, and just giving your own example? Maybe I misread you, but it is not clear that you are saying you have PMF. Or are you just saying you have a little? Having customers is not necessarily PMF. My misreading was mostly that your comment began on the topic of your first customer. One customer would not usually be called a market? Oddly, you then did a similar thing in your reply “our customer” and “that Market (the school)”. I mostly wanted to play with the metaphor: “PMF is when your product is pushed by a crowd of customers, a herd, almost uncontrollable. Sometimes going with the crowd is surprising and productive, and sometimes you have to try your hardest to go your own desired direction against the flow”. “Orthogonal” meant going off on a tangent to the core topic - maybe “peripheral” as a synonym (odd that my chosen words also have STEM meanings). Your comment feels a bit like a self-promotion. To reply to the core topic of the article would be to discuss “chasing the boulder”. This comment has also drifted along another different dimension, sorry.

JaggerFoo 4y ago

For serious analysis of "Product Market Fit", you are better off searching google scholar than reading this article.

gm 4y ago
FYI, this article does not claim to be an analysis of product market fit.

gz5 4y ago

Even if you get PMF, you don't magically sustain it and extend it. You need PMF and the business model*. Example: Yahoo search had PMF. Google search had PMF paired with the winning business model. *and much more, depending on your addressable market and aspirations...but PMF and business model are two legs of your stool

shrisukhani 4y ago
Also very true! PMF for dog-dating apps (intentionally bad example) is virtually useless. OTOH PMF in the database market is frickin amazing and you're likely drowning in revenue! As much as people don't want to believe it, TAM is a very very real in a startup's success.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Also very true! PMF for dog-dating apps (intentionally bad example) is virtually useless. OTOH PMF in the database market is frickin amazing and you're likely drowning in revenue! As much as people don't want to believe it, TAM is a very very real in a startup's success. TAM?
  - lifeplusplus 4y ago
    market size, total addressable market
daniel_iversen 4y ago
Yes! Decent execution (incl. your Go-To-Market strategy) combined with PMF = likely some success. Great attempts at execution combined with poor PMF = almost impossible.
akiselev 4y ago
I thought the whole point of product market fit was finding a product with a value proposition the market thought was worth paying for?

shrisukhani 4y ago

> Anything that is not in service of this does not matter in an early stage startup. This is too true and something I didn't internalize fully until maybe 6 months into my startup. If you have PMF, people can help you with everything else. If you don't, no one can really do anything for you.

shrisukhani 4y ago

> What you can control is the market you're in, your team, and the unique insight that you bring as the founder. Your job as a founder is to leverage these strengths to get to PMF. Agree with everything here except (maybe I'm contrarian) the 'unique insight that you bring as the founder' part. I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing. In reality, the market is too efficient for your 'unique insight' to really benefit you all that much beyond your Seed or Series A pitch. There will almost certainly be plenty of competitors ripping you off and at least one or two funded by other top-tier VCs. If the only thing you have different is your 'authentic unique insight', you're going to lose anyway.

2arrs2ells 4y ago
Your argument is a “unique insight” isn’t enough to provide an enduring competitive advantage (or “moat”). But that’s not what the OP is talking about. A unique insight (and great timing / market) is often enough to get to early PMF (and - like you mention - to Series A).
- enos_feedler 4y ago
  unique insights come from your perspective. It is your unique perspective which is a _factory_ for unique insights that allow you to solve a series of problems that hit your startup/company in succession. It is this durable perspective that has built up through long term experience that can't easily be copied/duplicated that makes you win a market.
robocat 4y ago
> I'm fairly convinced that unique insight is just a VC pitch thing Ask HN: do the great majority of competitors improperly understand the core insights behind a product? When I have been involved with successful products in the past, most competitors were ineffective because to me it seemed they missed something critical to the success of our product. Effective competitors are rare in my experience. Are startups in this decade better at grokking the core insights and improving upon that? Disclaimer: my experience is in the wopwops on the edge of the world (New Zealand), and I am also out of date. Also, it is my impression that what everyone “knows” is important to a product market is often well off the mark (morphic-resonance gone wrong ;-). If lucky, we all finally catch up with the insight that a founder had, but only after the insight has lost its unique value (maybe a few years). The cliché of yelling a valuable idea and nobody hearing it (part of the insight’s value is often that it is misunderstood - sometimes even though it has already been proven valuable!). Obviously the only competitor that would matter is the one that understood the insights. But does that competitor always exist… In a complex dynamic market the efficient market theory is wrong in practice I believe.

jwtnb 4y ago

What is the point of sharing this blog post?

voxl 4y ago
Given the author, the obvious answer is self-promotion. Given the upvotes, the obvious answer is that people enjoyed and resonated with it. What remains is for your to explain what the point of this comment was

Semaphor 4y ago

> Conversely, you can do everything right but if you don't have PMF, it doesn't matter (eg. Google Wave). Google Wave did everything right, but had no PMF? Maybe I’m seriously misremembering things (very possible), but didn’t they have a product that many people thought was an amazing idea with many uses, yet the UX and UI were so bad that it never got traction? That sounds more like having decent PMF, but doing things wrong.