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How long it took different companies to find product-market fit
- squirrel6 3y ago> The group that you haven’t achieved product-market fit with is the one you really want to target So well said, I never really internalized this until just now
- lennysan 3y agoLoved that quote
- nomilk 3y ago> One of the most interesting takeaways is how often founders never fully felt PMF Perhaps it's a shared trait among great makers. Like an industrious person feels their work is never done, a good maker feels they've never fully achieved PMF.
- j45 3y agoPMF doesn’t mean work is done, if anything it’s a start.
- seanoliver 3y agoProps to the Airtable team for keeping the faith for 2.75 years between launch and first customer.
- simonbarker87 3y agoSomething feels off about that and the other time lines. I’m sure I remember paying for Airtable pretty soon after it launched for a couple of months. Perhaps the timeline chart is literally just for the B2B channel?
- gcanyon 3y agoIf it takes a year or more to go from launch to first paying customer, what are you doing during that time? Of course, you could be purposefully giving your product away while building the premium, paid-for features. I think that applies to some of these companies, and I'd be more curious about the time from launching that version to paid customers.
- h1fra 3y agoI don't think the data is very "scientific", e.g: slack was officially launched in 2014 and got immediate traction. Yes there were 4 years of development but it wasn't even the product they wanted to sell.
- joshuanapoli 3y ago> Stop thinking of product-market fit as a yes or no question—but instead as a process of finding fit with more segments of the market. This seems really true to me. Though the nature of the search for PMF with more segments changes after passing some milestones. It’s more difficult to make large changes in the product once you have a basic level of traction and growth.
- j45 3y agoVery well said.
- drx 3y agoThis is such a great post for so many reasons, but I'm glad Lenny made that chart in particular. The overnight success fantasy is toxic and I've seen it infect (and sometimes ruin) many startups.
- lennysan 3y ago100%
- rexpop 3y ago> He’s like, ‘There’s a bug.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’ll fix it, but we’ve got other stuff going on.’ He’s like, ‘We have to call a red alert.’ So, jidoka[0]? 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomation
- ketzo 3y ago> There are all these horror stories in Silicon Valley of these companies who got to 150 or 200 million revenue and then didn’t grow Yeah, what a nightmare that must be. I’m being a little glib here — I understand that if you’re making $200M at a cost of $400M and your investors are expecting $2B and you stop growing… you’re in deep shit. But christ, people, can’t we get a little perspective?
- kimixa 3y ago"Infinite Growth or Death" is an impossible goal but still people seem to strive for it. Though most VC funding seems to have the explicit goal of "Burn cash to drive out competition so you have a monopoly, then abuse your market position to wring your locked-in customers dry", which feels awful from a consumer POV.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- superdisk 3y agoHow do you spend $400M?
- bsder 3y agoToo many salaries. VCs want you to go big or go home so they want you to hire. Hiring decreases your runway dramatically. $100 million lasts practically forever for 2 people. $100 million lasts through most problems for 10-15 people. $100 million doesn't last very long at all for 100 people.
- anon1199022 3y ago+ fancy office etc. Remember what twitter office was offering with no profit for the company? any extra was coming from companies potential profit
- 3y ago
- twodave 3y agoAnyone else a bit skeptical of the “time to having a live product” timeline of many of these companies? Maybe I’m wrong, but e.g. there’s no way Gusto produced a working managed payroll product in a month. There must have been either been significant pieces of their product that were pre-existing or else they built an interface to someone else’s product.
- lennysan 3y agoGood call, I’m going to dig into this further.
- mousetree 3y agoKent Beck worked at Gusto. He was a signatory of the Agile Manifesto. Therefore MVP in 1 month. /s
- twodave 3y agoI love me some Kent Beck, and I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I doubt he was interviewed for this article. 1 month for that kind of a product is short enough that it’s either a clerical error or someone is BSing big time.
- chrismarlow9 3y agoBeware of step 2 to step 3. I call it "chasing the whale". The problem is the "whale company" knows they are a whale. You'll slowly watch your entire development timeline and features shift to benefit only them. Your company basically becomes a contractor for them to get X feature working (and nobody sees this feature being helpful to any other customer). You can't get rid of them because it looks terrible for funding that you dumped such big potential. Technical debt piles up from priority shift and then the whale is gone. You were only a POC for them, and in the wake of being side lined as a priority other customers leave. I've seen this happen multiple times.
- mlhpdx 3y agoOr, you get past the POC and “land” the whale. You take a deep discount on price to lock in the revenue. Now you have revenue, but insufficient to hire and grow. Rinse and repeat. All the debt (technical and financial) and a dim future.
- superfrank 3y agoI work for a multi-billion dollar publicly traded company and I've watched this happen to a new product that our org launched last year. One big customer set the direction early on and got used to us building exactly what they asked for. As we've gained more customers we're having to tell them no more and more often and they're getting less and less happy. We're locked in to a long contract so they're not leaving anytime soon, but it's turning into a constant battle with them.
- quickthrower2 3y agoSuch a lose lose. Even for the “spoiled brat” customer who would have been better off with well set expectations
- lennysan 3y agoVery important insight. Thanks for sharing it.
- xnorswap 3y ago
- akhayam 3y agoWhat an excellent post. I love the "first felt PMF" criterion which is the right way to think about it because, like validated by interviews in this blog, most of the times you remain unsure that you have actually found PMF... and that's perfectly ok!
- chrisrickard 3y agoLoved this post Lenny, and came at just the right time for me. My B2B SaaS Userdoc is going well, but certainly not at the growth level of those AI image generation apps I see all over Twitter
- acyou 3y agoGreat article. I would like to also know how close, or the closest time each of these companies felt to dying, or if they ever thought they wouldn't find PMF. Or when they knew they would get to PMF. Or if they always believed they would get to PMF. Is a dead company just the same as one that never found PMF? Is that how survivorship bias is accounted for?
- istillwritecode 3y agoGoogle went about two years until they showed their first ad. They initially thought they would be providing search to companies for their intranet.
- etaioinshrdlu 3y agoAre there any interesting details about the intranet search products?
- nrp 3y agoGoogle Search Appliances: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Search_Appliance
- mkl 3y agoLaunched in 2002, when their revenue was over 400 million, and well after they had ads.
- mdekkers 3y agoThe yellow google search appliance was cool at the time.
- mkl 3y ago> They initially thought they would be providing search to companies for their intranet. Really? Page and Brin were focused on public web pages and links from before Google existed, through their PhD research [1], so switching to intranet seems strange. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bennyelv 3y agoGreat inspiring article, but I think there’s much more nuance in reality that it doesn’t address. My company (we’re multi-product) has been working on a new product that ticks a lot of the boxes that are proposed here, but that is still nowhere near PMF. There are > 100 paying customers who pay ~$30k for the product. There is a small set of these customers who absolutely love the product. That’s steps 1-3 done. But… Overall retention is low (varies between 55-60%). Sales are pretty flat and seem like a real struggle. Customer acquisition cost is 130-150%. Just because you got these first 3 milestones doesn’t mean that the rest naturally follow. My view on this product stalling is that it doesn’t really get the results that the customers think it’s going to and they cool on the idea and stop using it, but… you have companies like Snowflake that went to market claiming to be the one data platform to rule them all, which was also a large over-promise (it’s more expensive, slower, complicated than what they promised) but it grew explosively and IPOed. Even towards the end of the journey that this article describes there’s still major rolls of the dice that affect the outcome.
- withinboredom 3y ago> But… Overall retention is low (varies between 55-60%). Assuming you have a yearly terms (which you should, if at all possible), try to identify customers who might churn (using the product less, etc.) and spend some time with them -- literally, just send them an email to hop on a call. Try to understand why they are using the product less. Do the same with the ones who love you. Figure out what is different. Usually, this will grow into a "customer success" role, but it has to start somewhere.
- jchnxu 3y agoI have read about the journey of Figma and actually watched their CEO's early video call and their CTO's github WebGL demos. It's an amazing 5yrs
- greatNespresso 3y agoCool viz, yet I find the timeline misleading for some companies. Taking segment for example, sure, the moment they pivoted to CDP kind of business they reached PmF quite fast. But that happened only a year after their initial idea. They kept building and failing until they finally got the segment idea and famous Show HN.
- kwanbix 3y agoSide Note for Lenny, in case he is reading: whenever I try to add my email, I get "We were unable to validate your email domain". Of course my email is valid. I just use a forwarder email address, mixed with a catch all, so that I can do lenny.newslette@myexampledomain.com. But your website would not accept it. It is the only ever website that rejects it. Of course I would never give my real email.
- dustincoates 3y agoThat's strange. I do the same thing and Substack (and specifically Lenny's newsletter) accepts it okay.
- lennysan 3y agoOh hi! That's very strange indeed. Have you tried emailing Substack support? I'm not doing anything weird here.
- remram 3y agoIf you're using escribime dot com (as per your profile page), you're missing an MX record. Software will usually default to the A record in this case but that's not exactly standard. edit: it also refused my connection on port 25
- marcus_holmes 3y agoUtterly pointless because he didn't interview failed startups about how they felt. It's like doing an experiment and only counting the "successful" results - this is worse than "bad science", it's intentionally misleading science that actually sets us back. We really don't need any more survivor bias. Please go interview some failed startup founders. There might have been a crucial difference in step 2 of these 5 steps that successful founders did and failed founders didn't, but we won't know about it because there's no data from failed founders.
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoI guess if the point is to find out How long it took different companies to find product-market fit (title of the submission) you could argue that failed startups never found it?
- quickthrower2 3y agoMedian, mode and mean time: infinity
- boringg 3y agoI agree with OP - lots of survivorship bias here. To be fair to the author - going through the heaps of companies that didn't make it would be a sig more work. Most likely the failed companies didn't find it but possibly were close or other issues sank the company. Curious actually if there are companies that found product market fit and didn't survive. That's an interesting group.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoYou’re assuming that there’s a population of companies that failed, but also had PMF This is a contradiction as PMF is defined as having BOTH successful business relationship and product used. Where are these failed companies with useful products that people are using?
- cainxinth 3y agoI asked gpt your question: > Achieving PMF is just one stage of a startup's journey. Once PMF is achieved, the company still needs to scale, navigate competition, manage its finances well, adapt to changing market conditions, etc. Mistakes in any of these areas could lead to failure even with a strong PMF. > For example, one of the first successful smartwatches, Pebble had a great product-market fit with a passionate user base. Yet, they struggled against larger competitors like Apple and Fitbit and eventually had to sell their IP and shut down.
- falcor84 3y ago>If you build it, they will come—if you have strong product-market fit. That's Tautology of the Year material.
- ethanbond 3y agoAll startup advice is either tautological or so ambiguous as to be as true as its opposite. The reason is that no one actually knows how to do this stuff. No one has identified what ingredient or set of ingredients distinguishes successes from failures, except for rapidly learning and pivoting (but but of course you can’t pivot too quickly, as this graph shows!)
- paulsutter 3y agoNotice that products get more amazing towards the bottom of the chart. Building a great product is the challenge. Once you choose target customer and problem to solve, PMF is trivial but the hard work is still ahead. iPhone, Falcon 9, Starlink - none of these ever pondered PMF. They set out to build the most batshit amazing product for a specific purpose, and you can add Figma to that list The whole concept of PMF seems to be based on the lottery-ticket view of startups, "I don't know who is the customer or what they need, but someday I will randomly stumble across it".
- thenerdhead 3y agoIt is a cool visualization. I really wonder if the classic flaw of "what even is PMF" goes to show here. You can somewhat see that once you get past the first few companies.
- asadotzler 3y agoI worked on Mozilla for 6 years before we shipped Firefox 1.0 which had solid product market fit.
- killjoywashere 3y agoWow, the s curve for "first felt PMF" around 2 years really drives home Dan Luu's observation that discontinuities are usually there because of some externality https://danluu.com/discontinuities/ https://danluu.com/discontinuities/
- fogx 3y agomultiple quotes mentioned tracking early user activity on a very granular level. Any recommendations for such analytics? I know only hotjar
- dvvolynkin 3y agoI'm surprised at how long it took them all to get to the 'Live product' stage.