15 Product–market fit: Making sure the dogs will eat your dog food
This chapter covers
- What is the law of startup success, and what is the most important factor for success? Answer: market!
- How should you think about determining your product–market fit?
- No startup is ever successful without PMF. Do you have a companywide obsession to achieve it?
Proving PMF is what defines the success of a startup. There are things in a startup you can work on and improve, and there are things you can’t. The most common thing a startup can’t fix later is PMF. Get this wrong, and it is difficult to back up and go at it again fast enough before your cash runway gets too short (see anecdote 18, “Burn rate and runway—or, where is the edge of that cliff?”). Stating this more positively, if you get PMF right and your customers (aka “the dogs”) like your product (aka “your dog food”) so much that they will buy it (aka “eat it”), your chance of success is very high.
On this topic, I will share quotes from two very good sources:
- A blog post from Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of Netscape (the first widely used web browser) and Andreessen Horowitz (one of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capital firms)1
- Andy Rachleff, the founder of Benchmark Capital and a professor at Stanford Business School, who coined the term product–market fit and created Rachleff’s Law of Startup Success, which I outline later2