Market Fit Quotes

Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.

I don't understand how you can have product-market fit and not a lot of people wanting your product. The two go hand-in-hand.

Startup success is driven most by the product passion, quality, vision, team-work and persistence of the founding team and the talent that the team attracts.

Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.

A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

Most entrepreneurs think capital is the biggest problem they have - but it's not. You can have all the capital you want, but if the market fit and ability to adjust are not present, your startup will likely not succeed.

I think, when I see entrepreneurs, they tend to talk about the market and the industry - which is obviously very important, but the most important thing is you're product. What are you selling? And does it really have product-market fit?

The key to growing a business is that you need to be meeting some segment of the consumer's needs. If you've got a small business and a product or service that is not popular, you simply have to change your product or service to be more popular.

Advertising and promotion alone will not sustain a bad product or a product that is not right for the times.

It typically takes multiple iterations and pivots to find product/market fit - the match between what you're building and who will buy it.

Having the ability to be brutally honest with yourself is the greatest challenge you face when creating a business model. Too often we oversell ourselves on the quality of the idea, service, or product. We don't provide an honest assessment of how we fit in the market, why customers will buy from us, and at what price.

Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup's new product and its market.

Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.

You can always change your branding or hire lawyers, but it's critical that you figure out if you have product market fit, and if you don't, figure out how to course-correct without getting stuck.

Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.

I was criticized a lot when I was singing in Korean. The producers and people from my agency would point out my accent and tones, and would tell me I sound too American to fit the local market.