Product-Market Fit Quotes

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something that someone else needs, realize you're at a big disadvantage.

You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

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.

Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market - define your customers - then find or develop a product for them.

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.

One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.

Most startups are not just built for the person who is using them. When you do that, every now and then you get really lucky and... are representative of some huge class of people who all want the same thing you do... but very often that just turns into a side project that doesn't go anywhere.

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.

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?

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.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one. Get past the product market fit, figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem. So scaling, one through N, is figuring out can you do that at scale and how big is the scale. And when people pay you more than what it costs for you to make it, does that equation end up leaving you with money left over, i.e. profits.

There's nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year.

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

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.

Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.

Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.

My definition of product-market fit is you are drowning in demand - your product is being used by so many customers that you cannot handle all the new people knocking at your door!

For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core.

That's what we do when we work in Silicon Valley tech startups: We think about who's going to benefit from this. That's almost the only thing we think about.