Whether it’s written out as Product-Market Fit or Product/Market Fit, you need to understand and have it for your marketing program to be successful.
Every smart marketer knows that they can always find creative ways to market. But if you really want to scale a business, then that business really has to know it’s product-market fit.
So WTF is it?
Way back in June 2007, our hero of the VC world, Marc Andreessen, coined this term/concept as follows:
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
– Marc Andreessen on his blog, PMARCA
Ok, you’re probably thinking: duh, that’s really great, but…
How does this factor into the grand scheme of things?
Well… there’s 3 important parts of a business:
- Market
- Team
- Product
I’m not going to regurgitate Marc Andreessen’s famous post, but can you guess which of the 3 parts is the most important (hint: I put them in order)?
In this instance, I firmly believe and agree with Andreessen that you can have the best product in the world, but if you have no market for it… you’re screwed. How do I know this and agree with this? Because I’ve launched a great product to market and there was NO DEMAND. It was embarrassing that product-market fit wasn’t established by the time we launched it. And what made it worse, is somehow I nearly lost my job for it (and I wasn’t even working at the company when the initial concept first came to light!).
So why market, then team, then product?
As Andreessen mentions, you have the following scenarios:
- Have a shitty market & great team, you lose
- Have a great market & shitty team, you lose
- Have a great market & great team, then you can win or “magic happens!”
Wait, what about product?
Well, you need a viable product that works. Once you have that in a great market, the demand will push the great team to develop the product to be… well, great!
So why is this important?
If you don’t have product-market fit, no matter what marketing program you put in place, you will hit a wall. Sure, some leads will come in, but if the market is not great and has no demand for the product, you cannot create magic. No matter however great the marketing program or marketer.
To learn more and go far more in depth than I can take you, take a look at the suggested reading below – enjoy!
Some “light” reading
- “The PMARCA Guide to Start-ups – Part 4: The only thing that matters” by Marc Andreessen, June 2007
- “Product/Market Fit: What it really means, How to Measure it, and Where to find it” by Evergreen Business Fortnightly, July 2015
- “Zero to Product/Market Fit (Presentation)” by Andrew Chen, 2018
Header photo by Vladimir Proskurovskiy on Unsplash