Product-Market Fit is a Moving Target 🎯

Sometimes it moves fast, sometimes it moves slow

Feb 01, 2024

Dear GTM Strategist!

This edition of our Substack is dedicated to the holy grail of go-to-market: finding Product-Market Fit (PMF) and successfully crossing the chasm, which over 95% of innovation will not.

It is best to learn from those 5% who have gone through the journey.

Let’s hear it from Enzo Avigo, CEO at June.so

In the latest episode of the GTM Strategist Podcast, I interviewed Enzo Avigo. 🎙

Enzo previously worked as a Product Leader at Intercom, N26, and Zalando SE.

He co-founded a next-generation analytics platform for B2B SaaS businesses June.so, which became a smashing success on Product Hunt and they were also admitted to Y-Combinator.

Enzo has many interesting PMF lessons to share with you:

In saturated categories such as analytics, martech, logistics and CRMs with long and complicated onboarding cycles, trust takes long to build. This is why it is essential to launch with a product that really delivers on customers’ expectations. To learn that, we need to do a lot of customer discovery and have analytics properly in place early on.
He believes that proof of monetization is an integral part of PMF for most companies. Their most active early adopters were indie developers, while users who displayed a high willingness to pay were actually B2B SaaS businesses. This insight was very important for their positioning and growth.
They won the first 100 users through recommendations within their circles, network such as Y Combinator, and with outbound. Only later on did they start using content marketing - social media and experiential platforms such as Product Hunt. To this day, June.so gets 20% of customers from LinkedIn.

And much more.

I am so pumped to share an interview with Enzo with you.

Enzo is also an early-stage startup and product management opinion leader on LinkedIn - check him out. He shared his content creation and building in public process with you.

PMF is not a linear process. It is a cycle.

Based on Lenny Rachitsky's research, the median time from an idea to feeling product-market fit is roughly 2 years.

There are signals you can observe beforehand, but it takes time and iterations.

There are very few shortcuts.

Often, early-stage companies here in Europe build their products almost in isolation and then hire marketing agencies to secure early traction.

“When it does not work out, it is easy to pull out the “there was no product-market fit” card. We first need to create awareness.”

Bullshit. If there is a burning pain and need for the product - and there almost always is a segment that has it - you just need to find it, nail the positioning/messaging, the business model/offer, and the channel to reach them. Oh, and make sure that your product delivers a great added value to it.

That takes iterations, and it is mostly you who have the best chance to ensure that all the learnings are properly captured and implemented in the next iterations.

How about when things are broken, and you feel like the cycle is cursed?

Start fixing it.

My optimistic belief is that any product deserves a fair fighting chance and that there is an audience for anything. Our job is to find it.

(Also, for most teams, it is much more expensive to change products than messaging.)

When you are examining the lack of PMF, here is a little cheat sheet that can help you choose your battles and prioritize experiments. Rule of thumb:

If you cannot even get people to the website or to the calls, you have a targeting/channel/messaging problem. Good news - these problems can be fixed.
If you can get the people on the calls or website, you might have the wrong offer, or you have attracted the wrong people.
Not before you actually have an activation/retention change in the product can you dive in there. You need to give a product a fighting chance before whining “no product-market fit.”

En garde!

PMF is a mysterious animal with many moving particles. Almost no one understands it right from the start.

Every discovery that you make on the journey to securing product-market fit takes you a little closer to the holy grail. Celebrate those milestones and be structured and strategic in your learnings.

I very much believe in product vision and there are some things that we just will not do because it is not in our product DNA. Balancing the product vision and market feedback becomes an art of the founder that sets fundamentals for exceptional business and a strong brand.

Enzo said:

“One of our competitors gets a significant amount of leads with a 140+ page e-book on how to understand metrics. It is an extremely successful marketing tool for them, but we will never do it, because it is anti-June.so philosophy that analytics should be easy. We are building plug-and-play “Google Analytics” for products. Time to value has to be low, and 140+ page e-book is not on-vision for us.”

Voila, another indication that the best GTM Strategy is proprietary.

Back to work:

Your turn:

Use at least one measurement of Product-Market Fit and monitor it regularly
Enjoy the GTM Strategist Podcast with Enzo Avigo (links below) - it is one of my favorite episodes ever. He shares examples, is completely down to earth and gives smart tips on how to kick off your journey to PMF. Trust me, it is worth your time.

My turn:

This week we are closing the applications for the GTM Strategist Bootcamp B2B edition with Ognjen Bošković. We are very happy with the group and we will start on February 7th. If you would like to join, we can still squeeze a spot or two: https://encouraging-booth-c0f.notion.site/1d0d2b52f91447cba4019e11a30af545
If you have not read or rated the GTM Strategist yet, that would be the best gift to me in February, which is my b-day month.

Let’s go to market!

Maja Voje

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