Dear startup founders & product builders,

The whole idea of "product-market fit," i.e. that there's some magical, universal, knowable tipping point for when you should stop improving your product and start marketing it, is dumb.

A thread.

Sometime in early 2000s, VC-types wanted a way to say:

"I don't think your product resonates w potential buyers, but I'd rather not give you a metric, b/c then you might cross that hurdle, and it'll be awkward when I say no again."

Thus, "product-market fit" was born.

The idea made its way around Silicon Valley and into the blogs+books of the era (including, most famously, The Lean Startup).

This adoption by startup world led to every founder chasing the illusive "product-market fit," even though it has no clear, consistent demarcation.

VCs wrote blog posts and think pieces with graphics like this one.

PMFit lets someone dismiss a potential investment in your company, because you were "too revenue-centric" or "too sexy story." And what could you say or do in response? Nothing!

Precisely the point.

But "product-market fit" makes us do really dumb things, like:
A) Wait to do marketing until product is a "fit"
B) Chase a nebulous gut feel from investors
C) Look for data to fit a narrative

and, perhaps worst,

D) Largely ignore product after achieving the mythical "fit"

Let's get real.

The whole concept of a binary "yes" vs. "no" for product-market fit simply doesn't exist, and isn't helpful.

It's obviously a spectrum. Some products resonate more for some customers than others. So what? How does that help us?

Say we discard the binary and use a spectrum instead.

What can or should you do differently if your product is a 65/100 on some scale of customer-resonance vs. 45/100 or 85/100?

Again, it feels... like a useless concept (at least for founders, builders, & marketers).

Feels obvious that, instead, we should approach an exercise like this as a way to solve strategic problems: to choose what things to invest and not invest in.

How might we do that?

1) Split up customers/potential customers into segments
2) Figure out where and with whom we have opportunity
3) Make decisions about what kind of product or marketing investments to make, and when.

Delighted a customer group, but very few potential customers like them even know about you? Go full-throttle on brand marketing.

Have a high-opportunity group your product doesn't yet resonate with? Solve that before you spend more marketing energy on them.

If you're an investor with a gut feel, that's cool. Say "my gut's telling me not to invest, sorry." But don't build an indefinable, behavior-biasing concept just to get out of a hard talk.

And if you're a founder, ignore that investor drek. Build for & market to customers.

I wrote a whole blog post about this last night with more detail: https://sparktoro.com/blog/product-market-fit-is-a-broken-concept-theres-a-better-way/

But Twitter (obvs) likes to show you tweets without links that keep you here on their site. It's how they got product-market fit.