Inevitable: The Day Zero Handbook for Founders by Jeff Becker & David Hunt

Author:Jeff Becker & David Hunt [Becker, Jeff & Hunt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Antler US Fund
Published: 2023-02-28T22:00:00+00:00

USE FIRST PRINCIPLES TO FIND YOUR PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

PMF will look different for different companies. Not every company is B2B software, not every company is B2C, or DTC, or a marketplace. Some founders will think about product led growth, others will think about enterprise sales, and some will think about consumer apps. The essay, 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly is a really good one, because even though it's B2C focused, no matter who you are—B2C, B2B, or anything else—you need to find your first true fans. They share the same first principles: find people who love what you do and will tell other people about what you do. This will drive organic growth so your first customers and your earliest efforts create leverage and begin spinning your flywheel.

A lot of founders will take money from any investor on the basis of needing resources to hire, build, market, and sell. That may work for some, but the better approach in our opinion is to go slow to go fast, understanding your customers deeply and building for them. Done that way, fundraising becomes much easier.

To find product-market fit and to raise capital, there is only one path, and that is, as Steve Martin says, “be so good they can’t ignore you.”

Of course there are countless articles on the topic, some of which you’ll find at the end of the chapter, but one of our favorites comes from Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra, and below are the cliff notes:

If you can measure product-market fit, you can optimize for it

Reverse engineer your process to find a leading indicator

Measure your leading indicator. In Superhuman’s case, it is the percentage of people who answer “very disappointed” to the question of “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?”

Set a benchmark of what good looks like. Sean Ellis suggests 40% where Hiten Shah measured this question for Slack users, and found that more than half (51%) would be “very disappointed” to lose Slack

Survey users to measure your PMF metric and learn more about your ideal customer profile (ICP)

Segment your users by responses to narrow your focus and improve your understanding of the personas

Determine your High-Expectation Customers and their “why”

Turn on-the-fence customers into fanatics

Disregard non-believers for now and double down on the features your users love

Repeat the process for continuous improvement on a path to finding PMF

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