Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

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This article argues that PMF doesn't exist. Oh and if it does exist, it's not clear when it is achieved. And if you have it, you can lose it. Oh and even if you don't lose it, it doesn't guarantee success.

Whenever I hear arguments for or against something structured like this, I'm immediately skeptical. You see this with people promoting vegan diets. It's better for the environment, and healthier, and meat is gross and gives you ED, and... Sure maybe all those things are true, but what are the odds the author doesn't just have a point of view that he's trying to sell desperately.

Product market fit obviously exists. In my experience, I was at a startup and we had pretty much no sales or usage for about 9 months. Then we pivoted and pretty much overnight we had a few users and 100k ARR within a month or two. Does this mean it would succeed or we couldn't fumble and lose it? Of course not, but that's obvious.

PMF a useful framework to think about your product and question the value proposition you're offering. Take feedback from the market. If no one is using the product, its possible the market has no need for your product.

Agree but there are important points that the article doesn't address while trying to be very assertive, including:

- At the core of PMF is the idea that you are producing something novel in some business and/or technical aspect, NOT that your are selling a product or service that already exists and PMF is there. For example, if you want to compete with Salesforce you already know there is a PMF, it is a CRM! Your startup will have issues with GTM because PMF is already there.

- PMF is always risky. Not only for startups but also for corporations. GSE is the top search engine and one day OpenAI eats part of their cake. This is the innovation dilemma at play all the time. It is obvious that a startup will have a different financial impact from a moving PMF.

Finally, these discussions are fruitful when you start with more formal definitions [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product-market_fit

Respectfully disagree with this comment

“At the core of PMF is the idea that you are producing something novel in some business and/or technical aspect, NOT that your are selling a product or service that already exists and PMF is there. For example, if you want to compete with Salesforce you already know there is a PMF, it is a CRM!”

PMF is not about building something novel. It is about ensuring your product solves a real and critical problem for your target segment. Only customers are the experts on their problems and priorities. Entrepreneurs are experts on solving problems but we too often solve the wrong problems in elaborate ways.

Salespeople buy Salesforce today because everyone else buys Salesforce. CRMs come in all shapes and sizes. To find PMF for your CRM you need to niche down to find a segment that is underserved by Salesforce.

You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their experience around specific problem areas without ever mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific solution is likely to bias your subject. This is hard for founders as we tend to fall in love with our ideas and often slip into pitch mode mid-interview. This is a fundamental mistake.

I am glad to continue the discussion and narrow it as much as possible:

Please forget the "novel" meaning for a while, and let's continue with the CRM example. I am a Hubspot customer now. As most companies we have used spreadsheets, vTiger [1], SugarCRM [2], among other apps. My main point was that if they are not/were succesful by the HN startup definition is because they had issues in the GTM not in PMF and this is a common confusion. There was always PMF for CRMs the problem is marketing/selling them. That market is so huge and known that thinking in PMF is deviating the attention from just selling! That is what my "middle east business side" says.

[1] https://www.vtiger.com/

[2] https://www.sugarcrm.com/

You are essentially saying that some people oversimplify and equate traction, GTM, and PMF.

As you note, lack of PMF can be a reason why there isn’t traction, but it isn’t the only reason.

You can have a good GTM and good PMF and still have poor traction for a number of reasons.

Ultimately failure or success often comes down to traction, which is all of GTM, PMF, and customer retention/expansion working.

Thank you, and because you named traction, I remember the book from DDG's founder Gabriel Weinberg [1], that was previous to his success.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

I don't exactly see it this way - "You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their experience around specific problem areas without ever mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific solution is likely to bias your subject."

Sometimes the entrepreneur needs to expand the possibility space, rather than just addressing an "unmet need". There's the Jobs-ism about figuring out what the customer is going to want before they do. Thiel also talks in Zero to One about some of the biggest innovations not spawning from customer feedback or lean methodology.

I wouldn't say that GPT addressed a problem I had per se. It just created a whole new set of activities I wanted to try.

“This article argues that PMF doesn't exist. Oh and if it does exist, it's not clear when it is achieved. And if you have it, you can lose it. Oh and even if you don't lose it, it doesn't guarantee success.”

I would argue that these claims are all accurate, but with the clarification that PMF does exist, but on a spectrum, not as a binary state”

See my comment further downthread where I lay out a framework for determining your degree of PMF ideally BEFORE building anything, so you don’t waste time/money/effort on building the wrong thing because you think you ‘know what the market needs.’

If the only way you can validate PMF is by building something and then realizing no one is using it, you have wasted time and effort that would have been better spent validating PMF before building.

Yes exactly, it absolutely occurs on a spectrum. You can feel the difference in a startup when no one wants what you're selling, when some people are pretty into it but most people don't care, and when everyone has to have it.

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