Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com