Why you should only focus on Product/Market fit ?

How do you define Product/Market Fit

At a high level: you have found product market fit when you can repeatably acquire customers for a lower cost than what they are worth to you. This is a simple business statement. Are your costs lower than your revenues? Are you profitable ?

For true, lasting, durable, product-market fit, you need:

1. Market: Enough people want your product
2. Business model: You can make a profit selling your product to these people
3. Growth engine: You can acquire these people sustainably

Market matters most

In the following article, Marc Andreessen makes the market is the first criteria of startup success, underlining :

• “In a great market, a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup ”
• “Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn’t matter—you’re going to fail”
• “And when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly.”

Before PMF you should be obsessed on getting it

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

<aside> 💭 “The only thing that matters is getting to it.” implies at the early stage of the startup you should focus solely on assessing, reviewing and validating your PMF and not on other operations (recruiting, scaling sales too early, non essential and costly engineering …)

</aside>