Product Market Fit

As we progress in our projects and come further and further in developing our business plans for our product/services I thought it might be helpful to go back to the beginning: Product Market Fit. This idea is crucial for any product or services survival. The person you originally thought would like your product may not but you may find another market segment that does.  So how does one find product market fit and when does one know you have achieved product market fit?

I’ll address knowing when one has found product market fit. This past week I had the chance to talk to a friend’s friend, Donald Desantis. Donald, is a serial entrepreneur who’s latest venture, Hightower, just finished a funding round of about ~2 Mill. I discussed finding product market fit with him and how do you know when you have it so that you can start to scale your idea. He had one simple line “if you’re asking yourself if you have product market fit, you don’t.” Plain and simple. He said he gets asked this question all the time and wondered himself as well. So he set out to ask successful entrepreneurs and said they basically all gave him some version of that answer.

So how does one go about finding out their product market fit? Well one way is to do surveys, another is a customer interview, another is a user interview. To aid in the development of my idea I have been participating in IdeaLab, collaboration between Heinz and Tepper to act as a incubator of sorts for social ventures. This week was the first week I could make it and fortunately no one else was able to. So I had two MBA students all to myself for two hours to provide me with advice and guidance on my idea. They provided me with some great advice on creating surveys for product validation, which I will share with you.

1.     Have a hypothesis about certain things about your product that you believe to be true. However, this does not mean have a hypothesis about who you think would like your product. If you do that you will have a bias to prove that is the case.

2.     You want to collect demographic info and behavioral info

3.     The last question should always focus on would you pay X amount for X product

4.     Try not to go above 15 questions

5.     Use qualtrics (a website we all have access to I believe) it has a huge amount of pre designed questions that are good about avoiding bias.

6.     You want at least 100 people to fill out your survey

7.     The people filling out your survey should not be only your facebook friends. Chances are they are very homogenous from a behavioral and demographic standpoint.

8.     So how do you get 100 people to fill out the survey who are not your friends? Use the school, ask people on campus to fill it out, circulate to classes, etc.  Another great way is to use twitter. Ask random people such as famous entrepreneurs if they will retweet your survey link. You would be surprised at the amount of positive response you can get for this.

After you complete your survey you can get a good picture of who your ideal user might be and what their price point is.  From here you can target that ideal user and have one-on-one interviews with them. In this way you can help get closer to knowing if you have product market fit.