This article originally appeared in Forbes.
It’s one of the first and most important questions faced by every entrepreneur: “How do I find product-market fit?” Product-market fit (PMF) defines when you've delivered a product your market wants with overwhelmingly clear proof. Part of what makes it so elusive is that it’s extremely tempting as a founder to delude yourself into believing you’ve achieved PMF when you haven’t.
Why? Because, as a founder, you want so badly for it to be true. But wanting something to be true isn't the same as it being true. This becomes a particularly real problem when you start hiring, increase your burn and optimize for scale before you’ve proven without a doubt that you’ve made something people want.
One way of avoiding this scenario is to understand the scientific model that underlies PMF.
Defining the significance of product-market fit
A common response by first-time founders to the idea of PMF is that it seems obvious. After all, what can be so profound about the argument that you should be making something people want?
Here’s what’s profound about it: It’s not that it matters because, obviously, it does. It’s how little almost everything else matters in comparison to the early days of building a startup.
When you start a company, you have what feels like infinite freedom and flexibility. You can direct your time, attention and energy to working on almost anything. But it’s precisely because of this freedom that it’s supremely easy to get distracted or lose sight of what matters. When you could spend your next hour writing code, talking to users, doing research, networking, hiring or any number of other things, how should you prioritize?
At this earliest stage of company-building, PMF should serve as your North Star. It’s a forcing function for asking yourself what the highest-leverage actions are that you can take—in prioritized order—that will drive the most meaningful progress toward proving or disproving product-market fit. Talking to customers, building your product, hiring and raising capital are all levers for achieving PMF rather than the end goals in and of themselves.
A scientific model for product-market fit
I grew up in a family of scientists. This shaped much of what we talked about around the dining table, as well as my worldview. Science is more than just any specific discipline like biology or physics—it’s a framework for truth-seeking. It teaches you an experimental, probabilistic and open-minded way of looking at the world.
Science has a lot in common with the world of startups. Like science, embarking on a startup is ultimately an exercise in truth-seeking. You have a market. You have a hypothesis about a problem you think the market faces—a problem you believe you can solve in a significantly better way. That hypothesis is your startup. The onus is on you to prove your hypothesis correct or incorrect.
Building a company is a scientific journey of proving hypothesis after hypothesis: product-market fit, your business model, future product lines, future markets, your long-term strategy and defensibility, your long-term vision and so on. In effect, product-market fit is the first hypothesis you must prove.
Like any other hypothesis, this means it has a few key characteristics.
1. It's fundamentally probabilistic. It might be right, or it might be wrong. You can visualize this as a probability on a spectrum that changes over time as you learn, ship and iterate. This takes a certain humility to internalize because it’s in human nature to get attached to our ideas—to want to believe we’re right even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
2. Your confidence in what's true changes as you learn. You can increase your conviction about whether your hypothesis is right or wrong by talking to customers, doing market research, understanding what’s painful and knowing where technology is today and where it’s headed. Those things bring you closer to the truth and increase your chance of being less wrong over time.
3. It's testable. Ultimately, this means shipping a product or service and figuring out if people want it or not. There’s a market reality out there; your goal is to understand it.
The market is where reality hits—and can hurt. Your market doesn’t care about how passionate or opinionated you are about your idea, how many hours you’ve worked on it or how articulate you are about it. It’s easy to talk about whether you think something is a good idea or not. The ultimate judgment of whether you’re right or wrong is achieved only through the act itself of building a product or service and seeing whether it succeeds.
The uncontrollable variables of a startup
There's one notable difference between scientific and startup hypotheses. In science, if you've set up your experiment correctly, you're essentially casting your question out into the universe and leaving it up to the universe to tell you whether you were right or wrong.
Startups are a bit different. Success depends as much on the universe that's your market as it does on your own execution. You get to control what you build, how you build it and how you distribute it.
When users love your product and growth takes off, it’s obvious that you’ve proven your hypothesis correct. But when these things aren’t happening yet, it will be agonizing. Why isn't it working? Is it because of your execution? Or is this your market trying to tell you something and rejecting your startup’s hypothesis?
Unfortunately, there’s no surefire way to find an answer. Until you’ve either succeeded, pivoted or given up, these questions will endlessly keep you up at night. You have to develop your own conviction and answer as to whether you should keep trying or change hypotheses. Just remember to stay focused on that ultimate goal: overwhelmingly clear proof you’ve delivered a product your market wants.
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