I like this video because of the emphasis on the role our psychology plays in the search for product-market fit. Understanding people/users well - what they mean when they say "this is interesting" is really important. Systematic de-biasing of our own mind is an important idea in this talk.
Richard Feynman's famous conclusion to his report on the shuttle Challenger accident said "Nature cannot be fooled"-similarly, markets/users cannot be fooled. Either a product or service solves their problem or it doesn't. Anything in between needs to questioned carefully and observed (in an unbiased way) closely. Feynman also says "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool". Same idea as Peter's -- and a very important one!
I wish more founders talked about "what product-market fit feels like" (once they found it) - because only with enough samples, new startup founders can better understand whether they have achieved pm-fit. However, I wish video shouldn't be mistaken for thinking: "my Show HN post tanked, so I don't have pm-fit". I think it is worthwhile trying to understand what he means. It is quite clear when you really solve a problem that someone else has. It is also a great feeling.
One of the reasons why finding pm-fit is hard is because there are too many variables. Peter simplifies it to some extent when he says that while searching, one must be clear if you are changing the market or the product. This is correct, but in reality, these adjustments are quite subtle. So paying close attention to these constant/rapid adjustments (stepping back and thinking about them) is quite important.
I like the conclusion of his talk: you will know when you find it.
I wonder if there are any hugely successful companies that experienced in more subtle, gradual way. Instead of that one moment when they were overwhelmed by inquiries from prospective customers, they ground away slowly and steadily with hard-working sales and marketing teams. Instead of one big hockey stick moment, they just grew sales by 70% every year, year after year.
We launched with just enough features to serve a single client. For a while, each new client needed something more. After something like a year we were able to onboard some new clients without changing anything about the software -- that's when I felt confident we were onto something. Nevertheless we didn't suddenly experience a deluge of customers, phones ringing off the hook. Perhaps sales got easier, onboarding got easier, people had heard of us already. But even as we were growing by several times each year, we were still "slogging it out", doing the work.
http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/02/gail-goodman-constant-...
What he says just makes sense. There are no real metrics to describe it. I'l know when I find it.
The talk does a good job explaining how to identify PMF (i.e. how to tell fake PMF apart from real PMF), but unfortunately doesn't do much explaining on how to find it.
"I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?” Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target."
Peter and his colleague showed up and walked me through using Segment. The told me that I was the only one using their API via curl and that they were impressed with what I had been able to cobble together so quickly.
Peter took out a tiny Moleskine-type notebook and drew a diagram of what was next on the roadmap for Segment. I recall how neat and detailed the diagram was and how thoughtful Peter was about what he was doing next.
Peter and his colleague also revealed to me a sort of sister company they were familiar with that was creating an API around professional identity as a service. This sounded a lot like https://www.fullcontact.com/ but was something else.
I've since moved on from focusing on that type of data. HN seems to feature a fair amount of content about Segment. I enjoy keeping up with their progress and wish them all well.
In fact, there's been so many show hn's that have been way way way way more successful and I have seen nothing from them.
