Friday, August 08, 2014

Does your SaaS startup have product/market fit?

Product/market fit is a topic that I've touched on a few times on this blog. It's that extremely crucial but somewhat hard to define (and even harder to measure) step which every startup needs to cross as it goes from an idea to a product to a real, scalable business. It's also a very important concept for us at Point Nine Capital since we tend to look for some level of proof of product/market fit when we evaluate potential investments.

Sean Jacobsohn of Emergence Capital has just published an excellent post titled "Here’s how to find out if your cloud startup has product-market fit". It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that you've found product/market fit, and Sean's post mentions some of the most important of these pitfalls. "All my customers are fellow startups in my incubator class" might be an obvious one, but there are also less obvious ones. :-)

I like Sean's article so much that I've turned it into a Typeform. 

So, if you're curious how your SaaS startup is doing in terms of product/market fit on a scale of 5-25, answer these five questions!


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2 comments:

  1. dfg11:06 PM

    thanks صب واى

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  2. Florian Dorfbauer9:02 PM

    I was always unhappy with the fluffy term "product market fit" until I came across Alex Schultz' lecture on growth on last year's "How to start a startup" lectures. Alex basically links the user retention curve with P/M fit and made P/M fit somehow measurable (at least qualitatively).

    Here's his core message:
    ".... if you look at this curve, ‘percent monthly active’ versus ‘number of days from acquisition’, if you end up with a retention curve that is asymptotic to a line parallel to the X-axis, you have a viable business and you have product market fit for some subset of market."

    http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/
    http://genius.com/Alex-schultz-lecture-6-growth-annotated

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