False Positives and Service-Market Fit

Growing without product-market fit robs you of agility. Agility allows you to iterate. If you can’t iterate fast enough, you won’t get to product-market fit.Here is my suggestion to founders of tech-enabled services: don’t grow until you achieve product-market fit. Get a few customers in the door to start, then move any further demand to a waitlist... See more

The bad part is that you can fool yourself into thinking you have product-market fit. You have a product (the “tech”) to go along with (or “enable”) your service, but are people buying your service because of the accompanying product?

With service-market fit, there is little market risk. Tech-enabled services generally start out as just services that use existing technology well. You’re not testing a hypothesis by offering a service that other people already offer - you know there is demand for what you’re selling.

Once you know your product actually makes your service 10x better along some dimension, then grow. Don’t fall prey to temptation (or pressure from your investors) to grow before then.