Product Zeitgeist Fit: A Cheat Code for Spotting and Building the Next Big Thing | Andreessen Horowitz

Founders: Find something that is both important to you and resonates with a group of people at this particular moment in time. In the early days you’ll need to frame your story—to recruits, to partners, to investors, and to the entire outside world—along those lines. Talk about why your company matters, not just what it does. Make sure your product... See more

I’ve observed, both as a founder and in our conversations with startups, that finding product market fit is frustratingly vague: Everyone tells you you need it, but offer only hazy generalities on how to get there. Most guidance boils down to “listen to your users.” Good advice, but it still leaves open the question of how to get those critical fir... See more

Most startups die not because they can’t get their tech to work or because their competition out-executes them. The death of most startups is indifference. Put simply, most companies fail to launch because no one cares: not users, not employees, not investors, and certainly not the media. It’s death by a thousand shrugs.

These things tend to be generational; they’re reactionary; and they’re usually organized around a really compelling villain. Because we always seem to react against the unintended consequences, excesses, and blind spots of the previous generation, the zeitgeist is constantly changing. That means there’s always going to be an opening for innovators ... See more

The fact is that people need a different motivation to try something new, something that connects with them emotionally rather than functionally. It’s a seemingly simple idea can create powerful business advantages, a concept I call product zeitgeist fit (PZF): when a product resonates with the mood of the times. It’s the thing that makes users and... See more

When you have PZF, the product resonates with users not because it’s better, but because it feels extremely culturally relevant at that particular moment in time for a particular group of people. Users may or may not love your product, but for some reason they want it to win. Maybe because they hate the competitor with the “better” product. Maybe i... See more