#73 - Artisan Founders, PMF, and Honesty
Back with some thoughts on the hunt for product-market fit
TL;DR — for the people f*cking crazy enough to go do a startup, to make all the sacrifices, to take on all the stress, you owe it to yourself to be brutally honest with yourself about your achievements and how they might not be the achievements you need to achieve your dreams. Don’t congratulate yourselves too much for “traction.” For it does not mean you have product-market fit.
We all work hard and look for ways to confirm that we’re accomplishing what we set out to. I will never forget the constant need to “demonstrate value” in a former career, even when it was questionable if we were driving any.
So, in this drive to demonstrate value, one can become skilled at listing out the outputs. “I sent 100 e-mails to prospects last week!” “I created a new framework to help drive clarity” “We hired a new head of XYZ.” “We had 50 meetings last week!” …But what was actually achieved?
The best founders and leaders I’ve met and learned from focus on actual results and outcomes. But that’s not where they stop.
Maybe our outcomes, those oh-so-cherished accomplishments aren’t actually enough.
That might seem harsh, and certainly admitting that to yourself after working your ass off on something isn’t going to feel great, but it can be incredibly freeing to embrace reality.
What I’m saying here certainly applies to every one of us, but I’m going to shift for a moment to startups and the hunt for product-market fit for a minute.
Side note: Produt-Market Fit (PMF) is the point at which a product satisfies strong market demand, evidenced by high customer retention, organic growth, and time and cost-efficient acquisition, repeatably over time. Yes, this means a company can find PMF one quarter and then lose it the next.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve immersed myself in everything around PMF (I particularly enjoy PMF Method by First Round Capital and Arc by Sequoia Capital). One of my big takeaways from consuming and applying much of this content is that most people who think they have PMF don’t actually have it. They may have some degree of PMF, but not full-blown "dear god we cannot keep up or hire fast enough to meet demand" PMF.
You think people love and care about your product? They probably don’t.
You believe you have got the model dialed in because you’ve been working on it — achieving some outcomes — for a couple of years? Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re any closer to product-market fit. Don’t delude yourself
v20 of a product doesn’t mean it’s working. It just means you’re at v20
You think you can scale? Stop thinking about scale. You barely have any customers, and the ones you have are churning. Thinking about scale is almost always (but not always) a waste of time
You think this thing can get huge because people tell you how special it is? Maybe so. Maybe they’re just being nice to you because saying the nice things is easier than saying the hard things
In studying people who have been able to find and keep product-market fit, they embrace one thing early and obsess over it. The power of the pivot. Sure, some founders start off with a concept, and then that exact concept is what they scale into a huge outcome. However, most founders (at least the ones I know) pivoted their way over and over and over again until they landed on the right model.
Finding this illusive model that has PMF requires you to be an artisan — someone who crafts products with an incredible attention to detail, and with a habit of iteration and experimentation. And the thing about artisans is that most of their iterations won’t work. In almost every craft, people iterate 100s of times with different designs before finding the creation that has the potential to impact the world in a meaningful way.
I’m thinking about this today because I’ve seen many entrepreneurs commit to hard to a path and embrace this whole notion of the founder willing it into existence and just being persistent and just waiting for the market timing to change… These things are all valuable, but it shouldn’t distract you from being an artisan, assuming that your product is fundamentally broken, and iterating with greater speed and urgency.
I practice everything I’m writing. Homegrown is doing well. I can easily (and justifiably) write to you about how amazing things are and how we’re going to be an even bigger, more important company one day. But we’re only going to get there — to that target state of giant impact — by embracing what I’ve written here. Despite strong revenue, despite repeat customers, despite high demand, etc. etc., I still embrace the reality that we’re somewhat broken, so that I can find the product version that satisfies me.
I’m not deluding myself that our achievements are the achievements I want most, and that’s why we’re going to win, because I’m not satisfied yet with the value we provide to our customers, and I probably won’t ever be. That lack of satisfaction is what sparks the drive — the desire — to be better.
P.S. the picture for this article is my chief of staff and I working later at night on a recent trip. We’re having a great f*cking time building this thang!