GoKawiilEveryone talks a lot about product market fit. It’s drilled into you as a founder. “Don’t build something people don’t want, don’t wait to ship your product, don’t isolate yourself building castles in the sky. Your startup lives and dies based on your understanding of the market, so go out there and understand the fucking market.”
It’s really really important advice. The temptation to build your own “vision” is really strong. There are hundreds of founders who will insist that they are hunting for market signal while doing the exact opposite. First time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution, etc. etc. So I get why it’s emphasized so much, is my point.
Nuance is hard to communicate, though, and I think sometimes founders — especially second time founders — will decide that the natural conclusion is to hunt for PMF wherever you can find it, in any industry, serving any group of people. And this is also wrong, because you won’t have founder market fit.
Everyone knows what product market fit is, what the hell is founder market fit?
Most people are not suited to be founders. Those that are, are not equally suited to sell the same things. Selling into the consumer creative world is way different than selling into the enterprise tech world (ask me how I know). A jazz pianist with a history of psychedelics and a past as a Buddhist monk is going to ace the former. A buttoned up ivy grad with a research pedigree will do better on the latter. Try and switch them. Can you imagine this guy in a room with a bunch of pressed white shirt consultants trying to identify quarterly deliverables?
Forget about sales, these people just wouldn’t have anything to talk about. And if you can’t talk to your customers, you can’t build product for them.
Founder market fit is about culture. It’s that unquantifiable similarity function, that vibe fit, that accent and language and way you dress and the million other little details that gives you tribal identity, the things necessary to get a potential customer to tell you their problems and root for you to succeed and give you their money (in that order). It’s also the million little details that the founder looks for in their clients, the things that makes the founder want to dedicate years of their life to building for that group of people.
Is this unfair? Or maybe anti egalitarian? Does it rely too much on stereotypes? I’m not sure. On the one hand I like the idea that anyone could just learn to sell to anyone else. On the other hand, that word “learn” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It just seems practically obvious that, like, a native Spanish speaker will have a harder time selling into a Chinese market than a native Chinese speaker. It’s not impossible, it’s just that the former founder would have to do way more work, and startups are already a ton of work!
Product market fit is a boolean, or maybe measurable on a single axis. You either have it or you don’t. Founder market fit is weirdly high dimensional, because it’s as much about temperament as it is about anything else.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re an introvert, someone who’s not great at the whole ‘going to a new place, putting on a character, and selling to strangers who don’t know you’ thing. This isn’t prohibitive as a founder, but it’s going to make it harder to sell to certain large enterprises who are used to extremely charismatic salesmen spending on steak dinners and box seats at the Yankees and exchanging business cards at conferences. So you may want to gun for a market where the buyer is more likely be someone you never have to meet in person — consumer markets, or dev tools that spread through word of mouth. If you insist on b2b, then maybe a better target wedge are remote teams that don’t necessarily expect a lot of in person face time. Or find the kind of people that you might like to hang out with. For me, that’s people who like video and boardgames. Can you find a way to turn ‘going to gencon’ or ‘going to pax west’ into an opportunity to meet your target customer? (Unfortunately I could not)
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