Steal our 5 step process to developing product market fit for startups yet to launch part 2

Hello everybody, we continue today from where we stopped yesterday discussing the topic of finding gong product market fit for startups still in the idea stage. The metrics to measure product market fit currently available in the market are only useful for startups that have dedicated extensive resources and time in the market. We are breaking away from that expensive test to discover product market fit when you’re still early, minimal investment in terms of cash and time spent.

So we ended yesterday collecting feedback from our audience. We have 5 major touch points and today, we’ll make sense of the feedback collecting using demo data. Remember, our base hypothesis is drawn from Sean Ellis framework.

Look through your responses and do the following:

1. Find your biggest fans: From your survey you’ll notice those who will be highly disappointed if you don’t get to launch your product. These guys have high expectations and can’t wait for you to launch so they come on board. Focus keenly on these people. Next you want to know exactly who your high expectation customers are.

2. Armed with this data, filter everyone who would be very disappointed to the answers from the number 5 question. So who is your ideal customer? The founder? The HR personnel? Remember the options here are custom built by you to suite your specific market and product. You’ll have to tailor-make your product for these people. Don’t be afraid to niche down. You can scale out later.

3. Ignore the segment who won’t be disappointed if you don’t launch. Now I know this is hard because for you, validation comes from gathering a lot of uses early and from your initial marketing and audience building, a lot of people with varied interests and commitment level may have joined your community but it doesn’t mean they’ll convert into customers when you launch. If you indulge these people, they’ll send you down a hole of custom feature requests which you’ll spend the next few months building but that’ll be a mistake. No feature you’ll add will get these guys to view your product favorably so ignore them and niche down to those who are more interested in your product.

4. From question number 2, look through and glean insights. The question is who do you think will most benefit from our product when we launch? This is an open ended reason for the specific reason that you can now connect with people using their own words to tell you why they are with you. People will be specific and share from their heart. This helps you write better targeted marketing messages to that subset of people when you eventually launch and running your marketing. Again, ignore the feedback from the set of people who won’t be disappointed if you don’t launch. The feature requests they’ll demand will be very distracting and won’t help your overall product strategy.

5. Remember you are building for a specific market. Right now, our focus is optimizing for a specific subset of users: those who will be very disappointed if we don’t launch our product. I’ll recommend leaving out those who are somewhat disappointed from the answers we got from question one. The reason is that as startups still in the idea stage, we don’t have the luxury of building for everyone and we certainly don’t have the time not the money to go big immediately. What you do now is to aggressively double down on what users (your users are those who will be very disappointed if you don’t launch) love. Now you understand the kind of people who love your product and you also know exactly what feature benefits them the most. Now focus on that. By focusing on improving user experience for your best users, you increase product market fit but if you focus on addressing what holds you back, you’ll struggle to outpace competitors.

So understand the process: build an audience, survey your audience, filter out those who won’t be disappointed or who are somewhat disappointed, now determine the ideal profile of those interested based on question 5 and build better for them based on the open ended feedback you got from question 3.

As an entrepreneur operating with a lean budget, limited time and resources, you shouldn’t spend all your time building and launching a product nobody wants. You need to build something people want and the way to do this without spending lots of cash and time is to determine your product market fit even when you are still in your idea stage.

Want to determine yours and you need guidance? You’re in luck. We are launching a course within the month to address that. Details would be shared via email to our subscribers. I hope this helps someone.

Thank you for joining me today. THE END

At Hala, we believe that consistency is greater than intensity. Thats why we are building our community around the principles of improving with just 1% daily; which compounds overtime into something remarkable. Hala is going to be a fine blend of creatives, experienced doers, starters and dreamers. We are founded on the strong belief that ultimately, we hold a duty of care to others in need. We want to balance access to opportunities regardless of colour, background, faith or income level. We value Integrity and highly regard dignity of labour within the Hala community. As a community, our success is measured by how many dreams are achieved, those broad fulfilling smiles when help arrives and how well we are able to impact humanity. These principles are consistent with Bible teachings where we draw our faith and inspiration from. You are welcome to join Hala, you’ll discover practical tips you can start implementing today to stay ahead in business.

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