PMF means people show through action that they want your product. This means people have to see and respond to it. How do you get that and how do you measure that?
PMF also requires a product or at the very least an MVP. So it means you won’t know if PMF exists unless you put your MVP out in the world.
That means you are running on your intuition when you are getting to the MVP part. That means there will be failed attempts until you hit the actual MVP.
So keeping the cost of failure per attempt low is necessary to get to PMF.
So the process of creating an MVP and the cost of putting it in front of people should be low.
Also, the measure of people’s response should be accurate because overshooting means wasted spend on growth for a product with no PMF, and undershooting means forgoing a million-dollar opportunity.
So a prerequisite to PMF is distribution, i.e., getting it in front of them. Be it organic or inorganic.
Talking with people can help, but it is not a replacement for an actual MVP when it comes to PMF.
This paradigm implies many of your ideas will fail but also mandates that you come up with many ideas because this one might also not work. So being good at idea generation and non-attachment to any single idea is a necessity.
How do you get an MVP in the hands of people when you have zero organic momentum going for you? In that case, partnering with someone with an audience is a way, but that’s a daydream for someone without even an MVP.
Well then, non-organic and paid is the option. You will need to have the marketing copy of your MVP down well for this option. The platform and type of ads should fit with your MVP and its copy.
Have multiple copies for the same MVP, and I mean it in the sense that you are even trying out different types of positioning and segments to run ads on. This is because we won’t be sure which position appeals the most and which segment of the market the copy is appealing to most.
Essentially, we are trying out multiple positions and segments via small budget paid ads and concluding what the PMF is. This is even a better and more privileged way of finding PMF, I think, since via organic you may have your product carried to a huge but potentially wrong audience, so they may not buy even if your views and page stats look great.
With this method, you may not essentially find PMF, but whatever feedback you get can be used to integrate into your organic content. If your ad did best when positioned as knee pain relief for teens, then you can gear your organic content towards that. This helps your organic efforts to also be aligned with the PMF.
You need to have a landing page collecting emails with this setup, or you will lose your ability to retarget these people and also carry out further A/B tests. Emails are important, or you are not squeezing the most out of your ad spend.
Of course, if possible, we can carry out different landing pages for different ads too. Paid ads also let you gather objective data on different directions you take. They let you know which ones are best; ones with the highest conversion and lowest costs are the best positions to occupy.
Set baseline KPIs for each position so that you can qualify which ones are good easily. CTR > 2% or sign-up rate > 20% or CPC < $0.5 or whatever. Whatever falls below can be dumped and replaced with a newer idea.
In fact, I believe paid ads are the best thing when it comes to PMF. Organic algorithms are dubious; your content that actually sells your product may not be the one that maximizes their views, watch time, or whatever KPIs they are trying to optimize. So you will not get views. It can also be a possibility that your organic content is not gaining traction for the segment and position that you want, but it does provide traction for subpar or poor segments.
In fact, for PMF-related purposes, run ads and experiment a lot. You will need capital to run ads and also tech capabilities to conduct A/B tests and also run emails.
Once you have PMF and a decent position and target after your ads phase, run organic initiatives optimized just for that, even if it is poor with regards to social media vanity metrics.
You’re using ads to create pseudo distribution, not to fabricate demand. Even though the first year is mostly just inorganic sales-driven revenue, we have to start building organic channels right away from the moment we get clues. Organic, i.e., community, word of mouth, UGC, etc., is supposed to account for 50-70% of your sales by the 3rd year.
#runmoreads
Simply put, PMF = Observed Action & Distribution Precedes Validation
You can’t confirm PMF without exposing the MVP to real audiences.
It is something specific that our customer did. All of this is very specific, narrow, and real-life action-oriented. It’s not brainstormed, imagined, or deduced but concluded from actual reality. Thus it needs real-life actions as precedents; it cannot spawn from isolated or imagined actions. It needs a real MVP, a real delivery system, real users, and real customers. Nothing imagined or simulated.
Amazing how the marketing/distribution part of it can be more exhausting, financially taxing, and technical than the product itself. We will just refer to it as distribution from now on. Distribution is a huge task; it’s the only money-making part in this because the product itself is never enough for money. It’s the position and segment that turns a product into something that can make money. You can sell literal shit (no metaphor or simile) if you have done your distribution well.
Business without experimentation is just gambling. You can’t have any single idea you can be attached to, and you just have to keep testing each one of them and throwing them off if they don’t serve you.