The Product Market Fit (PMF) is the graal for every founder, CEO and Product Manager. It’s when your product is the solution to a problem, when people buy your product as fast as you can make it. Marc Andreessen, the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; co-founder of Netscape;[3] and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, says:
“You can always feel when product/market fit is not happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of ‘blah,’ the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
And you can always feel product/market fit when it is happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house.”
Also, I’d like to share with you a very useful article written by Rahul Vohra who explains how he found a magic formula, a magic number that measures the Product Market Fit. Here is the article from First Round: How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
Last but not least, Paul Graham, founder of Yahoo! and Y Combinator, says:
“When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they’re making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.
In theory this sort of hill-climbing could get a startup into trouble. They could end up on a local maximum. But in practice that never happens. … The maxima in the space of startup ideas are not spiky and isolated. Most fairly good ideas are adjacent to even better ones.”