Why Product Market Fit Isn't Enough

It’s Not Just Great Product ATTACH

The “go-to” answer for almost every question in startups, is “build a great product.”

  1. There are great products that never reach $100M+.
  2. There are also terrible products by many people’s definition that reach far greater than $100M+. If you’ve ever used Workday, you know what I’m talking about. (At the time of this writing, Workday is worth $20 billion.)

The problem with the answer of “build a great product” is that it leads to something that Andrew Chen and I talk about extensively in the Reforge Growth Series called the Product Death Cycle. The Product Death Cycle was originally coined by David Bland of Precoil.

In terms of a growth curve, it looks similar to this:

It’s Not Just Product Market Fit

The second “go-to” answer is Product-Market Fit.

It’s Definitely Not Growth Hacking

Before tactics you need a growth process. But before a growth process you need a strategy. This framework is all about how you construct your strategy and position yourself for “Smooth Sailer” growth.

What is the difference between Smooth Sailer and Tugboat companies? ATTACH

The difference between the $100M+ companies, and those that struggle are the ones that are able to make four pieces in a puzzle fit:

There are three extremely important points I want to hammer home through out these posts:

  1. You need to find four fits to grow to $100M+ company in a venture-backed time frame.
  2. Each of these fits influence each other, so you can’t think about them in isolation.
  3. The fits are always evolving/changing/breaking. When that happens, you can’t simply change one element, you have to revisit and potentially change them all.