Four pitfalls to product-market fit
The exploring ideas trap, the pilot gap, the money gap and the lost marketeer
After working with 300+ early-stage startups, I see entrepreneurs get stuck in four common areas: exploring ideas, not doing a pilot, not asking for money, and lack of marketing.
1. Exploring ideas trap
This is for founders who want to start but haven’t yet. They are, in their mind, doing a lot of leg work but not getting out of the building.
Solutions
Just go talk to potential customers, now! Some ideas on where to find customers for problem interviews can be found here.
Go deep, don’t do broad chitchat only. If you are doing broad problem interviews ‘talking about sustainability’, and you get into a circle jerk that you both find sustainability important, that’s a waste of time. You are trying to find customers, not to blow your own horn.
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2. The Pilot Gap
The pilot gap is for founders that have talked to 10-50 potential customers, but get stuck. Instead of proposing a pilot, they keep on doing problem interviews.
This can be caused by the idea that there is a magical threshold you should cross before you can propose a pilot. This can be caused by not knowing what you have to offer yet.
Solutions
If your offer is vague: make a brochure, it helps to make things concrete
Fill in the Startup pilot canvas to understand what you want to learn from your pilot
Bring the brochure to your next problem interview and propose a pilot to people with high problem urgency
3. The Money Gap
Waiting too long to charge money can hurt. This user on Reddit had 250k free users on his AI tool, quit his dayjob, and started charging money. Now, he has 400 paying $4 a month. He is disappointed, to say the least.
The Money Gap is the first time you get to a minimum viable startup. Very important step. Big difference in people’s attitudes and behaviour. Before a paid pilot, people pay you in time or effort. But money talks.
Yes, you will drive off some people who were happy with free or just talking to you. But, are you building a business or a charity?
Solutions
Always try to charge money for a pilot. The sweet spot: a discounted pilot
The first version of your revenue model should be simple and straight to the point. Design yours with this template.
Don’t sweat the costs of your first paid pilot if it’s relatively little money. You can do a quick sanity check on your unit economics with this canvas or this SaaS calculator.
Don’t worry about how they are going to pay you. You can send a PayPal payment request for the first consumers. You can send a classic invoice. Don’t stress over Stripe integration. Focus on getting a verbal or email commitment to paying a certain amount. You are testing for willingness to pay, not the technical feasibility of payment setup.
4. The Lost Marketeer
Many startups can get some early customers via their own network, but fail to get into scalable sales motions.
Often, this team lacks ownership and accountability for testing multiple marketing channels and doing the grind. If you don’t know marketing, educate yourself.
Solutions
Make one or two people responsible for marketing and sales and dedicate at least 2 hours per day to outbound and 2 hours per day to follow-up leads
Pick a channel
Cold Outbound or Paid Digital works for 99% of startups
Word of mouth is not a GTM-strategy
SEO or content marketing is a long-term process: not advised for most early-stage startups getting to first 100-1000 customers
Try hard to make the channel work (one round of Instagram ads doesn’t cut it)
Educate yourself
Create a GTM strategy (beachhead advised) with help from Maja the GTM Strategist, or buy her 100-step Go-To-Market Checklist
You probably are no master at writing good advertising texts. Subscribe to some copywriting gurus like Robert Kaminski from Fletch. He gives you actionable tips on how to make your copy better, and how to position your product.
You can always improve your cold outbound emails and messaging. Follow authors such as Yurri Veremchuck with concrete examples of bad and good emails.
I think there is another pitfall in solution-product fit where user and buyer can be different.
Wish I had this wisdom a year ago.