📕 My playbook to product-market fit

Based on mentoring 200 early-stage startups

Startups go through these phases

Founder-startup fit fluctuates throughout the journey. Read about here and here

Problem

• Most early-stage startups think they lack product-market fit

• Most early-stage startups actually lack

  • Customer-problem fit or problem-solution fit

  • Business model-fit is easy if you have the two above

Each fit requires different experiments to learn different things

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⚠️ Disclaimer: The steps in the playbook suggest a logical order. The startup process is far from sequential and predictable. This is the happy flow, your mileage may vary. Consider this a list of milestones to hit that are most easily explained in this order.

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📕 The playbook

1. Find potential customers | Customer-problem fit

🎯 Goal: Validate your super-specific niche to focus on

🧠 Mindset: You are not going to help everyone. Serving one segment is already hard enough

Understand problems & jobs to be done

1. Find customers with high problem urgency

2. Find a problem worth solving

3. Understand your customer’s job to be done

4. Understand your customer’s job to be done hierarchy

5. Understand the difference between job to be done and problems

Select your beachhead market (your super specific niche)

1. Learn what defines your beachhead market

2. Think about the market sizes (but don’t go overboard)

3. Define your beachhead market

Can’t pick the right problem to solve? Book a session with me!

2. Land a free pilot | problem-solution fit

🎯 Goal: Validate that your solution works

🧠 Mindset: What does it take to make my customer super happy?

Designing your pilot

1. Understand what value is for your customer

2. Create brochures to land a pilot

Landing your pilot

1. Understand how to make your pilot sale not suck

2. Design your pilot with your customer using the Startup Pilot Canvas

Observing if your pilot works

1. Understand what problem-solution fit looks like?

2. How to get to problem-solution fit?

3. Extra tip on getting to problem-solution fit

Issues with selling your pilot? Book a session with me!

3. Sell a paid pilot | Business model fit

🎯 Goal: Validate that you can capture that value

🧠 Mindset: What is the simplest business model to pull this startup off?

Design your revenue model

1. Create your revenue model to propose a paid pilot

2. Understand the basics of a viable business model (money in - money out > 0)

3. Set your price high enough

4. See if you are profitable with unit economics

5. Be flexible and really focus on the mininum

Define your to-market strategy

1. Create focus by defining waves 2 and 3 of your to-market strategy

Design and validate the rest of your business model

1. Create a value system schema of your first business model in this toolkit

2. Do a sanity check on missing parts by filling in the lean canvas

Issues with getting paid for your pilot? Book a session with me!

4. Scalable sales | Product-market fit

🎯 Goal: Validate marketing channels that you can repeat easily

🧠 Mindset: First do things that don’t scale, then scale them. Grind.

Identify potential marketing channels

1. Inspiration here and here

   1. Most likely: cold calling, LinkedIn outreach, Social/Google Ads
      Likely to avoid: SEO (expensive, long term), Influencer

2. Create a list of your top 3 best potential channels

Run marketing experiments

1. Start thinking in experiment cycles

2. Running marketing channel experiments - example 1

3. Running marketing channel experiments - example 2

Things that might become important here

1. Raising money (FFF, angel, VC you name it)

2. Having your financials in order (proper overview and forecasting)

3. Branding and communications

4. [to be continued]

Issues with getting to product-market fit? Book a session with me!