“And you can always feel product/market fit when it's 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.”
You Can Feel It
From Marc Andreessen, “The only thing that matters” (Pmarchive, June 25, 2007), Part 4 of “The Pmarca Guide to Startups.” The essay argues that market matters more than team or product, and it divides a startup’s life into two parts: “before product/market fit” (BPMF, in the essay’s shorthand) and after it.
Andreessen’s list keeps going: money from customers “piling up in your company checking account,” hiring “sales and customer support staff as fast as you can,” reporters calling, investment bankers “staking out your house.” And it has a mirror image. “You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening”: customers “aren’t quite getting value out of the product,” word of mouth isn’t spreading, “the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.” Neither paragraph offers a metric or a threshold. Andreessen’s claim is that both states are unmistakable from inside the company.
For a company still on the wrong side of that line, the essay’s prescription is single-minded: “When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit.” The obsession he means is literal, “changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market,” whatever is required.