cornbreadfed614
New member
Everyone seems to think product-market fit is a clear before-and-after, like you wake up one day and suddenly you never have to worry about acquisition again and all you have to do is scale.
It only looks like that in hindsight. While you're building the startup (not when you've made dozens of millions and brag about it on podcasts), it looks and feels different.
First, it's not a binary: There's levels to this game! That might be the most important insight. I really like First Round's four levels of PMF framework and we use it internally at CommandBar to see how we'll get to the next level.
Here's how it worked for us and what we noticed along the way:
First level
When you solve for that, you get to the next level
Second level
Third level
And that's level 4, which we're doing everything to reach! I wrote a detailed breakdown as well with exactly what we did to ascend the levels, telltale signs we made it to that level and what we're doing next to get to level 4. You can read it here: https://www.commandbar.com/blog/we-found-pmf/
It only looks like that in hindsight. While you're building the startup (not when you've made dozens of millions and brag about it on podcasts), it looks and feels different.
First, it's not a binary: There's levels to this game! That might be the most important insight. I really like First Round's four levels of PMF framework and we use it internally at CommandBar to see how we'll get to the next level.
Here's how it worked for us and what we noticed along the way:
First level
- We had a pretty cool product (cmd+k) as a service that we had customers fr. But people didn't really get it. Buyers were from all types of functions and everyone described us differently.
When you solve for that, you get to the next level
Second level
- We had a clearer ICP (product teams) now and could optimize for their use cases (and, by extension, their user's use cases).
Third level
- We started to get a lot more demand for our product—a consistent flow of leads and deals.
And that's level 4, which we're doing everything to reach! I wrote a detailed breakdown as well with exactly what we did to ascend the levels, telltale signs we made it to that level and what we're doing next to get to level 4. You can read it here: https://www.commandbar.com/blog/we-found-pmf/