When the missing part in your PMF (Product Market Fit) is the M, it won’t help to focus on the P even more.
It’s time to put down the P and go deep into the M.
What do I mean?
I’ve worked in and with so many teams who couldn’t put down the P. They were obsessed with “aligning” around the question: “what exactly are we building?”
I shudder in horror to think of the time wasted on this question. Days, weeks, months, years … of workshops and conversations and arguments and surveys …
Because now I realise two things:
You can’t answer this question upfront, only with hindsight. Every successful project I’ve worked on ended up evolving or transforming so much that nobody could have anticipated it at the start. Years later, looking back, it’s all clear and we’re aligned on the story. But it was never clear or aligned at the time. (Meanwhile, every failed project stubbornly clung to the original vision.)
It really doesn’t matter what we think our software is. We crave the sense of comfort and control we’d get if we knew the answer and we want there to be a shortcut. But no, what matters is whatever language helps our customers understand what our software can help them do differently.
No successful product or service is sold as what it actually is. All software is messy, confused and constantly evolving, so it’s not any one thing anyway.
A successful product or service is sold as the only [category] that offers [unique value].
This happens in the customer’s mind:
category: triggers an association for the customer that helps them know what to compare your software against
unique value: within that category, here’s how your software enables the customer to do something they care about that they can’t do with other category members
One category, one difference. This hides 99.99% of the mess of what your product or service actually is. (That’s 99.99% of everything you’ve worked on and worried about.)
But again: it doesn’t matter what YOU think your product or service is, how brilliant you are, or how hard you’ve worked. It only matters which category you can win in.
You don’t choose the definition of what your software is to make yourself feel good or to “get aligned”. You choose it for your customers to feel like your software is uniquely valuable to them.
The only reason to say, “our software is an X” is to trigger an association in your potential customer’s mind so they know how to find and choose your software.
And here’s the brutal bit.
You’ll only know the right thing to say after you’ve got PMF.
You can’t know what customers think about categories, uniqueness or value with any confidence until after you’ve got a whole bunch of customers. Then customers will keep showing you what your software is – the tough part is you letting go of what you think it is.
So I’m afraid you’re going to have to start by getting some customers without knowing what your software is, without knowing what category you’re playing in, without knowing how to sell your software efficiently – without knowing your software’s unique value that’s behind their buying decision. All of that will only emerge later. Much later.
You make those first 3, 10, 50, 100, … sales one at a time, slowly, with a lot of effort and mistakes.
It’s unfamiliar to most people, because most books and information is about sales at scale: sales after PMF.
But sales before PMF looks nothing like sales after PMF. Powerpoints, clear messaging and systems – all that comes later.
Before PMF, sales looks a lot more like learning. And it’s the founder’s most important job. It means opening conversations, listening to what potential customers are truly struggling with, prototyping options that might help them make progress, learning what actually helps them make progress, and doing a whole load of stuff by hand, improvised, in a magnificent, chaotic mess.
Tom x
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Great post Tom, I really enjoyed this one and the reminder to understand the market and the problems your target persona has first.
Your insight about sales before and after PMF is really nice!