What is Product Market Fit or PMF?
<aside> 👉 A good product-market fit doesn't mean creating a product that is best in class. It is about creating a product that wins customers easily and generates consistent revenue growth in its lifecycle.
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PMF is Market and Customer-driven. This means a product that is making billions today could be a failure tomorrow. Remember Blackberry? The same secure phones with physical keyboards that made it no. 1 eventually led to its downfall.
🔬Pre-Launch
This is the most crucial step in the product development cycle. Numerous metrics, sentiments, and numbers need to be looked at and analyzed.
But there are a few *signals to look* for...
Visible Excitement
The "real" metric for consumer products is - "does someone's pupils dilate while using your product?". To evaluate a product in beta and early stages the criterion should be users’ happiness and excitement.
Does the product have very good customer feedback?
Even from a fairly small user base. It could well be that you've found your niche early on, do your research and learn more about it.
People are ready to pay
Users are reaching out on their own to ask if you have a paid or premium version. This indicates that the product has 1) already found its target customers and, 2) found an excellent use case with those customers.
The next call to action would be spending more time with these customers learning about how they’re using your product.
The retention curve of a successful vs. unsuccessful fit.
User feedback is an important signal of product/market fit.