It's possible that the founders of businesses that expect to advertise on Google/socials could put this to work, but it's not a general case best practice since most businesses are not launched through targeted keyword auctions.<p>The problem I have with this essay, after sitting with it for a few minutes, is that it's predicated on the notion that every failed startup is a great idea that deserves to exist, but just hasn't found its paying customers, yet.<p>Sadly, this is simply not true. Lots of founders drink their own Kool-aid and build significant amounts of IP and software and merchandise before actually verifying that real people want to give them real money for it. Telling them that they just haven't found the right Instagram demographic is actively harming them now and in the future.<p>Look, I often tell founders that they need to identify what success looks like, and what failure looks like, and then stick to those definitions to the maximum degree possible. This gives us the opportunity to celebrate our wins (which can otherwise be fuzzy until you ring that IPO bell) but just as importantly, it gives founders the ability to differentiate between "don't listen to the haters" and "it's time to be honest with ourselves about the fact that this isn't going to work".<p>There's an art to knowing when to stop. You really don't want to allow the sunk cost fallacy to damage your ability to move on to the next idea. After all, our time is finite, and the optimal time in your life to start a company is even more so.
Brian Balfour wrote about this a few years ago and I find that framing quite useful too (having led both innovation orgs within large mature companies as well as startups). Highly recommend a read.<p>He talks about market - model - channel - product fit. In that order.<p><a href="https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enough" rel="nofollow">https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit-isnt-enou...</a>
Interesting piece.<p>From my position (running innovation programmes inside a big mature organisation) the idea of channel / offer fit is just as important internally as externally.<p>You need to be able to explain the idea in ways that internal stakeholders understand, and describe it in terms of channels or offers they understand.<p>In the organisation I work in, we are basically consultants - so any new innovation has a much greater chance of success if it can be described in a way that fits with a time and materials sale. Building a product is much harder, and can take years to gain traction - more internally than externally.<p>I'm sure the same applies with VC funding - having a product or service that maps onto your investors' worldview makes the conversations much easier.
I love this:<p>- 'Distribution' is really the hot button this is about, even if I didn't see the word there. "Build it and they will come" is rare. Such product/market fit thinking sweeps that difficulty under the rug, while channel looks at it straight on. The article's notion of 'order' also gets into repeatable selling motion for after a customer is in the funnel -- customer success etc etc -- which can also be tough.<p>- ex: For us as an enterprise product, we found amazing users who would go as far as spending every evening and weekend to investigate their data. Being a tool investigators love (sec/fraud/social/blockchain... and now commercial analysts like supply chain) means initial product/market were just about there. But..... that didn't mean we just sold and grew. Figuring out the selling process is huge: how prospectives find it, try it, make their decision, purchase it, etc. Especially for 5-7 figure software, getting a predictable (& ultimately scalable) journey can mean figuring out a lot of smart targeted nudges & streamlining between your external channel partners + in internal sales/marketing/success folk.
As a (solo) founder of a SaaS, I really dislike this take. It sounds like a purely sales&marketing point of view — sell it and forget it. It might work if you are selling physical products, or anything which is not subscription-based. But if you are running a SaaS, you need to optimize long-term retention (minimize churn). In order to do that, you have to deliver a good product that people want to pay for, over the long term. This is what you need to optimize, not "channel/offer fit".
This checks out when I look at the coding bootcamp that I worked for. They advertized a lot on Facebook and that was more or less it. SEO was also a thing, but definitely secondary as that was company-wide, but we were the only European location.