Talking to fellow founders whenever I can as a pre PMF startup founder. The stories are wildly different than those I read or hear about on podcasts, blogposts and newsletters.<p>HN mostly being anon, I thought it would be an ideal place to share how you found PMF as a service to other startups and founders. Whether you are a 1 person company or 1,000, it does not really matter
We started by solving a problem we knew well.<p>- Got feedback early – But we focused on usage, not just compliments.<p>- Looked for real engagement – When users started referring others, that was a big sign.<p>- Tracked metrics – Retention, churn, and whether people were paying.<p>- Iterated based on feedback – Kept refining, but didn’t force things.<p>- Let it grow naturally – When the product started growing on its own, we knew we had it.<p>It wasn’t a single moment—just a gradual process of building, learning, and tweaking.
I'm a bootstrapped founder (with some prior experience zero-to-one-ing startups before), and have spent the best part of this year trying to find PMF for two of my bootstrapped products.<p>At least for the style of businesses i'm building, my biggest learning is quite simply that finding PMF can not be shortcutted (trust me, I've tried).<p>For me, finding PMF has meant:
- Spending as much time with potential customers as possible (on calls, in their office etc). Learn/Listen
- Constantly playing with positioning/messaging/feature-set based on insights you're learning.
- Building out a pilot/prototype and seeing if customers will pre-pay to be in a early pilot group<p>The great news is, most of this can be done without writing a single line of code.<p>Hope that's helpful