Leveraging Your First 100 Users to Find Product-Market Fit
Lately I’ve heard a couple of startup founders describe the success of their launch as binary. Instantaneous adoption by thousands of users equates to a success and any other result is deemed a failure where assumedly the problem does not exist. This logic is flawed. Just because people are not tearing down your door to use your product does not mean that it is a failure and certainly does not mean that the problem does not exist. Great products take off because great founders make them take off. All you need from a launch is some initial core of users. If you do not have this initial core, recruit and relaunch until you do. How well you are doing a few months later will depend more on how happy you made those users than how many of them there were.
Before finding product-market fit there are many advantages to being small. The most innovative leaps in the life of your company are made at this stage, the product can be totally changed in a week. You have the ability to talk to your users directly and build exactly what they need. Imagine Facebook or Uber trying to iterate like this, it would be a disaster. On the journey to finding product-market fit, pay passionate attention to your users; handcraft the core service for them and create a magical experience for your customers so that they love you. Early on, it is better to have 100 users who love you than 100,000 who sort of like you. It’s like keeping a fire contained at first to get it really hot before adding more logs and pouring gasoline on it.
To build a product that users love you should take extreme measures not only in acquiring users, but in making them happy and exceeding their expectations. Your first users should feel like signing up with you is the best decision they could have made. For small companies, this isn’t necessarily achieved with an insanely great product but by the experience of being your user. When Airbnb first launched in SF, the greatest concentration of hosts was in NYC so the founders went to their customers to learn who they were, what they wanted, and how their experience as hosts could be improved. The founding team went door to door signing up new customers and improving the experience of their existing hosts by taking “professional” photographs of the home for the Airbnb listing. This professional photography was done by Brian Chesky…Airbnb’s Co-founder and CEO. This is an example of going to great lengths to ensure an exceptional user experience. Home visits became Airbnb’s secret weapon in learning exactly what their users loved; they didn’t guess at what users wanted, they reacted to what users asked for.
Once a company has scaled, a product that is better than anything else available is the dominant component in making users happy, but for an early stage company an MVP will suffice if you make up the difference with attentiveness and tailored action. Google was not the first search engine but listened to their users and built a product to meet their needs and exceed their expectations. When Facebook launched in 2004, Myspace had been around for one year and had quickly amassed five million users. But Facebook launched to serve a niche in Harvard students who felt like it was designed for them, so a critical mass of them signed up. The platform was tailored to providing an experience for the students of one school, but once Facebook dominated the market it was born in, it gradually entered new markets at other schools by maintaining its customized user experience and making students feel like the site was their natural home.
Steve Jobs said it best, “You have got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” By doing anything else you are going to join the graveyard of startups with a solution in search of a problem. Show customers what they want, listen to what they say, and watch carefully as they interact with your product. The typical smartphone experience we enjoy today did not happen overnight. It has taken more than a decade of Apple adding feature upon feature to build the product that has revolutionized the way we communicate with people and the way we interface with technology. The first iPhone lacked several features that are now considered to be standard in the smartphone industry; it did not have the ability to access 3G networks, it was only compatible with one carrier (AT&T), there was no App Store, it required a computer to set up, the default black background could not be changed, and the list goes on. Jobs, coining himself as a discoverer rather than an inventor, displayed an obsession for identifying what people want and iterating the product accordingly. Understanding your users is unquestionably the first and most important step in the design process. Steve Jobs is said to have been an avid eavesdropper on his customers while they shopped in the Apple store in Palo Alto. Jobs would hide in the bushes and analyze how customers talked about the products, interacted with the products, and how they formed relationships with the technology.
With startups and any new product it is imperative to engage your customer as much and as often as possible. It is really hard to get even a few people to love your product but it’s much less difficult if you spend a ton of time with them and are able to hone in on their problems in order to create a solution that meets their needs and exceeds their expectations.
When you are small and trying to find Product-Market Fit, you are uniquely positioned to get direct feedback from your users, whereas, bigger companies have to interpret data and draw conclusions. This stage in the life of a startup is extremely important, your users should be offering passionate feedback about your product. If you are not getting exuberant responses something is wrong; simply meeting their needs is not enough. Passionate feedback while you are designing the product is essential because it allows you to iterate in the direction that is most satisfactory to your customers. It’s the equivalent of setting a foundation as an architect; user feedback ensures that you are not building a dozen floors on unstable sand. Paying careful attention to what your customers say about your product and how they interact with it is the secret weapon for every startup searching for Product-Market Fit.
Over engage your early users, solve the problem they are having, create a product and experience that users love, and acquire new customers one by one until you are ready to scale.
