<ul><li>Take at least a full day off every week in order to avoid burnout. </li><li>The journey to achieving product/market fit is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistency over the long haul is key. </li><li>Co-founder and team relationships are tenuous. Friendships may well be strained. Handle these situations with integrity, empathy, and emotional intelligence. </li></ul>

Take care of yourself 

<ul><li>If you feel stuck in a situation where you are force-feeding customers your product and they show apathy, then clearly, you haven't achieved product/market fit. </li><li>Product/market fit is a situation where the product is pulled by the market rather than you having to push it. </li><li>To achieve product/market fit, you may need to give up your initial ideas and make pivots. </li><li>Don't be afraid of doing so, as sometimes, they are necessary. </li></ul>

Don't be afraid of pivots 

<ul><li>Don't ask leading questions.</li><li>Ask open-ended questions. </li><li>Ask about what they are hoping to achieve. </li><li>Ask about what their life will look like if they are able to achieve what they hope to achieve. </li><li>Don't be okay with only a high-level understanding. Dig deep into the details. Understand the nitty-gritty of your customers' processes and workflows. </li></ul>

Improve your user research abilities 

<ul><li>The product should work for more than one customer.</li><li>Different B2B customers have different needs.</li><li>Learn to identify overlaps and differences between needs. </li><li>Don't plan on doing custom builds - instead, make the core product configurable. </li></ul>

Build a configurable product

Make a list of problems you care most about in the world. Starting a company is hard and you’ll be much better at sticking through the hard periods if it’s something you are passionate about.

Before you have product-market fit, it can be a distraction to recruit, hire, onboard and manage people when instead you should be hyper-focused on finding product-market fit. Plus, when things aren't working, you have to manage not just your own morale but everyone else’s morale.

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Startups are long and hard. There will be inevitable lows. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">During those difficult moments, you really need to care about the problem that you're solving in order to persevere. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Life is too short to spend on solving a problem that doesn't matter to you. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">Once you have found a problem space that you deeply care about - make your desire to solve the problem unkillable. </li></ul>

Choose a problem space that you care about

<ul><li>Before you can propose a solution, you must be intimately aware of the inner workings of your customer's current workflows. </li><li>Immerse yourself within the customer's environment. </li><li>Shadow your customers, walk in their shoes. </li><li>Learn to see the problems from their perspectives. </li><li>Learn your customer's workflows to the degree that you develop deep empathy for their role and experience.</li><li>Only then can you challenge the way things are done and propose new ways of doing them. </li><li>Learn the rules so that you know which ones to break and which ones to adopt.</li><li>Build strong relationships with your customers. </li></ul>

Lean on deep immersion

<ul><li>Estimate the value that you generate for your customers as a dollar amount. </li><li>Charge 10-20% of this value as a starting point.  </li></ul>

Price on value 

Learning how to build a successful company that sells to government agencies. 

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Binti’s co-founder and CEO Felicia Curcuru sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how her time spent shadowing family social workers in San Francisco empowered her to build a product now used by a third of the country’s child welfare agencies. 