<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>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>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>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 

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.

<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 

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>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 

<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

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. 

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Technology & The Future

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Business

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Startups

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Product & Design

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Leadership & Management

Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit 

<ul><li>A great product solves a real customer problem.</li><li>A great product is 10x better, faster, or cheaper than the competition.</li><li>A great product makes the user successful.</li><li>A great product is exceptionally well designed.</li><li>A great product has polish!</li></ul>

Build Great Products 

<ul><li>If you can't or have a hard time fundraising, then stop burning cash and focus on making the product profitable. </li><li>Profit provides sustenance. </li><li>If you can sustain for the long haul, then you can build a great company that will endure. </li></ul>

Can't fundraise? Turn a profit 

<ul><li>Know your customers deeply. </li><li>Read all customer support tickets.</li><li>Get to the root of the issue using the 5 Whys Framework.</li><li>Deeply understand your customer's desires and what prevents them from accomplishing their desires. </li><li>Solve the problem that blocks the customer from accomplishing their desires. </li><li>Test out your product with actual, paying customers at their homes; </li></ul>

Focus relentlessly on the Customer

<ul><li>Build a model of your customer. </li><li>Focus on a specific and acute problem faced by your customer.</li><li>Build a single solution that solves this narrow problem incredibly well. </li></ul>

Narrow your focus 

By studying the journeys of founders that have successfully navigated the path to the elusive product/market fit, we can learn much about how to chart our own path to startup success. 

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Webflow’s Bryant Chou sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he and his co-founders leaned into the power of customer empathy to create the leading visual development platform for building powerful websites without writing code.

Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit

Webflow’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons on Creating a Market with Rigorous Customer Empathy

Ramiz Rahman