| The push toward PMF has been really great for the industry and really helped avoid wasting a ton of cash. The only argument AGAINST it rally is when a team has a proven track record and already KNOWS how to find PMF and knows that it has value. PMF is amazing when you do it right. With http://datastreamer.io we were actually a meme tracking app (similar to hacker news) but what ended up happening is that people basically said "hey, that's cool and all but we really just want to license your blog data crawling platform". At the time I was thinking that I could just use the licensing sales to continue developing the meme tracking app. At some point it just dawned on me that we had 10-15 customers and that it was the tail wagging the dog so I dropped the meme tracking app entirely and then focused on the crawling and data licensing component. For Polar, https://getpolarized.io/, (which is something new I'm working on) I needed it for my own personal use as my document collection was getting out of hand and I need some way to manage annotations. I wanted something close to an IDE where I could keep all my books and web content tagged and in one place. Initially I was worried that there might not even be a market - even as just an OSS product. We've been soft launching for about 2 weeks now as an MVP and the results have been really fantastic. The app is definitely not complete - not by a long shot. There are pretty clear holes in the app. For example, I shipped it without the ability to delete books - which is kind of important. If your customers are willing to put up with a feature incomplete and a broken app and are interacting with you and requesting new features and suggesting bug fixes - well you might be on to something. I think the trick is realizing the minimum viable product that you need to ship to measure this and then iterate from there. If you keep iterating on an MVP that people are actually USING you will eventually hit PMF and then take off. None of this is new though.. the whole lean startup space talks about this excessively. |
Serious question: Why is it free? How would you be able to support and maintain the product if you aren't charging for it?