[gizmo]

I think this article misunderstands the concept of product-market fit. Many mediocre products sell and with enough sales effort you can create a big business that only sells mediocre products. This shouldn't surprise anybody because most products aren't that great and most businesses make plenty of money regardless.

Product-market fit is not about that. It's not about whether you can find somebody who wants to buy your product. It's not even about whether you have very satisfied customers.

Product-market fit is about having a product that fills such a deep need in the market that you get pulled into an exponential growth trajectory. Instead of growing because of your own marketing efforts you grow because you can't keep the customers/users away. It can be a viral app where every user on average invites more than one other user. It can be an app that every college student wants to be on. It can be anything. But it's always about having some kind of self-reinforcing loop. It's about push versus pull. Peter Thiel referred to Twitter as a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Twitter had such strong PMF that all their operational mistakes just didn't matter.

Users make content. Content makes the platform better. Which results in more users. See step 1.

This is fundamentally different from doubling your signups after you double your adspend. Most businesses don't have product-market fit in this way. Most startups don't. That includes most unicorns. But those that do end up getting huge, and that's why startup investors talk about product-market fit and network effects and viral growth all the time.

[light_triad]

Good points but I think you're talking about 3 different concepts:

- Network effect: does the product get better with more users?

- Viral growth: does each user bring more users?

- PMF: is there a correspondence between the market, problem and solution that results in market pull?

You can have PMF without the other 2, which is not as strong. You can also have PMF for a niche that never grows to a mass market or have decent sales without PMF. Agreed having to buy your traffic and needing to go through the FAANG toll booth every time you want to access your audience is a problem.

[gizmo]

You can't grow to 10s or 100s of millions of users without some kind of network effect or viral loop. It's pretty much impossible.

[mnemonicsloth]

McDonald's. Disney. Walmart. Kroger. Comcast. Verizon.

And many more who sell crops, chemicals, power, machine parts, cars, concrete...

Many companies have billions of customers and no trace of lock-in or virality at all. You might want to shift your perspective a little and remember that there is a world outside of Silicon Valley.

[zht]

Comcast and Verizon have no lock-in?

[mnemonicsloth]

Verizon competes with T-Mobile and AT&T. Comcast competes with a different arm of AT&T, Google Fiber, various older satellite internet services and now Starlink.

Outside the US, broadband providers are still huge but differences in regulation mean there are five or six of them in most markets.

Overall, I think my point still stands: claiming that you can't build a giant company without Silicon Valley's growth formula is ridiculously narrow. The vast majority of big companies are built by other methods.

[jvanderbot]

I think you switched from a binary flag ("no true PMF ... ") to a scalar without realizing it:

> Most businesses don't have product-market fit in this way.

They'll have it to a lesser extent?

The word "Fit" kind of implies a scalar relationship, and the disagreement over who has "it" and who "doesn't" comes down to size of market and suitability for that market. Why can't you can be perfect for a small market, or crappy for a market so large that you initially succeed but plateau.

[gizmo]

Endothermic and exothermic are different categories of reactions and both are also scalar. PMF is exothermic in this analogy. Growth produces more growth by itself, like a raging forest fire. Whereas regular business growth is endothermic: when you stop selling you stop growing.

[jvanderbot]

Endo / Exo have a zero point, across which you discretely jump categories, after which you scale up or down subjectively.

PMF does not have a zero point. If you sell (clasically) "zero to one" item you may or may not have PMF. One nuclear reactor / aircraft carrier is a big deal. One newsletter subscription is a small deal.

[galenmarchetti]

"clown car that fell into a gold mine" is such a brilliant image. im not familiar with twitter in those days, but I've seen other companies that definitely match this description