The Quest for Product Market Fit

More than any other question, founders ask me about product market fit. How do you find it? How do you know if you have it?

This is a good set of questions because the only job that matters for a founder is to find and hold on to product market fit. Every other job is a tangential side quest. Product market fit is like the sun. It’s the source of all life and movement for a company.

I’ve found product market fit 8 times in my life. There is no formula to discover it anymore than there is a formula to write a hit song. There is not even a standard measurement for it. What follows below are just some observations on the art of the quest itself.

• PMF is not binary. You can certainly NOT have it, but just like different stars have different strengths and sizes, so does PMF.
• Size: You can have PMF in a very small market. If your PMF is strong, you can have a monopoly in this small market. In college, Tom, Sean, and I made a site called “Just a Tip” that let users send anonymous tips telling friends about their annoying problems. It virally exploded overnight with millions of users. We had very strong PMF… in the “anonymous tips by email” market. Not exactly a huge market, particularly in our ability to monetize it.
• Strength: The strength of your PMF is directly proportionate to your organic growth. If leads or users show up out of nowhere without you having to lift a finger, that’s strong PMF. Just a Tip had very strong product market fit, just not in a very large or lucrative market.
• A Market of 1: If you build a product for yourself, you have at least satisfied a market of one. Presumably, there are other people like you. I made Confide because I wanted to use it myself. We made Roam because we wanted a Virtual Office for ourselves. Now, these are networked/team products, but if you make something you use and live in every day, you are living on the edge and more likely to succeed because you can tailor it to fit exactly what you’re doing.
• Change: Just as a star ultimately burns out over time, so does PMF. Early adopters dry up, channels lose their effectiveness, markets change. Competitors jump in. Most often you’re hit not by a direct competitor, but by a new paradigm that changes the demand profile for the product. Several times in my life I’ve had really strong market fit and slowly fallen out of it over time. A founder needs to be watching all of this on the edges and stay on top of it.
• Change can be GOOD: When Yext launched in 2006, the iPhone didn’t exist, and Google Maps was in its infancy. The explosion of these new mobile mapping services was an incredible market force that propelled the entire listings category into real-time updates on mobile devices. Yext was positioned perfectly to lift off from this with our PowerListings franchise in 2010. MapQuest printouts became Google Maps on the iPhone.
• Believe What People Do, Not What They Say: Everyone will lie to your face and tell you your product is great. If you offer it to them for free, they will give you positive feedback with a few meaningless nits to show they’re paying attention. It’s a waste of time. It’s misleading signal unless you make them pay. I endeavor to get harsh signals from the market, not happy signals from friends. There is nothing harsher than the market.
• Focus on the Customer, Not the Technology: Steve Jobs famously said you need to start from the customer and work backwards. One of the worst debacles of my career was Xone, a beacon-based product that failed at Yext. I was obsessed with a new low-energy Bluetooth capability that Apple built into iOS and was convinced it was the future of in-store experiences. I made the huge mistake of trying to figure out applications for the technology instead of just trying to consider what someone actually wanted.
• Bottom Up, Not Top Down: Going super granular is the most important thing I do. Correspondingly, the biggest mistake I see others make is starting at the market level and deciding to “enter the CRM space” with “AI” or “Cloud” or whatever. That’s just pattern matching to what’s already worked in the past and applying it to a new domain. That might work for investors. It may even work sometimes for other entrepreneurs! But it’s never worked for me. I’ve found you have to come up with original ideas, and that only comes from deep work, living down in the trenches of whatever you’re trying to do. The idea for Yext PowerListings came when I was running Yext Calls’ call tracking services and realized you could swap phone numbers in a MapQuest listing, and that businesses would want to control it.
• Services Companies Never Evolve into Product Companies: I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve met with a services company who said they were planning to do some service over and over again, build internal products to streamline those services, and then bring those products to market. I met with them later, and it never happened. I’ve never seen it happen once. If you want to make a services company, do it! If you want to make a product, do it!

Above all, I’ve found that you have to strike the right balance between dogmatically believing in the big-picture thing you want to do, while being willing to change the details constantly to figure out what actually works. As we founded the Yext Calls era business, I spent basically all my time with a small team running media experiments for brands like GymTicket.com or TVRepairman.com. GymJungle.com was a Google-like search for gyms. We tried everything. Very, very few things worked at all. But when something did, we grabbed it and ran with it.

One last point. It’s way, way, way harder than you think. It takes way longer. It involves way more pain. Look at every single major tech company from Amazon to Google to Meta to any of Elon’s companies. They all have an arc of failure every few years where the world is convinced they will not survive. They look nothing like they did in 2005. They’ve required constant effort and reinvention led by the founders (look what’s happened to Google since Brin returned to reshock the company).

Yet decades later, they beat on, because the quest for product market fit is an unending founder epic that starts all over again the second you think you’re done.