What is product/market fit?
In the beginning, the entrepreneurs should be obsessively focused on finding a product/market fit, and conserving cash to allow them as much roadway as possible. Mark Andreessen describes product/market fit as “the only thing that matters,” but what is it?
Basically, a startup has product/market fit when it has:
- A set of customers excited enough about your product to pay for it. Usually, that payment is cash, but sometimes it’s time. As Facebook, Twitter and Google have proven, if you can get enough customers spending time with your product, there’s usually a way to monetize it.
- A customer base large enough to create a viable business.
Andreessen says:
ou can always feel product/market fit when it’s happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers ….
You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of ‘blah,’ the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
Lower your burn rate during the search for product/market fit
If your startup hasn’t reached product/market fit, you should obsessively focus on finding it and adjust your burn rate downwards to give yourself as much time as you need to get there.
The best way to find product/market fit is to get in front of customers and validate your assertions. Start early, and validate before you build anything. Use wireframes of the product to walk customers through your vision, then keep validating throughout product development.
Develop objective listening skills, and don’t get caught up in selling too hard. Often entrepreneurs only hear what they want to hear, a trait sometimes referred to as “happy ears.” When a customer disagrees, you’ll often hear these entrepreneurs say: “They just don’t get it.” This is a good indication the entrepreneur isn’t listening.
Also, ask yourself two questions about each of your assertions:
1. Is the problem you’re tackling important to the customer? Too often, companies chase problems that just aren’t important enough to spend money or time to solve. If the problem isn’t important enough, be prepared to drop the idea you’re currently working on and pivot to something different.
2. Do your solutions really solve the problem? Present the solution to the client, and ask them tougher questions such as:
- “Is this a must-have, or a nice-to-have?”
- “Would you commit to purchasing at this price if we build it?”
- “Where does this fall on your list of priorities on which you’d spend money?”
At my fourth startup, Watermark Software, we got a great response when we showed our software to potential customers; our launch went well; and even the New York Times was excited enough to dedicate a half page to covering us. But while it was cool, it wasn’t a must-have, and we struggled to sell it. After two more years of hard work, we found the vertical applications that were a better fit for our product and pivoted the product into a full solution for those verticals. The business took off.
We wasted a ton of money in those two years. Had we done a better job of customer validation up front, we could have avoided that waste. I made the mistake of listening with “happy ears” instead of being objective.
Reduce your burn rate; increase your time
No one can predict how long it will take to find product/market fit. To give yourself the greatest chance of success, you need your funds to last as long as possible. In other words, you need to set your burn rate as low as possible.
The ideal startup team should be the founders, the product development team, and one or two sales people to get the founders in front of customers. That’s it. The founders are the people best suited to interacting with customers to figure out if the experiments are working and to learn from the failures. This work is the key job of the entrepreneur, and cannot easily be delegated to others.
It may also be tempting to hire a large R&D team to get to market quickly.Recognize that few products are immediately ready for broad adoption, and you’ll likely need to go through a few revisions to get to product/market fit. Set your burn rate for a marathon, not a sprint.
There can be exceptions to this spending rule when you can find things that will clearly shorten your time to product/market fit: for example, a new hire that brings in a missing but much-needed skill.
Once you have evidence of product/market fit, you can then find a repeatable and scalable sales model, which I’ll address in my next post.
David Skok has been a General Partner at Matrix Partners since 2001. He founded his first company when he was 22, and since then, founded three companies, including SilverStream Software, and done one turnaround. Skok specializes in SaaS, enterprise software and cloud computing, and blogs at forEntrepreneurs.com.
Image courtesy of Flickr user tonylanciabeta.
In the upper reaches of Wall Street, talk of another financial crisis is dismissed as alarmism. Last fall, John Mack, to his credit, was one of the first Wall Street C.E.O.s to say publicly that his industry needed stricter regulation. Now that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the last two remaining big independent Wall Street firms, have converted to bank holding companies, a legal switch that placed them under the regulatory authority of the Federal Reserve, Mack insists that proper supervision is in place. Fed regulators “have more expertise, and they challenge us,” Mack told me. Since the middle of 2007, Morgan Stanley has raised about twenty billion dollars in new capital and cut in half its leverage ratio—the total value of its assets divided by its capital. In addition, it now holds much more of its assets in forms that can be readily converted to cash. Other firms, including Goldman Sachs, have taken similar measures. “It’s a much safer system now,” Mack insisted. “There’s no question.”
That’s true. But the history of Wall Street is a series of booms and busts. After each blowup, the firms that survive temporarily shy away from risky ventures and cut back on leverage. Over time, the markets recover their losses, memories fade, spirits revive, and the action starts up again, until, eventually, it goes too far. The mere fact that Wall Street poses less of an immediate threat to the rest of us doesn’t mean it has permanently mended its ways.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about recent events was not how rapidly the big Wall Street firms got into trouble but how quickly they returned to profitability and lavished big rewards on themselves. Last year, Goldman Sachs paid more than sixteen billion dollars in compensation, and Morgan Stanley paid out more than fourteen billion dollars. Neither came up with any spectacular new investments or produced anything of tangible value, which leads to the question: When it comes to pay, is there something unique about the financial industry?
Thomas Philippon, an economist at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, thinks there is. After studying the large pay differential between financial-sector employees and people in other industries with similar levels of education and experience, he and a colleague, Ariell Reshef of the University of Virginia, concluded that some of it could be explained by growing demand for financial services from technology companies and baby boomers. But Philippon and Reshef determined that up to half of the pay premium was due to something much simpler: people in the financial sector are overpaid. “In most industries, when people are paid too much their firms go bankrupt, and they are no longer paid too much,” he told me. “The exception is when people are paid too much and their firms don’t go broke. That is the finance industry.”
On Wall Street dealing desks, profits and losses are evaluated every afternoon when trading ends, and the firms’ positions are “marked to market”—valued on the basis of the closing prices. A trader can borrow money and place a leveraged bet on a certain market. As long as the market goes up, he will appear to be making a steady profit. But if the market eventually turns against him his capital may be wiped out. “You can create a trading strategy that overnight makes lots of money, and it can take months or years to find out whether it is real money or luck or excessive risk-taking,” Philippon explained. “Sometimes, even then it is hard.” Since traders (and their managers) get evaluated on a quarterly basis, they can be paid handsomely for placing bets that ultimately bankrupt their companies. “In most industries, a good idea is rewarded because the company generates profits and real cash flows,” Philippon said. “In finance, it is often just a trading gain. The closer you get to financial markets the easier it is to book funny profits.”
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Michael M Thomas Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 11:33 am
In the first big art boom, back in the late ’80s-90s, some one observed, “It isn’t that the art isn’t worth the m oney, it’s that the money isn’t worth the money.” – MM Thoomas
Friday screencast: artflation Abnormal Returns Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Easy money and the red hot art market. (Big Picture)
Mike in Nola Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
When I saw the Lichtenstein story on the BBC yesterday, was going to send BR a note that he might use as the start of a blog post.
The point of my note was that such big prices tend to mark tops in stocks because it’s a sign of overconfidence combined with spending paper profits. The example that first came to mind yesterday was the Japanese investor who bought one of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for $80M – in 1990 just after the Japanese market peak.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1126944.html
Of course there are other indicators. Remember reading about one of the well known players in the very early 1900′s who, when he saw $10k bet on the turn of a card, went out and correctly sold everything.
An illustration of what some art investments are worth in hard times is that some segments of the art market were down 75% during the depths of the crash. The only reason art is booming again is because Ben B has repumped the liquidity bubble, allowing the banksters to make plenty instead of having their sorry asses thrown out on the street as they deserved.
grlampton Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 2:37 pm
A lot of what this post says about the art market can also be said about the rare coin market. Granted, rare coins are not unique in the same way a single piece of artwork is (though some are close to unique).
Although I do not know what the long-term appreciation figures are for artwork, classic American rare coins have outperformed the S&P over the lon g haul, and, in my view, thwey are a lot more fun.
gms777 Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
And for the 99.99 percent of us who don’t have millions to throw at art, when you buy art, buy it because you like it and think you will continue to enjoy looking at it in your house for years.
Something like 95+% of all art never appreciates in value or if it does, it does so below the rate of inflation.
obsvr-1 Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
seems this is just the .1%-ers keeping up with the Rockerfellers
Perhaps the FED should be buying up rare art during distressed markets — then sell to the Fraudsters and elitist when they have nothing better to do with their money but buy high priced art; then recycle the profits back to the taxpayer (reduce nat debt) — or substitute SSA for the FED to bolster the Trust Fund for self sufficiency.
ToNYC Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
If you’re very rich, you can ship your art to Switzerland, London or Singapore to be stored in a state-of-the-art facility and not have to worry about the Feds tracking it as funds.
Believe it or not, that’s where the majority of art ends up these days, sitting in storage waiting for the right time and place to be shown or sold.
great point you make:
rich or just smart…keeping all invested in Intellectual Property keeps you free. Hard assets are more like anchors and chains and locks and guns.
Long term Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 5:12 pm
The problem I see with art, as an investment or even as a store of value, is that BOTH the insurance AND storage costs of pieces in the $10M+ range are significant. And reoccuring. And a drag on ROI unless a large mark-up is achieved.
Mannwich Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Then there’s this. Sure doesn’t sound worth it to me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/realestate/14cov.html
philipat Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
I’d also recommend fine wine for similar reasons. Also more liquid (Double entendre intended!)
pintelho Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Now this is an excellent educational piece…thank you Marion
Long term Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 9:06 pm
i consider this very interesting from the perspective of how chinese billionaires will benefit high-end american exports.
VennData Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
What’s good for Damien Hirst is good for the global economy — Charles Wilson
YourPortlandFinancialAdvisor Says:
November 12th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
“Blue-chip art is no different from gold.”
It’s actually a lot different. People collect art to feel good about themselves, to feel intellectual, worldly, ect. Watch “Gone With the Wind”, Tara, the plantation is filled with paintings from Europe because that was the equivilant of the time. Plus anyone who fancies themselves a contemporary art collector must have and be judged by works of certain artists. Warhol would be one. No Warhol, no collection.
Julia Chestnut Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 5:52 am
The distinction here is between art as a store of value and art as an investment that is expected to create appreciation. The big jump in the value of a piece of art occurs when the artist dies, and thus the supply ends. People who build a fortune in art do so by having good taste and developing a relationship with the people who create (and/or sell) the kind of art that they love. It is about enjoyment and communication – about beauty and provocation. I have found in my limited experience that people who see art as an investment don’t pick the right artists: someone has to do their choosing for them.
But the pieces that we’re talking about in this article are investment grade – blue chips, as you said. Those are a store of value, alright. But as someone noted, the price of keeping something like that is extremely high. There are some pieces of such extreme value to certain unscrupulous people that you don’t insure them if you own them – because you are afraid that the appraiser or the insurance company might tip someone off about where the piece is. I wish I were being alarmist. Often these pieces are kept in professional storage in vaults because you don’t want to keep it where your family lives for these reasons. As old Priam found out long ago, possessing a thing of legendary beauty invites certain problems, especially if you are using it as a store of wealth.
contrabandista13 Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 8:25 am
And just to think, I bought a “Melvin Cruddy” last week for $2.77 at Resales for the Retarded.
It kinda looks like a Modigliani of Bugs Bunny and Daffy having breakfast at a Milwaukee coffee shop.
BuffaloBill Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 8:35 am
A.) If bought at auction, there are also buyer’s and seller’s commissions. You’ll need to add these into your investment computations. These commissions are not insignificant.
B.) If bought at auction, the hammer price (plus commission) is the single highest worldwide valuation for that piece.
C.) To quote the late Lawrence Fleischman who headed Kennedy Galleries in NYC for many years. “Art makes a lousy investment for almost all buyers except for dealers as we work hard to maintain a rolodex of likely customers. ”
D.) To quote the late Horace Solomon of Holly Solomon Galleries, “The painting hanging behind me is worth $125,000 – mostly because I say so.”
contrabandista13 Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 8:41 am
The BIG MONEY plays in the art market are all about vanity… Oh….! Such refined and subtle sophistication…
Having said that, It’s worth remembering that a trophy such as a Pollock or a real Modigliani, never grows old, never makes you carry it’s purse and will always comfort you in sickness and in heath….
Greg0658 Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 9:13 am
interesting thread .. I’ll add my pov (thats point of view) not (privately owned vehicle :-) … while waiting for the pumpkin pie to bake
I collect art – not blue chip art (I can’t) .. music 1st books 2nd clocks 3rd (why I started that with the dang time change twice a year) .. add general stuff to cover the walls, shelves and corners .. why I started that or continue that operation (as we slip back into a hunter gatherer society) (produced in mass production) I don’t know … I guess I’m a well trained consumerist .. worked all my life to turn green TP into stuff – because what good is scratchy green TP .. so coming up on the Thanksgiving season I’ll just ask for your thanks .. so thank you in advance … ie thanks for working to build stuff and then turn excess wages into stuff so people who can’t turn stuff into stuff can flip it for a living
ps – the other pov – wish I could earn enough to have one of those fancies I loved to take pictures of – but then again – I might hit a deer with it or get it k@/@d
ToNYC Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Art as investment works for the smart players who realize that over time their judgment of the intellectual perspective which is IP, and what it is that the artist presents will be a Call on an increasing statement of value over time (and transferred stored savings). The ones that see the artist’s vision and help bring that awareness public do the very best and are the lifeblood of our culture as well.
Saturday links: cleaner coal Abnormal Returns Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 10:08 am
What is driving the art market? Easy money.* (Big Picture)
philipat Says:
November 13th, 2010 at 11:31 am
VennData Says:
“What’s good for Damien Hirst is good for the global economy — Charles Wilson”
IMHO, the new Warhol? And I mean that not kindly. Both take advantage of art as culture as fashion as Ladt Gaga to make money. No problem with that, and good luck to them. But is it art?
Howard Lindzon » Blog Archive » Printing Money…I Mean Quantitative Easing Says:
November 14th, 2010 at 2:07 am
Today I am thinking about my Sotheby’s $BID indicator. I wrote about it a lot up until 2008 and have just forgotten about it until this fantastic post about the art market.
Record Art Prices… Are the Rich Worried? Says:
November 14th, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Today I am thinking about my Sotheby’s $BID indicator. I wrote about it a lot up until 2008 and have just forgotten about it until this fantastic post about the art market.
Abnormal Returns on Art Says:
November 15th, 2010 at 1:02 am
To read the post mentioned in the video, click here: What’s Driving the Art Market? Easy Money.