Product Market Fit

Product-Market fit is a stage during the initial days of a startup when the product and users align. Sam Altman characterizes it as when the user start talking about your product to others on their own. Paul Graham’s definition: Product market fit is when you build something that people want.

Startups take different time to achieve this depending on the problem it is trying to solve and the industry that it’s in. Before a startup reaches product market fit, it will iterate through multiple solutions based on the feedback from different stakeholders. Shorter this feedback loop is, the “leaner” it is. The tricky part of achieving product-market fit is that it is a 2 dimensional problem. Each time you tweak the product, that in turn also shift the market for that new solution.