People make product-market-fit seem like this mythical thing you can pinpoint to an exact moment, but it’s never that. Different folks have different definitions of it, so I won’t bother trying to come up with a unanimous one. Paul Graham, for instance, says you’ve achieved PMF when you no longer ask yourself whether you have. IMHO, that’s a rather simplistic way of looking at it (it’s not actionable and just relies on vibes).
“Companies without product-market fit feel like they're pushing a boulder uphill. Companies with product-market fit feel like they're guiding a boulder downhill.”
Instead, I believe it comes in stages. It’s not a milestone, it’s a continuum. That’s what it was like for us, at CommandBar. First Round Capital puts it very eloquently in their framework (we’ll talk about this later):
“Our contention is that product market fit is not binary — and it's not something that you get to overnight, despite what all of those “we just went viral” founding stories may have you believe.”
PMF is your start-up’s reality check. It won’t tell you what to build, but it serves as a guiding compass for your company’s direction. Without it, you’re flying blind. Assessing PMF helps you understand if your product resonates and people want what you’re building or if you’re merely filling up space in the market.
Superhuman famously published its PMF framework a few years ago. Super straightforward. You ask your users how disappointed they would be if they could no longer use the product. If over 40% say they would be very disappointed, you’d considered that a strong indicator of PMF. It’s similar to an NPS survey (which you can easily build with CommandBar, wink wink). It also asks:
My take on this framework is that it’s good, but mostly applicable in the very early stages of the company. It gives you just enough data to either (1) continue with a vision or (2) change and adapt based on user feedback. It also carries the risk that you end up whatever people are requesting, which as counterintuitive as it may sound, is not always the way to go (“faster horses”, etc etc).
The one framework we’ve used a lot at CommandBar is this one from First Round Capital, called The 4 Levels of PMF. Todd Jackson, Partner at First Round, also recently shared it on Lenny’s Podcast.
In this article, I’m going to talk about how we used First Round’s framework for each of the levels and what we’ve learned from implementing it.
To understand what follows, you’ll need to understand what CommandBar does. Suppose you’re not yet familiar with our product (we’ll forgive you this time - just this once!!). In that case, CommandBar is a user assistance platform that allows product teams to embed an intelligent agent on top of their software to help perform actions, fetch data, and co-browse with them to show how the product works.
It does more than responsive support, too. You can configure CommandBar to proactively nudge users when they seem confused or encourage them to do things—like a friendly human assistant standing by your side, not an annoying barrage of popups.
We didn’t start as this, though. We talk more about our repositioning here, but our initial product was what we now call Spotlight, a universal search bar for any app.
First Round’s framework describes this as: You have a handful of somewhat engaged and happy initial customers but things still feel early and messy. Focus on increasing satisfaction.