Why Product Market Fit isn’t enough
How to place your product by evaluating all the right things
Product Market Fit (PMF) is that thing that is achieved when a company has a product people buy, and it indicates how satisfied the market is with the product the company created.
Sometimes, though, there is a great PMF but, still, people aren’t buying our company’s product.
Why does this happen?
Brian Balfour, one of the best men marketing currently has, tells us this in great detail. While his website offers in-depth and very analytical essays about a vast array of marketing topics, I’ll try to summarize what I learned about Product Market Fit in this brief article.
Balfour stated that we usually only consider two elements when analyzing the PMF and these are Product and Market. It looks effective to only consider those two at first glance but, if you stop and think about it, it really is simplistic and the reflection needs to be further developed.
According to Balfour, there are four key elements to be considered together when finding the perfect PMF:
- market
- product
- channel
- model
These four elements all interact with each other, and in order to have a complete vision of how the product fits the market, we need to verify how each of these elements fits with the other.
The questions to ask ourselves when correctly analyzing the PMF are four:
- How does the product fit the channel?
- How does the channel fit the model?
- How does the model fit the market?
- How does the product fit the market?
Answering all these questions will help us have a comprehensive view of how our product can fit into the market and it will help us see which are strengths and weaknesses of our strategy. This will allow us to fine-tune the ideas we want to implement strategically and to use the best strategy we can come up with, maybe slightly tweaking all the different elements to reach great PMF.
When defining a strategy following different frameworks and analyzing all ideas is extremely important. Althpugh I will talk about framework options in another article, keep in mind that skipping steps will not allow you any sort of advantage in the long run.
