Rob Palumbo’s Post

10 Steps to Product-Market Fit: A Practical Guide Achieving product-market fit is the key to a startup's success. Here’s how you can get there: 1) Problem/Solution Fit: Ensure you’re solving a real, pressing problem. 2) Document Your Plan A: Start with a clear business model, but be ready to pivot. 3) Find Early Adopters: Identify and engage those who need your solution the most. 4) Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Focus on delivering the smallest solution that provides real value. 5) Measure Progress: Use metrics like acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue to track growth. 6) Deliver Value Before Scaling: Make sure users find value before you focus on scaling. 7) Learn from Early Feedback: Leverage qualitative insights from a few good customers. 8) Identify Your Growth Engine: Choose between paid, sticky, or viral growth strategies. 9) Track Cohorts: Understand user behavior by measuring them as cohorts. 10) Keep Testing: Breakthroughs come from learning through failed experiments. PS. check out 🔔 for a winning pitch deck the template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel https://lnkd.in/ejp-Bhnu

Admitting failure on Linkedin? Not something you see every day 😉 James Evans wrote a guest post for Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged about CommandBar's early failures to create a new category and how shifting to an existing category was key to helping the business take off. It's full of important learnings and pitfalls to avoid that all startups could benefit from. Check out the full post in the link in the comments below ⬇

Building a generational company take more product surface area. We've been building Unify for 17 months and we already have 2 distinct pillars to our product: 1) Signals: the reasons why we reach out 2) Engage: the workflows to engage with customers (think emails, calls, LinkedIn messages) We spent the first ~9 months of the company building signals, and found initial product-market-fit with just this pillar. But from day 1 of starting the company we knew that if we wanted to disrupt the entrenched players in our space we'd have to support customers in creating pipeline more broadly, not just surface signals for them. When we started building sequences last fall, we got questions about if we were building this too early. Our investors pushed us on this point too. But Connor and I had the perspective that we wanted to build a generational company, and one that changed how go-to-market fundamentally worked. So we took a swing on building our 2nd product extremely early. As soon as we onboarded customers to sequences, the vision made sense to them. They started pulling us for more new features. Building more product surface area is a core reason why we grew 29% m/m last month 🚀🚀🚀

Key lessons on achieving product-market fit emerge from 20 founders: Focus on rigorous validation. Maintain lean operations. Engage directly with customers. Adapt your ICP based on feedback. A more customer-centric approach simplifies navigating the complexities of achieving PMF. #ProductMarketFit #StartupAdvice #FounderInsights

“Extreme product-market fit is a state of widespread demand for a product that satisfies a critical need and — crucially — can be delivered repeatedly and efficiently to each customer.” This definition comes from a First Round Capital post Kristen Hayward, Head of People and Operations at Superhuman, shared with me. We discussed when Superhuman found their “extreme PMF.”  They targeted achieving 40% of customers being “very disappointed” if they couldn’t use Superhuman. And more critically how that milestone drove decisions NOT to scale. Most PMF definitions only focus on how well a product satisfies a customer’s problem. That could be any customer. In your pre-PMF stage, or Launch Wave (more on Launch Waves in our book 📚 Sail to Scale 📚), early customers are usually the innovators:  This class of customers are like teenagers.  They love experiencing new things and are risk-takers. They tend to be less concerned by early stage product flaws. The mistake founders make is they start scaling 1) Investing in a sales team,  2) Spending on marketing and advertising, and  3) Buying KIND bars and foosball tables as soon as they have their first few paying customers. The innovators are not a broad base. Throwing dollars - especially too early - won’t get you sustainable scale. Your product needs to satisfy multiple customers’ problems. That’s why I like measuring “extreme product-market fit– a product that satisfies a critical need and can be delivered repeatedly and efficiently to each customer.” The lesson is reaching the 40% benchmark for beyond the innovators and for each segment. How did you know when you achieved “extreme product-market fit?” 👇👇👇Post your thoughts in comments. #ScalingSuccess #ProductMarketFit #StartupJourney

10 Steps to Product-Market Fit: A Practical Guide Achieving product-market fit is the key to a startup's success. Here’s how you can get there: 1) Problem/Solution Fit: Ensure you’re solving a real, pressing problem. 2) Document Your Plan A: Start with a clear business model, but be ready to pivot. 3) Find Early Adopters: Identify and engage those who need your solution the most. 4) Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Focus on delivering the smallest solution that provides real value. 5) Measure Progress: Use metrics like acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue to track growth. 6) Deliver Value Before Scaling: Make sure users find value before you focus on scaling. 7) Learn from Early Feedback: Leverage qualitative insights from a few good customers. 8) Identify Your Growth Engine: Choose between paid, sticky, or viral growth strategies. 9) Track Cohorts: Understand user behavior by measuring them as cohorts. 10) Keep Testing: Breakthroughs come from learning through failed experiments. ----- Follow All Chance to learn from more innovative insights.

10 Steps to Product-Market Fit: A Practical Guide Achieving product-market fit is the key to a startup's success. Here’s how you can get there: 1) Problem/Solution Fit: Ensure you’re solving a real, pressing problem. 2) Document Your Plan A: Start with a clear business model, but be ready to pivot. 3) Find Early Adopters: Identify and engage those who need your solution the most. 4) Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Focus on delivering the smallest solution that provides real value. 5) Measure Progress: Use metrics like acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue to track growth. 6) Deliver Value Before Scaling: Make sure users find value before you focus on scaling. 7) Learn from Early Feedback: Leverage qualitative insights from a few good customers. 8) Identify Your Growth Engine: Choose between paid, sticky, or viral growth strategies. 9) Track Cohorts: Understand user behavior by measuring them as cohorts. 10) Keep Testing: Breakthroughs come from learning through failed experiments. -------- Follow All Chance to learn from more innovative insights.

I’ve seen 3 great ideas fail in the last 6 months. Not because they weren’t brilliant. Not because the founders weren’t smart. But because they skipped ONE crucial step: market validation. Most people think they need: 👉 A polished product. 👉 Fancy features. 👉 A huge marketing budget. Here’s the truth: You don’t need ANY of that to validate your idea. What you need is this: ✅ Talk to real people. ✅ Ask tough questions. ✅ Learn if they’ll pay for your solution. Validation is the difference between building what you think people want... And building what they’ll actually buy. So, ask yourself: Have you validated your idea with the market? If not, let’s fix that. Drop a comment or DM me, and I’ll share the exact questions I use to help founders test their ideas fast.

Here’s the tough part: Consultants, advisors, and product experts often face a hard choice: 1️⃣ Give founders what they need—focus, clarity, and ruthless prioritization. OR 2️⃣ Give founders what they want—visions of grand multi-market dominance. The truth? You have to do a bit of both. Give them just enough of the future vision to keep them excited—while quietly guiding them to focus on the basics that will *actually* get them to product-market fit. Because here’s the thing: You don’t get to dominate multiple markets until you own one. And you don’t get to launch 20 features until one becomes indispensable.

There are two crucial parts to successfully achieving product-market fit: 1. Generating disruptive or 10x product ideas: This involves identifying the ideas you are meant to build for the next 10–15 years. This step can be non-intuitive, confusing and, slow. 2. Executing these ideas with excellence: The goal here is to execute the best with what you have, survive and thrive until you hit product-market fit. At Before Day Zero, Ankur Saxena (Former Head of Growth & Technology, Blinkit) is hosting an online workshop where he will dive into the first part - mastering consumer insight systems, particularly Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) that can fuel your intuition to discover 10x consumer product ideas. Many founders in the critical -1 to 0 phase struggle with this. They often miss the crucial step of translating consumer insights into viable ideas - a key piece of the puzzle for achieving product-market fit. If you're in the -1 to 0 phase of building, don't miss this one. Limited spots available. See you! The link to RSVP is in the comments.