A product-market fit refers to the ability of a brand's product or service to satisfy a market need.
Do you want to grow your business? Discover these useful resources to take you through your success journey.
Benefits of Product-Market Fit
A product market fit helps to show:
- How to get prospects’ attention and convince them to purchase your products
- What steps to take so that you can drive business growth and turn satisfied buyers into advocates
- The elements or features which your products need to satisfy the audience's demand/expectations
- The best demographics that are likely to care more about the product or service
Developing deep insight into the above factors empowers you with a competitive advantage that fails to discover its product-market fit. You’ll be able to gain online visibility, cultivate a loyal customer base, boost conversions, and secure recommendations.
A better product-market fit will enable your company to develop and distribute a product in constant demand. Sales will be high, and buyers will write positive reviews online, convincing others to invest for similar reasons. You’ll create a product that addresses real pain points.
How to Find a Product-Market Fit?
Finding your product-market fit is the key to your brand's success. Here are five steps on how to find a product-market fit:
#1: Find the Problem/Solution and Audience
You need to start by asking yourself; what is the problem? And what’s the solution?
For example:
Problem:
You have a difficult time finding the best restaurants in town.
Solution:
Develop an app that people can use to search for the best restaurants and other services.
The next step is finding an audience that has the problem and wants the solution. When you are part of that audience, that’s a plus for you. However, when the problem isn’t relevant to you, then you may need to find people you can talk to about the problem and solution. That will help give you are clear perspective on the nature of the difficulty.
Here’s how to test the problem-solution approach:
Look at frequency versus value—how often the user will use your product and how much value the solution offers.
Usually, the user should use the product all the time, and the product should be able to solve every problem the user experiences. However, you can settle for a high frequency or value if you can't attain both.
#2: Find a Way to Start Building
You need to find a way to start building your product with the resources at your disposal. Here are key factors to consider:
- Is the problem solvable?
- What can you build with the available resources?
- Do you have the necessary technology to build the product?
- Are you able to find customers for the product?
#3: Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
You need to build the smallest possible thing that is valuable for a few early adopters. Tips to consider when building an MVP include:
- Define the core feature and stick to it
- Build your MVP fast—else things will drift.
- Get the MVP in front of customers as quickly as possible.
- Get feedback from a small relevant group to avoid too much noise and less dependable feedback.
#4: Find the Metrics for Success
These are the numbers that show your progress on the market-fit journey. Here, you need to focus on retention and usage.
Retention shows you if people keep using the product. Active users can also inform you of your retention rate.
Usage shows you how much people use your product.
#5: Build a Fast and Insanely Awesome Release Cycle
This is about improving the product fast. You can accomplish this by:
- Brainstorming. Throw all the ideas on a whiteboard from your team and users. You can’t build every idea, but you can listen to all.
- Short-size. Estimate how much work it is to build a feature.
- Prioritize and decide. You need to know what metric you are trying to improve and compare it against the features you’re adopting.
- Provide specifications for what you are building.
- Build it.