Everyone talks a lot about product market fit. It’s drilled into you as a founder. “Don’t build something people don’t want, don’t wait to ship your product, don’t isolate yourself building castles in the sky. Your startup lives and dies based on your understanding of the market, so go out there and understand the fucking market.”
It’s really really important advice. The temptation to build your own “vision” is really strong. There are hundreds of founders who will insist that they are hunting for market signal while doing the exact opposite. First time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution, etc. etc. So I get why it’s emphasized so much, is my point.
Nuance is hard to communicate, though, and I think sometimes founders — especially second time founders — will decide that the natural conclusion is to hunt for PMF wherever you can find it, in any industry, serving any group of people. And this is also wrong, because you won’t have founder market fit.
Everyone knows what product market fit is, what the hell is founder market fit?
Most people are not suited to be founders. Those that are, are not equally suited to sell the same things. Selling into the consumer creative world is way different than selling into the enterprise tech world (ask me how I know). A jazz pianist with a history of psychedelics and a past as a Buddhist monk is going to ace the former. A buttoned up ivy grad with a research pedigree will do better on the latter. Try and switch them. Can you imagine this guy in a room with a bunch of pressed white shirt consultants trying to identify quarterly deliverables?
Forget about sales, these people just wouldn’t have anything to talk about. And if you can’t talk to your customers, you can’t build product for them.
Founder market fit is about culture. It’s that unquantifiable similarity function, that vibe fit, that accent and language and way you dress and the million other little details that gives you tribal identity, the things necessary to get a potential customer to tell you their problems and root for you to succeed and give you their money (in that order). It’s also the million little details that the founder looks for in their clients, the things that makes the founder want to dedicate years of their life to building for that group of people.
Is this unfair? Or maybe anti egalitarian? Does it rely too much on stereotypes? I’m not sure. On the one hand I like the idea that anyone could just learn to sell to anyone else. On the other hand, that word “learn” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It just seems practically obvious that, like, a native Spanish speaker will have a harder time selling into a Chinese market than a native Chinese speaker. It’s not impossible, it’s just that the former founder would have to do way more work, and startups are already a ton of work!
Product market fit is a boolean, or maybe measurable on a single axis. You either have it or you don’t. Founder market fit is weirdly high dimensional, because it’s as much about temperament as it is about anything else.
Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re an introvert, someone who’s not great at the whole ‘going to a new place, putting on a character, and selling to strangers who don’t know you’ thing. This isn’t prohibitive as a founder, but it’s going to make it harder to sell to certain large enterprises who are used to extremely charismatic salesmen spending on steak dinners and box seats at the Yankees and exchanging business cards at conferences. So you may want to gun for a market where the buyer is more likely be someone you never have to meet in person — consumer markets, or dev tools that spread through word of mouth. If you insist on b2b, then maybe a better target wedge are remote teams that don’t necessarily expect a lot of in person face time. Or find the kind of people that you might like to hang out with. For me, that’s people who like video and boardgames. Can you find a way to turn ‘going to gencon’ or ‘going to pax west’ into an opportunity to meet your target customer? (Unfortunately I could not)
In case it helps, here’s a list of axes that have been on my mind recently.
Introversion / extroversion. We already talked a bit about this above. If you’re an introvert, it will bluntly just be harder for you. But also you probably want to lean towards distribution channels that do not require you to be on stage or networking at conferences, which in turn will likely drive more towards consumer or PLG (product led growth, as popularized by figma and linear).
Your particular identifying cultural niche.1 Don’t lie, I know you have one. You’re a hipster tumblrite or a too-online reddit kid or a 4chan edgelord. Or if you spent time offline, you’re a jock or a drama kid or a computer geek. You identify with someone in the Breakfast Club more than the rest. That almost certainly impacts who you naturally gravitate towards, and who you will want to serve (or, alternatively, who you wouldn’t want to spend any time with).
Related: are you technical? A lot of technical people have a really hard time empathizing with people who are non-technical. Learning to code literally warps your brain. But without that empathy, you will not be able to ‘speak the language’ of an ops person or sales person. It is way too easy to take for granted basic things like ‘what is a command line’ or even ‘what is markdown’. That leaks into your product experience too. You may literally be blind to the ways in which your product assumes technical competence.
Where you live. If you live in NYC it’s just easier to start a fintech company. If you live in Texas, it’s easier to start an energy company. Etc. etc.
What you spend your free time doing. In case you haven’t noticed, I think about AI agents a lot. That makes it really easy for me to write a lot about AI agents, which in turn is a great distribution channel for when I try to sell my AI agent technology to people (buy Nori!). Do you spend your free time thinking about the problem space? If you do, it’s easier to wake up 3 years down the line to continue grinding.
Your team size. Some folks really like working on small, lean, talent dense teams. That basically takes them out of the running for industries that require or expect more of ‘forward deployed’ handholding / services model.
Related: how much you prefer raising. If you’re someone who’s a maximalist, who wants to raise infinity dollars, that generally goes hand in hand with fielding a massive team to operationalize everything. The amount of money you raise also impacts how easy it is to sell to specific people, because they look at that dollar amount as part of the buy/no-buy signal. If you want to sell to CISOs (for example), it helps to have raised a ton of money from blue-chip VCs because it gives your company legitimacy, which is incredibly important to an executive role that is all about evaluating legitimacy.
What you like to wear. This is a little stupid, but I kinda hate wearing a suit. The whole white buttondown, belt, crisp pants. Just not really for me. There are also, silly as it may sound, some industries where that’s just an expectation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sol Hando out of a suit, but he pulls it off every time, and I suspect it works really well for his industry.
The overall space of founder market fit is just mindbogglingly vast, because everything is a signal to your customers or a signal to you. There are lots of reasons people tell founders to ‘build for yourself,’ but perhaps the most important one is that you hopefully have a pretty good understanding of how to find and appeal to other people who are like you. And hopefully you like yourself enough to want to sell into that market.
It’s worth noting that not everything about founder market fit will end up mattering all that much. All of these considerations are things that will make differences on the margins; and many things are also just inherently contradictory, so something will have to give. To pick an example out of a hat, it is definitely harder for me to build AI dev tools living in NYC. The ‘founder market optimal’ choice may be to either build fintech (change the market) or move to the Bay (change the founder). But we’re doing fine at Nori selling our background agent infrastructure, even if it means racking up more airline miles than we might have otherwise.
Founder market fit is about tradeoffs, and in particular, which tradeoffs are impossible for you as a founder to overcome. Note that this isn’t always easy to really think through. Knowing what you can deal with and what will grind your gears until you go mad requires a lot of introspection.
In this, finding founder market fit is not so different from, like, finding a good relationship partner. Being a founder is a long-term commitment. Minimum three years, but more likely 7 to 10 years. Lots of things that seem fine right now really will grind after that long. You need to think through your deal breakers and make sure that the place where you find market signal isn’t in a space you’re going to end up hating three years down the line. Like Paul Graham famously said:
If you can just avoid dying, you get rich.
Which, of course, is why founder market fit ends up being so important. If you don’t have founder market fit, your startup will die, because you will lose interest or get frustrated or just not want to do it anymore. That may be true even if you are seeing some success. I know too many startups that hit the 7 figure ARR mark and just fell apart because one or both founders couldn’t do it anymore.
And on the flip side, if you do find the overlap of founder market fit and product market fit, you’re on the golden path for life.
In February of 2021 I made the crazy and totally unadvisable decision to leave the comfortable world of Google and start a company. Best decision I ever made. Along the way I started I started writing a journal of sorts that I've taken to calling the Founder's Guide -- basically a place I can ramble about startups and how they work and how to think about them. You can find more in the series here.
HN discussion here.
My wife got to this part of the article and said, unprompted, that she identified with the grumpy old man on the porch shaking her (his?) fist at children. When I said that that’s not a character in the breakfast club she shook her fist at me
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