What defines product market fit for a consumer internet startup? via Quora
Marc Andreseen writes an awesome post on product market fit hat Sean Ellis’ references in his post. He paints a picture of when product market fit isn’t happening to give an insight into the concept.
“You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.”
Conversely, when the opposite is happening, when you customers get your value proposition, when word of mouth is spreading, when usage is growing fast etc – you’ve got product/market fit.
However, one crucial point that Andreseen addresses that is overlooked when people talk product/market fit is the importance of the “market” itself.
“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”
Andreseen defines a good market as a market where the number and the growth rate of customers is large. MBA grads would talk Porters five forces, industry lifecycle analysis or Blue Ocean Strategy, but regardless of which tool you use, picking an emerging, large and (relatively) unsaturated market will gives your startup the best chance of reaching product market fit.
As Adreseen explains:
The #1 company-killer is lack of market.
When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
Therefore when trying to define product/market fit, it’s important to establish if the market is even worth addressing in the first place. If you believe there’s real opportunity, getting the right product to the market and growing the company around that demand is the essence of product/market fit.
Full article: http://pmarca-archive.pos
Launchrock your Startup with a Viral Landing Page
Setting up a prelaunch landing page is a no brainer for any startup. Whether you’re seeking to build your prelaunch list; whet the market’s appetite for your product or test the response to your idea you’ll use a coming soon page.
However, driving traffic to these pages, particularly for a bootstrapped startup isn’t easy but one startup LaunchRock.com is aiming to change that and make landing pages viral.
Inspired by Hipster.com and Fork.ly who both built large prelaunch lists using this simple idea, LaunchRock allows you to create great looking coming soon pages in minutes with a referral mechanism that creates a unique referral link for everyone who joins your list.
How you promote users to share this referral link is up to you. For example you can incentivize people to share link by giving them specific offers; e.g. “Invite 3 friends for priority access to your site” or by giving them tickets into a contest or a simple gift once they invite a specified number of people. The result is a landing page with a much greater chance at building your prelaunch list.
It’s not a silver bullet and doesn’t excuse you from other ways of marketing your startup, but it’s a nice way to test the water and build your audience without spending a cent.
Give it a go. http://www.LaunchRock.com
Melbourne Lean Startup Meetup
First Lean Startup Event for 2011. (more…)
10 Business Models that Rocked 2010
and what you can learn from them!
This presentation from Board of Innovation has been kicking around for a while now, and has even featured on Tech Crunch, but it’s so good I’m happy to repost it for anyone who hasn’t seen it.
As Groupon’s growth and valuation soared in 2010 the “Groupon model” became part of every web entrepreneurs lexicon. The easy to understand, easy to replicate and killer cash-flow model captured the imagination of many and sparked a wave of imitators looking to profit from the simple group economics.
But there were a host of other models that made their founders real money in 2010 such as AirBNB, Quirky.com and KickStarter that may not have quite received the same widespread commentary and understanding as Groupon but each had a profound effect on their success.
The presentation below describes and diagrams nine of these other business models (together with the Groupon model) to provide the viewer an insight into how these successful startups generate cash.
It also provides a source of ideas and inspiration for other web entrepreneurs to learn from, and even a framework for developing your own ideas with a set of templates and tools.
As diagramming your business model is an important stage that too many entrepreneurs skip over if you have a new idea – take advantage of these tools to map it out and make sure include it in your business plan, slide deck or executive summary.
The google docs template is particularly useful (and sharable!) if you’d like a hand workshopping your model contact us.
Enjoy the presentation!
