(2016-11-02) Intuition Behind The Founder Product Market Fit

Michael Light: Intuition Behind the “Founder-Product-Market Fit”. *In this interview, I spoke with Taylor Pearson.

I remember, there's a story from Steve Blank, who is one of the very early founders of what's now called Lean Startup. He had a book called Four Steps. He told an example, he started a company making video games for teenage boys...He'd done the market analysis, it was a great market, it was growing very quickly. He realized that the one problem with the business was he hated all his customers. He mostly wanted his customers to go away, and so they did (laughter). So it turned out to be a very, very bad business. It was a very good business for someone else but it was a very bad business... for him.

It was bad Product-Founder fit.

One of the questions I’ve asked myself when it comes to “Am I a good fit for this market” is, think about who your ideal customer avatar is. (ICP)

I tend to think about what does the day-to-day of running this business look like? What do I enjoy doing day-to-day, what am I good at day-to-day? What does this day-to-day business require?

I’ll give you another test to do it, just talk about doing that job, working with that market. And then make a recording of it and listen to the tone of your voice, and hear how excited you sound in the recording. That’s a clue for both you and anyone else who’s going to be involved

Taylor Pearson: There's a book by Jonah Lehrer called How We Decide. It just came to me as you were talking. He summarizes that when you're making a decision with five factors or less, you can make that in a very conscious life.

So if you’re choosing a car and there’s a hundred makes and models and there’s different colors and there’s fifty features in every car, you look at all the options. You read about them, you sleep on it for a few days, then whatever you’re most excited about or whatever you gut sense is, is the one that statistically is the better option.

Tony Robbins... tells a story where he’s with a kid who wants to stop drinking cola or something. And he’s like, “Well, how much do you want to drink this cola right now?” And he says it’s like a two out of ten. His scale goes from minus ten to plus ten. And the kid wants to stop drinking colas, right? So he first of all runs him all the way up to ten out of ten, he’s super excited to want to drink it, just to prove to him, you can play with this thing. Then he runs him all the way back down to minus ten. And then at that point the cola is like drinking shit, he doesn’t want to touch it. SO you can adjust how you feel about things.