(2019-09-24) Product-User Fit Comes Before Product-Market Fit A16z

Product-User Fit Comes Before Product-Market Fit. The honest version of “we’ve got product-market fit on a small cohort of very early power users” is “we’ve got product-user fit.”

The path from product-user fit to product-market fit is all about answering a few core questions: Who really wants this today? How many of those people are out in the wild? What else would it take in the product to turn non-users into users of our solution?

When exploring products that have only been in market for a short amount of time, the behavior of power users is often more interesting and important than any aggregate metrics. If the goal is to “make something people want,” then continuously talking to and observing early power users (Early Adopter) is the only way to really understand what drives both user retention and non-user activation.

See Crossing the Chasm