Product/Market Fit

key Start Up success-requirement from Marc Andreessen - getting the right Fit between product and Market Segment - 2007-07-27-AndreessenMarketIsKeyForStartup - establishes viability/scalability of your Business Model?

Steve Blank says you don't scale-up staff/expenses until you reach it - 2009-11-04-BlankWhenGrowLeanStartup

• conversely, if you're scaling marketing/sales expenses and getting less growth than you expect, then you don't have product-market fit regardless of any other rules-of-thumb. See (2019-08-31) Dunford When Product Market Fit Does Not Equal Growth.

Sean Ellis "very disappointed" metric: (2009-11-30) Ellis The Startup Pyramid Via Product Market Fit

Product Development and Customer Development

Awesome piece detailing process of increasing focus of your product/segmentation (ideal customer) to drive development: (2020-08-04) Rahul Vohra Shares Superhumans Product Market Fit Framework

Before you reach that, you should do certain things that won't scale.

• Paul Graham: The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going. It could be interesting to start viewing startup ideas this way, because now that there are two components you can try to be imaginative about the second as well as the first. But in most cases the second component will be what it usually is—recruit users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience—and the main benefit of treating startups as vectors will be to remind founders they need to work hard in two dimensions.