Sharing my #1 tip for finding product-market fit as a founder šŸ“ˆ

Gary Zurnamer
9 replies
We recently closed our $5mm seed round and looking back, I realized there was one key habit that helped us find product-market fit - talking to customers every day. When things were unclear or we debated a big decision, we'd email a range of customers, set up a call (or send them a Vouch video request) and ask them for their view on: 1. Product features and user experience 2. How we position ourselves and the messaging we use 3. Pricing These conversations would inevitably show us the right path to the best answer and save us hours of internal debates and decision fatigue. It sounds simple but next time you are faced with a big decision - go ahead and ask your customers what they think! Do you have any tips on how you found product-market fit early on? I'd love to hear advice on this topic from the community here šŸ™

Replies

Bren Kinfa šŸ’Ž SaaS Gems
Indeed! Getting into your end users' shoes and into their heads is one of the best things an early-stage founder can do to align product direction, IMO.
Gary Zurnamer
@saasdesigner Absolutely! Often the hardest to do though. Sometimes easier to keep your head down and build without feedback. It's a balance
Heleana Grace
This is awesome, Gary! I've been following you guys since we spoke last time, and I love the tips and tricks series on your blog! šŸ¤© I can confirm that even for a service like Videodeck, talking to clients has been the best way to improve our positioning and validate our business. I have one question for you, though, what do you do when you get completely different feedback from different clients? How do you decide who do you listen to?
Gary Zurnamer
@heleana Thanks! Great to connect again and shout out to @lauren_thomas4 for our wonderful blog content. The question on different feedback is super important. We generally try to cluster the feedback together to identify trends. For instance, if we ask 10 customers for feedback and there is consistency from a few of them, we'll gravitate towards that first. We do also look at the other feedback and interrogate it but clustering and pattern matching from a group is how we tend to handle it. You could also assign a score to each bit of feedback based upon your ideal customer profile. E.g. if you have a cohort of customers that you know are your "best" users, you would rank their feedback higher than say another customer that is a less frequent user, more likely to churn, etc... I hope this helps!
Heleana Grace
@lauren_thomas4 @gary_zurnamer1 Thank you so much for such a detailed answer. I really really appreciate it! That's a really good approach. I'll send out a questionnaire to my clients and see if there are any consistent answers! I think it'll help me even in a positive way, to see what people are absolutely loving as well. :) Btw, we just launched a cool thing on PH! I'd really love to just get your feedback on it and see what you think! producthunt.com/posts/saas-video-script-templates Thanks again for all your advice!
Software Guy (Aarvy)
that was very useful, thank you for sharing.