"Knowing where you are along this path also helps you understand when to go from traction, to transition, to growth."

"1.  The Leading Indicator Survey"

"1a.  Product/Market Fit Survey (Created by Sean Ellis)"

"“How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?”  The measure of success is if 40% or more respond “Very Disappointed.”"

"1b.  NPS (Net Promoter Score)"

"a.  They have the highest chance for generating a false positive b.  It is hard to answer the question “how big of a market?” with this data and therefore hard to understand how much you should accelerate."

"2.  Leading Indicator Engagement Data"

"The leading indicator survey data tells you what people say they would do (i.e. be very disappointed if the product disappeared) so the next step is to support that with data about what they are actually doing."

"a.  Events or actions, not views b.  The core purpose of the product"

"3.  The Retention Curve"

"Plot the % active over time (for various cohorts) to create your retention curve.  IF it flattens off at some point, you have probably found product market fit for some market or audience."

"The question then becomes what/who is that market?  And how big is it?"

"Identify the characteristics of those that retained vs those that didn’t.  If you don’t know the difference, then you don’t know who your audience and market is."

"a.  Key Demographics (Sex, Age, Location, Industry, Company Size, etc depending on the type of product) b.  Time c.  User Source"

"The second method is by using qualitative surveys to try and identify differences between those who retained and those who didn’t."

"The bottom line, with out retention, accelerating growth is meaningless.  Your retention curve is the best proof."

"4.  The Trifecta"

"1.  Non-Trivial Top Line Growth(Snapchat - 200K downloads) 2.  Retention (50% of downloads were active Daily) 3.  Meaningful Usage (The users just weren’t coming back daily, but there were taking a meaningful action - sending 10 pictures a day on average)"

"This process never ends primarily for one reason -  your market doesn’t sit still.  It is always moving.  These days markets are moving/changing at an accelerating pace.  As your market moves, your product needs to move with it making product/market fit a pulse that you need to constantly keep your thumb on."

"the real problem is something experienced within your market and by your audience, not something that lives within your product."

"What we should have done instead was to focus on the problem and market, then search for the solution. This common mistake is why I prefer “Market Product Fit” over the terminology “Product Market Fit.”"

"Category. What category of products does the customer put you in? Who. Who is the target audience within the category? There are always multiple personas within a single category, so this breaks it down further.  Problems. What problems does your target audience have related to the category? Motivations. What are the motivations behind those problems? Why are those problems important to your target audience?"

"Core Value Prop. What was the core value prop of the product? How did it tie to the core problem? Hook. How could the core value prop be expressed in the simplest terms? Time To Value. How quickly could we get the target audience to experience value. Stickiness. How and why will customers stick around? What are the natural retention mechanisms of the product?"

"In practice, the search for market product fit is never a straight line. Instead, it happens over multiple cycles of iteration. You start with a market, build an initial version of the product, look at who actually gets value from the product, then redefine the market and redefine the product."

"Market Product Fit is not binary. It’s also not a single point in time. A better way to think about Market Product Fit is on a spectrum of weak to strong."

"To get a qualitative understanding, my preference is to use Net Promoter Score (NPS). If you are truly solving the audience’s problem, then they should be willing to recommend your product to a friend.  The biggest downside with qualitative information (vs quantitative) is that it carries a higher probability for generating a false positive result, so take it with a grain of salt."

"There are two quantitative measures to understand Market Product Fit: Retention Curves and Direct Traffic."

"for 80% of B2C and B2B products out there, flat retention curves is what you are looking for."

"Direct traffic is typically the result of word of mouth. If you are truly solving an audience's problem, they tend to tell friends. It might not be a lot of direct traffic, but there should be some."

"“Product market fit doesn't feel like vague idle interest. It doesn't feel like a glimmer of hope from some earlier conversation. It doesn't feel like a trickle of people signing up. It really feels like everything in your business has gone totally haywire. There's a big rush of adrenaline from customers starting to adopt it and ripping it out of your hands. It feels like the market is dragging you forward."

"Start with the market (problem), then the product (solution). Not the other way around.  Define your market hypothesis using Category, Who, Problems, Motivations with most of your work going into Problems/Motivations.  Define your product hypothesis using Core Value Prop, Hook, Time To Value, Stickiness. Think of Market Product fit as a cycle.  Understand that Market Product fit is not binary. Instead, it’s a spectrum of weak to strong. To understand if you have Market Product Fit, combine the qualitative, quantitative and intuitive indicators."

"Attacking all three tiers will pull your product in different directions, require you to build expertise in multiple channels at once, communicate to three different types of customers at once, etc. It's better to focus on one tier of the market."

"Why can't you just focus on Market Product Fit? Because as we know from Product Channel Fit, products are built for channels. That means that as you lay out your Product hypotheses, you need to include your channel hypotheses as well."

"Why can't you just focus on Market Product Fit + Product Channel Fit? Because as we know from Channel Model Fit your model hypotheses influence your channel hypotheses."

"1. Evolving - Your market, product, channel and model are always evolving and changing."

"2. Breaking - An element gets killed off. Typically this happens with the channel, as was the case with Pinterest."

"when one of the fits changes, you need to revisit all of the fits to ensure growth."

"Model Market Fit is the concept that your market (and of customers within your market) influence your model."

"First, define your target market. You should have done this already at the Market Product Fit stage anyway."

"After you have defined the market, you can do some qualitative research to understand what their willingness to pay is for your solution to build your ARPU hypothesis."

"for SaaS businesses where there aren't strong network effects, I use 10% as a rule of thumb. Great SaaS companies will capture more than 10% of their target market over time, but this is a good starting point."

"If you've read some of my other material I also typically recommend starting with a niche market in the earliest days and then expanding out."

"I left the middle of the spectrum blank. This is the ARPU-CAC Danger Zone."

"Channel Model Fit is simple - channels are determined by your model."

"The two most important elements of your model are: How Your Charge - For example, free (monetized with ads), freemium, transactional, free trial, one year up front, etc.  Average Annual Revenue Per User - What the average $$ you make from a customer/user per year."

"companies that end up in this zone have a much higher failure rate because they lack Channel Model Fit."

"1: Too Much Friction For Low CAC Channels"

"For example, if you clicked on an ad for an interesting product and found it to be $500, what are the chances you would buy? Pretty minimal. The higher the price, the greater the friction. The greater the friction, the less effective the lower CAC channels are because they just don't influence a user's decision enough."

"2: ARPU Doesn't Support Higher CAC Channels"

"Channel Model Fit doesn't just exist for overall products and companies; it exists at a product tier level as well."

"If you are making changes to your model (pricing, how you charge, etc.), you also need to consider your channel to make sure you still have Channel Model Fit. I see a lot of entrepreneurs make changes to pricing and expect the other components to continue working, but this kind of model-level change can make or break the viability of the key channels you've been counting on."

"at a given moment in time a company that has product channel fit will get 70%+ of their growth from one channel."

"1. Products Are Built To Fit Channels, Not The Other Way Around"

"Products are built to fit with channels. Channels do not mold to products."

"You control your product, you do not control the channel. So you need to change the things within your control to fit with the things that you do not control."

"Quick Time To Value. Virality thrives when the viral cycles are short."

"Network Makes Product Better. Ideally the product value increases the more of your network is on it."

"UGC - Product needs to enable users creating millions of pieces of unique content. Motivation to Contribute - Product needs to have the core motivation to contribute content."

"“The kitchen sink approach doesn’t work. Most companies get zero distribution channels to work. If you get just one channel to work you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished. Distribution follows the power law."""

"It is better to prioritize and tackle one or two at a time in pursuit of your power law channel."

"Over time you shouldn’t seek to diversify channels for the purpose of diversification."

"Product Channel Fit (just like all the other fits) is always evolving and can break as a new channel emerges or an old channel gets killed off."

"Zynga, PopCap, King, etc are still around today. But they took a really long time to transition to the new channels correctly and as a result some opportunity was captured by others."

"The “go-to” answer for almost every question in startups, is “build a great product.”  Every time I hear that answer it feels completely unsatisfied. Building a great product is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s far from the full picture."

"The second “go-to” answer is product market fit. While product market fit is a component of the framework, it is far from the answer. The issue with the product market fit mantra is that we have taken it to the extreme and developed tunnel vision. Statements like “Product Market fit is the only thing that matters” have become more common. It is not the only thing that matters."

"The difference between the $100M+ companies, and those that struggle are the ones that are able to make four pieces in a puzzle fit:"

"There are four essential fits: Market Product Fit, Product Channel Fit, Channel Model Fit, Model Market Fit"

"Most real-world work involves a problem that doesn’t have an answer yet, and the biggest growth opportunities are in uncharted territories."

"As we emphasize continuously in Reforge, becoming an elite growth marketer has nothing to do with the specific hammer in your toolkit and everything to do with mastering the emerging skills, frameworks, and thought processes that enable you to solve new problems, repeatedly."

"Mastering The Fundamentals"

"The fundamentals help you solve the variety of growth problems you will face in your specific situation. The better you are that fundamentals, the harder the problems you will be able to solve."

"The fundamentals for growth are: Data Analysis -  Understanding the meaning of data to identify, understand, and pinpoint solutions."

"Quantitative Modeling  -  Translating your historical data into a forward-looking model to simulate the future which helps you understand better what you should be doing today."

"User Psychology - The data doesn’t matter unless you know how to influence the numbers in an authentic way.  That comes down to understanding the psychology of your audience, problem, and solution to figure out what your users respond to."

"Storytelling - You can be the best at quant modeling, analyzing data, and understanding psychology, but to be a great growth professional you need to know how to bring those things to life in a way that is compelling and interesting to your target audience. This is storytelling."

"Being “ok” at a variety of things is far less valuable than being amazing at one."

"The best way to get better at solving problems is by solving more problems so in the process you actually build the skills that will enable you to go deep on something else."

"When I hire, I will take someone who has become amazing at one thing over a generalist any day of the week because if they got great at one thing, the probability of them becoming great at another are a lot better."

"One, the only way to find out the answers to those questions is through action. You aren’t going to think your way to those answers. You need to dive in and spend enough time on it to give yourself an opportunity to fight through a hard problem."

"Two, this isn’t a 10-year commitment. If you really focus you can go deep on something in a year or two. If you end up not liking that area, it’s not a waste."

"A large input into how you learn are the projects you work on in your organization."

"If you want to optimize for learning and career trajectory, you’ll need to take a different approach."

"Messy projects require a deeper level of understanding to untangle whatever the mess is. You instantly become an expert on something that is high impact in the org."

"The combination of those two things leads to faster trajectory. If you successfully solve one hard problem, people will come to you with more."

"3. Keep One Foot in the Known"

"If you want to maximize learning you need a foot in the known and a foot in the unknown."

"The challenge is that it’s easy to fall too far into the known because it feels easy, comfortable, and efficient or you start to get bored which leads to unhappiness."

"But studies have shown that the most effective learners learn by relating the new with the known."

"4. Accomplishments Over Credentials"

"Part of why it was so unfulfilling was that I made sure half of my classes were easy to make sure my GPA was high."

"As Google itself has discovered, credentials have little to no correlation to being successful in a role and a highly productive professional."

"5. Build a Platform"

"One of the questions I ask myself is “What are the 20% of activities that led to 80% of value creation?” There is only one thing that has been on that list all 7 years. Writing on my blog."

"Every professional opportunity that I’ve had has come from my blog."

"I’m not saying you must write a blog, but you should invest in building a platform for yourself that you own."

"Opportunities Flow To You. When you distribute your hard work, people take notice and the opportunities flow to you."

"You Create Leverage. Because opportunities flow to you, you end up gaining leverage. It is a much stronger position to be in the seat of being sold to versus being the one that is selling."

"You Build a Personal Brand. It is no secret that companies with strong brands hold a number of powerful advantages in their market."

"The truth is, finding a great coach is incredibly difficult. It is something that you have to search for and work at for a long time."

"It’s actually the opposite -- you do good work first, which gives you the opportunity to find a good coach."

"Unbiased Opinion. Everyone around you (family, friends, employees, co-founders, investors) have their own personal biases pulling you in different directions because they all have a personal stake in the outcome in some way shape or form."

"The Right Questions.  Great questions lead to great answers. A great coach will ask you questions that you wouldn’t ask yourself."

"Being reactive almost always creates sub-optimal outcomes. It is hard to say no or evaluate opportunities in an unbiased way if you don’t have some pre-set criteria or filter."

"The proactive mindset forces you to ask yourself about what you really want. Understanding the answer to that question seems easy on the surface, but for many is actually pretty difficult."

"Rather than feeling like you need to think your way to a confident answer, treat it like an experiment."

"Learning is typically the priority when your startup is pre product-market fit or when you are expanding to a new target audience."

"Volume - There will be a time in your business when you will want to prove that you can go from a certain base amount of customers, to moving the needle in a meaningful way."

"Cost - Optimizing your CPA to get more out of your budget."

"It was clear to us that the most important thing to optimize for was learning.   Knowing that we were able to work back how much volume we needed to get data around our questions, and what we were willing to spend to get those answers."

"If we were trying to choose what initiatives we were going to spend our time and resources on, would could easily decide by asking ourselves “What is going to help us learn the most?”"

"Step 2:  What are your constraints?"

"Step 3:  Setup Your Channel Matrix"

"3.3  List Out Channel Defining Attributes In The Header Row"

"Step 3.2 -   List Out All Potential Channels In The Header Column"

"Step 4:  Fill In Values Of Channel Matrix With Low, Med, High"

"Are there upfront costs?  Minimum spends?  Pay as you go?  Incremental cost (i.e. expected CPC’s or CPM’s)?"

"How large is the channel in overall volume?  How scaleable is it in terms of your time/resources?"

"Step 5:  Choose 1 - 2 Channels As Hypotheses"

"Lets revisit the Boundless example.  Our constraints were time and targeting and we were optimizing for learning.  As a result we looked for channels that were high in targeting, low in input/output time, and provided just enough scale to get us the data we needed."

"Evidence of the four Fits is most apparent in the SaaS space. We can look at almost any category in SaaS and find multiple $1B+ companies who all essentially have the same core product."

"In the email marketing space, we have multiple companies valued at $1B+: Marketo, HubSpot, and Mailchimp."

"As a result they've differentiated their product on the things that enterprise customers care about: customization, security, and scale (that's their Market Product Fit)."

"Because of that, they use Outbound Sales to sell (Product Channel Fit)."

"Because they use Outbound Sales they must have High ACV's to support the channel (Channel Model Fit)."

"There are thousands of customers in the enterprise space times their ACV's equal a greater than $100M revenue business (Model Market Fit)."

"Their market is the mid-market. As a result they've differentiated their product on “All In One” since thats what mid-market customers care about."

"Their market are small businesses. As a result they've differentiated their product on being simple and touchless (Market Product Fit)."

"There are millions of small businesses so even at the low ACV, they have a far greater than $100M business (Model Market Fit)."

"All four Fits are like the pieces of a puzzle. Plenty of enterprise companies have tried to move down market by making small changes to their pricing or product. But, to properly attack any new tier of the market requires locking in all four Fits, which means potentially changing all four elements and building new expertise."

"Startups are commonly instructed to just focus on product market fit in the early days. This leads to teams ignoring the other fits."

"That means that as you lay out your Product hypotheses, you need to include your channel hypotheses as well."

"You spend the majority of the earliest phases proving Market Product Fit, but you need to do that in context of having hypotheses for the other fits at the same time."

"Breaking - An element gets killed off. Typically this happens with the channel, as was the case with Pinterest."

"When one evolves, changes, or breaks, you once again need to revisit all of them rather than just trying to fix one."

"So they do two things at the same time: they try to design a new product, while rewriting the existing product."

"So we made what was a pretty hard decision at the time, which was basically, no new features for two years, which is kind of a crazy thing.”"

"When you disprove a hypothesis, you make a change. But when you make that change you need to revisit the four fits to make sure they all still fit together."

"Building a great product is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s far from the full picture."

"These are the phases of the product death cycle:"

"This isn’t the type of curve we are looking for. Subscribing to the mantra that all you have to do is “build a great product” is submitting yourself to an “if you build, they will come mentality.”"

"Statements like “Product Market fit is the only thing that matters” have become more common. It is not the only thing that matters."

"Before tactics you need a growth process. But before a growth process you need a strategy."

"There are four essential fits: Market Product Fit, Product Channel Fit, Channel Model Fit, Model Market Fit. I'm going to dedicate a post to each of these fits, along with how you can apply this framework."

"What we should have done instead was to focus on the problem and market, then search for the solution. This common mistake is why I prefer “Market Product Fit” over the terminology “Product Market Fit.”"

"The reason for this is because the real problem is something experienced within your market and by your audience, not something that lives within your product."

"There were four key market elements that we looked at:"

"Category. What category of products does the customer put you in?"

"Who. Who is the target audience within the category?"

"Problems. What problems does your target audience have related to the category?"

"Motivations. What are the motivations behind those problems?"

"While I find most companies really understand the “category” and the “who,” defining the problems and the motivations behind those problems is far more important."

"The product was extremely simple. It consisted of a Chrome extension that, with a click of a checkbox, let you track your emails and get instant notifications on who opened and clicked on your emails."

"Core Value Prop. What was the core value prop of the product?"

"Hook. How could the core value prop be expressed in the simplest terms?"

"Time To Value. How quickly could we get the target audience to experience value."

"Stickiness. How and why will customers stick around? What are the natural retention mechanisms of the product?"

"We found a lot of marketers, business owners, and other professionals using the product just as deeply as the sales professionals that were our core personas."

"Market Product Fit is not binary. It’s also not a single point in time."

"A better way to think about Market Product Fit is on a spectrum of weak to strong."

"Once again we should be letting the market lead the way in this ongoing process."

"1. EXPANDING MARKET DEFINITION"

"To expand into these concentric layers, the product typically needs to change to maintain the strength of market product fit."

"Sheryl Sandberg has said that to do this, the company didn’t ship new features for a whole year just to make sure they nailed this market transition."

"How do we combine qualitative, quantitative and intuition indicators to understand how strong of Market Product Fit we have?"

"To get a qualitative understanding, my preference is to use Net Promoter Score (NPS)."

"The second quantitative indicator is direct traffic. Direct traffic is typically the result of word of mouth."

"Sometimes I like to ask the question, “If you turned off all your marketing efforts today, would you keep growing?” The answer should be yes."

"It feels like the market is dragging you forward."

"Start with the market (problem), then the product (solution). Not the other way around."

"The first issue with that statement is that it is saying that channels will mold to the product you are building and as a result you think about product and channel separately in silos."

"The reason for this is that you do not define the rules of the channel. The channel defines the rule of the channel."

"You control your product, you do not control the channel."

"Network Makes Product Better. Ideally the product value increases the more of your network is on it."

"Quick Time To Value - Users have less patience to find value when coming from an ad."

"UGC - Product needs to enable users creating millions of pieces of unique content."

"In other words, at a given moment in time a company that has product channel fit will get 70%+ of their growth from one channel."

"UGC SEO: TripAdvisor, Yelp, Glassdoor, Pinterest, Houzz all got 70% of their growth from UGC SEO."

"LinkedIn is the perfect example where over time they've achieve Product Channel Fit with Virality, UGC SEO, and different forms of Inbound and Outbound Sales."

"1. You shouldn’t take a shotgun approach to testing channels."

"2. Over time you shouldn’t seek to diversify channels for the purpose of diversification."

"3. Don't have team members focused on user acquisition and team members focused on product in silos  from each other."

"Companies in the old channel will try and copy/paste their product into the new channel.  Because of Product Channel Fit, 1 doesn’t work and leaves the door open for new companies to emerge."

"Products need to be molded to the channel. The channel does not mold to the product. Product Channel Fit creates new companies. But if not managed properly, can also kill your company."

"In late 2011 Pinterest hit an inflection point and their growth started to take off. One of the reasons were they hit product channel fit. The channel was viral sharing to Facebook's feed through their API. But around end of 2012 Facebook started killing off the API's that enabled this channel."

"Part of that transition over the long term was that Pinterest also changed their product focus from a social product to more of a personal utility."

"Channel Model Fit is simple - channels are determined by your model."

"How Your Charge - For example, free (monetized with ads), freemium, transactional, free trial, one year up front, etc."

"Average Annual Revenue Per User - What the average $$ you make from a customer/user per year."

"The reason is because most startups need to keep their payback period to less than one year."

"Every business lives on the ARPU ↔ CAC Spectrum."

"Most B2C companies driven by an ads model — companies like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Yelp — live on the left hand end of the spectrum. They have low ARPU, and therefore have Product Channel Fit with low CAC channels like Virality and UGC SEO."

"Businesses with transactional models (i.e. subscription e-commerce) typically live here. Because they have higher ARPUs they can take advantage of higher CAC channel like Paid Marketing."

"Shifting over to the right hand end of the spectrum you have higher ARPU businesses (typically B2B Mid Market companies) like HubSpot and Zendesk. They have higher ARPUs and can therefore take advantage of high CAC channels such as content marketing, inbound/inside sales, or channel partnerships."

"I left the middle of the spectrum blank. This is the ARPU-CAC Danger Zone."

"I call it the danger zone because companies that end up in this zone have a much higher failure rate because they lack Channel Model Fit."

"Low CAC channels require low friction products (quick time to value) and low friction models."

"You can have a business here, but your acquisition strategy ends up a patchwork of bits and pieces from a lot of different channels rather than owning one channel."

"Channel Model Fit doesn't just exist for overall products and companies; it exists at a product tier level as well. LinkedIn is a great example of this."

"LinkedIn Free - On the left end of the spectrum they have their free product driven by Virality and UGC SEO."

"LinkedIn Premium/Jobs - One step over they have LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn Job Postings. Higher ARPU, therefore they can take advantage of higher CAC channels like Paid."

"LinkedIn Talent, Sales, and Learning Solutions SMB - LinkedIn also has B2B products in Talent Solutions, Sales Solutions, and Learning Solutions for small and medium sized businesses. Here they use mostly Content Marketing and Inside Sales."

"LinkedIn Talent, Sales, and Learning Enterprise - They also have enterprise tiers of their B2B products and use outbound enterprise sales to drive those."

"1. Don't Treat Model and Channel In Silos - You can't think about your model and your channel in silos because the two go hand in hand."

"2. Don't Treat Channel Model Fit In A Silo"

"Elephants - Products that get 1,000 customers paying $100K+ year."

"Moose - Products that get 10,000 customers paying you $10K+ per year."

"Rabbits - Products that get 100,000 customers paying $1K per year."

"Mice - Products that get 1M customers paying $100 per year."

"Flies - Products that get 10M customers generating $10 per year typically via ads."

"If your business ends up above this threshold, then you have Model Market Fit. If you are below the threshold, then you don't have Model Market Fit."

"ARPU x Total Customers In Market x % You Think You Can Capture >= $100M"

"TOTAL CUSTOMERS IN MARKET"

"You also need to understand if customers meeting the expanded criteria are willing to pay the same amount."

"ARPU"

"% YOU CAN CAPTURE"

"If you find this to be too low to fit the Model Market Fit equation, then you can think about increasing prices."

"If anything, it is easy to overestimate the percentage you think you can capture. For example, if you are a SaaS startup and this variable comes out to 50%+ then you should be worried."

"Instead, for SaaS businesses where there aren't strong network effects, I use 10% as a rule of thumb. Great SaaS companies will capture more than 10% of their target market over time, but this is a good starting point."

"Companies with strong network effects can assume a higher percentage because you are typically playing an all or nothing game. If you win, you will probably capture the majority of the market."

"Often when you use the Model Market Fit equation with the niche market, it never ends up equaling >$100M. That's fine."

"In that case, you just need to have hypotheses for what the next expansion markets are and how big they are."

"The effects aren't linear, they compound. That means losing momentum doesn't make things incrementally harder, it makes them exponentially harder. Maintaining momentum requires anticipating future problems, and making sure you are planting the right seeds today."

"In startups, roughly between Seed and Series B, a canyon exists that kills momentum."

"Many startups find product-market fit yet still fail to grow into large, sustainable, iconic companies."

"They start to face rising acquisition costs, declining retention, increased competition, and lower ROI on their efforts. Companies often stumble, early momentum is lost, and the Universal Growth Loop spins in reverse."

"Great companies aren’t built by silver bullets. We would have to suspend reality to believe that just one thing needs to go right for a startup to succeed and to grow into a category-defining company."

"But it’s not all about random chance. There are fundamental pieces of a growth plan that can be considered early in the lifespan of a startup or a new product line and set it on a path towards sustainable growth."

"You need to go from linear tactics, to building a compounding growth engine."

"You start to encounter adjacent users."

"The talent you need is different and highly competitive."

"As startups need more growth, the biggest mistake is just trying to execute more linear tactics."

"Each one has a low ceiling of growth before it becomes ineffective and inefficient."

"Each one tends to have a fixed cost in time to setup, plan, monitor, and report on. With a small team, limited resources, this creates overhead that is too large to mange at this stage."

"Many linear tactics aren't repeatable over the long term."

"In other words, you can't add lots of small things together, you need to transition to one or more big things."

"It is typically because there is no hypothesis on what the growth engine is, and as a result they are compensating by trying to cobble together a lot of little things."

"Another major mistake is confusing linear tactics with product market fit."

"Linear distribution channels, especially early on in a startups life, can lead to false signals of success. Traction, does not equal product-market fit."""

"With what size market do they have PMF with?"

"What is the strength of that PMF? (it's not binary)"

"your future audience is always evolving. The challenges that these potential users face in adopting the product increase over time. Without a team dedicated to understanding, advocating, and building for your next set of users, you end up never expanding your audience."

"These users have an equal or greater chance they drift off into space rather than crossing the threshold to the next state. There is something preventing them from getting over the hump and transitioning into the next state."

"These are your adjacent users and the goal is to identify who they are and understand their reasons struggling to adopt."

"The impact of the adjacent user is a decline in your acquisition, retention and monetization metrics. It takes more effort and more work just to maintain your growth metrics."

"People who can both set strategy and are close enough to the tactics aren't in that stage for their career long. It is an incredibly short window."

"To make this problem worse, there are many different types of growth professionals."

"Most have deep experience in a couple of types of growth models. This means you need to match the hire's experience to the hypothesis of your growth model. But most companies don't have a hypothesis of their growth model."

"Scalable Channels Haven't Increased At The Same Rate As Capital"

"The Low Hanging Fruit of Bottoms Up SaaS Is Gone"

"Those companies are receiving more capital earlier in their life at the time of the canyon."

"Outside of the monopolies of Facebook, Google, and Amazon the only other emerging player with meaningful scale might be TikTok."

"Less places to put it"

"Means rising costs"

"On Google, it is becoming harder and harder to rank. It requires larger content investments to break through."

"As those companies have needed to keep their ad numbers increasing, they make it harder to get organic distribution which pushes companies to spend more money."

"The loss of this data has two effects:"

"More difficult to target customers more efficiently and effectively."

"Harder to create more personalized experiences which reduces conversion rates."

"As that has gone away, startups need to diversify investment across more channels to receive the same results."

"This requires more infrastructure, people, and time earlier in the lifecycle of a company making getting to break out growth more difficult."

"Much of this was driven by taking existing categories of software and massively reducing adoption friction. The challenge is that low hanging fruit is picked pretty clean."

"Your growth strategy is cross-functional, bringing together how product, marketing, and sales interlock to drive growth."

"Why we should be thinking about it as Market Product Fit."

"It is actually only one of four fits needed to grow a product to $100M+ in a venture-backed time frame."

"Category. What category of products does the customer put you in?"

"Who. Who is the target audience within the category? There are always multiple personas within a single category, so this breaks it down further."

"Motivations. What are the motivations behind those problems? Why are those problems important to your target audience?"

"The four main elements that were important to define as product hypotheses were:"

"Core Value Prop. What was the core value prop of the product? How did it tie to the core problem?"

"2. THE MARKET EVOLVES"

"Facebook was one of the companies who successfully made the tough transition. Sheryl Sandberg has said that to do this, the company didn’t ship new features for a whole year just to make sure they nailed this market transition."

"With almost everything, you need to combine qualitative measurements with quantitative measurements with your own intuition. We trick ourselves when we only look at one of these areas. It’s a lot like trying to get a full picture of an object with only a one dimensional view."

"1. QUALITATIVE"

"To get a qualitative understanding, my preference is to use Net Promoter Score (NPS). If you are truly solving the audience’s problem, then they should be willing to recommend your product to a friend."

"2. QUANTITATIVE"

"The second quantitative indicator is direct traffic. Direct traffic is typically the result of word of mouth. If you are truly solving an audience's problem, they tend to tell friends."

"The two combined (flat retention curves and direct traffic) mean that a product with Market Product fit will grow naturally without additional efforts like paid marketing."

"3. INTUITION"

"It really feels like everything in your business has gone totally haywire."

"There's a big rush of adrenaline from customers starting to adopt it and ripping it out of your hands. It feels like the market is dragging you forward."

"when we did find product market fit, I thought for sure, this is too tiny to matter but it actually solved a real problem and the market demanded it and ripped it out of our hands.”"

"The point here is when you have strong Market Product Fit, it feels like the market is pulling you forward vs you pushing something on the market."

"Product Market Fit Expansion"

"Applying the wrong tool to the problem."

"Misaligned Incentives"

"""One of the most common conflicts I've seen is when product leaders try to apply a single development process, measure of success, and strategy to all product work."

"The 4 Types Of Product Work Beyond Product Market Fit"

"Feature Work - Creating and capturing value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas."

"Growth Work - Creating and capturing value by accelerating adoption and usage by the existing market."

"Scaling Work - Focusing on bottlenecks to ensure the team can continue to move forward and take on new levels of feature, growth, and product-market fit expansion work."

"Product-Market Fit Expansion - Increasing the ceiling on product-market fit in a non-incremental way by expanding into an adjacent market, adjacent product, or both"

"One of my key early mistakes was to push the strategic direction of the new Sales product toward the prosumer market."

"Why us?"

"The most important question for PMF Expansion is why us? You have to create something new, while leveraging a key strategic asset that you've already built."

"You are building the best possible product, holding some set of variables the same."

"I've seen similar efforts at other companies pour too many people or too much distribution too quickly in an effort to accelerate product-market fit expansion. Other times companies will even skip steps entirely. When you do that, it is like adding too much wood to the fire too soon, which smoothers the flame you already had going."

"These are the phases of the product death cycle: Add New Features: Team adds new exciting product features. Launch: Features are launched with some press. Spike: A short term spike in growth occurs. Growth Flattens: Within weeks the growth flattens off. (repeat) Add New Features: Team ends up back where they started, adding new features to get another spike."

"""Build a great product"" can't be the answer to most growth questions, if the above two statements are true.  It is certainly a starting point, but not the answer."

"Building a great product is a piece of the puzzle, but it’s far from the full picture."

"There are great products that never reach $100M+."

"There are also terrible products by many people's definition that reach far greater than $100M+."

"Subscribing to the mantra that all you have to do is “build a great product” is submitting yourself to an “if you build, they will come mentality.” Happy dreaming."

"The main point is: product market fit is not the only thing that matters."

"The problem with hacktics are that they are short lived and never sustainable."

"There are four essential fits: Market Product Fit, Product Channel Fit, Channel Model Fit, Model Market Fit."

"You need to find four fits to grow to $100M+ company in a venture-backed time frame."

"Each of these fits influence each other, so you can’t think about them in isolation."

"The fits are always evolving/changing/breaking."