Product Market Fit with Rob Cheng

“Why you’re thinking about PMF all wrong”

Most founders I know begin their startup this way: you work at tech companies for a while, where you realize that there’s too much bureaucratic and organizational friction that slows down good ideas. So you strike out on your own, because you’ll be damned before you let that happen to your ideas. You’re hyper-focused on building the tightest set of features to launch your MVP and prove product market fit.

Then you launch, and practically no one shows up. You try more and more things to boost awareness, from broader social content, to more cold emails, to spending money you can’t really afford on lead gen agencies and Google AdWords – after all, isn’t it a good thing to cast a wide net so more people can buy from you?

Nope. That’s not how the market works. Every time you include another “&” in your list of features, use cases, or industries you serve, what you’re really doing is just figuratively adding more keywords to buy, increasing the cost of your go-to-market—and your pool of competitors—while weakening the ability of your actual ideal customer to find you.

Remember that friction you were trying to escape when you left that corporate gig? Well now you’ve got it in spades. But hey, at least you can take comfort in the fact it’s self-inflicted.

In this talk, Rob draws on decades of experience bringing new technologies to market, to show founders how to avoid the most common mistakes startups make trying to build early traction with their products and find that elusive product market fit.