What is SaaS product-market fit?

Founders of B2B SaaS companies are uniformly concerned with optimising what’s known as product-market fit: the ability and position of a company to serve a large market with a service that satisfies an urgently felt need or desire. Given that having a large, enthusiastic customer base, and products or services to satisfy and delight them, is the foundation of any successful business, this makes sense.

Interpretations:

1. Compare it with the viral ity of a piece of social-media content
2. Where viewers are also buying the product or service sold via it
3. It needs to generate revenue and reach certain marks

What will a start-up do to reach product-market fit?

As a founder you can answer this to yourself by hearting what makes a vlogger’s first/one vlog go viral!! You may conduct multiple surveys while at the core of it how you connect authentically that comes as a result of multiple Marketing iterations. Now, how do we pen this journey?

In principle, you can measure product/market fit with surveys that identify what percentage of your users think your new product is a ‘must-have’. But more often than not, product/market fit is less about hypothetical numbers and percentages, and more about an in-depth and tangible understanding of who your customers are, and how they feel about you and your product. Is it creating organic growth, where people spread the word on their own? Are people willing to pay for your product? If they are, you have product/market fit. The road to product/market fit is often driven by finding customers via word-of-mouth, before you build a marketing engine to scale user acquisition.

As a startup or early-stage company, your product/service will probably satisfy a small segment of the market (hopefully a good market!). As you grow, so will your understanding of the problem you are solving; and with this understanding, your customer profile might evolve.

Interpretations:

1. Make this phase Market-product fit than product-market fit
2. Solving exact pain-point which has already gone malign for businesses in the past
3. You are doing every bit of marketing iteration to make this panacea – faster for technical implementation, price convenience for adoption, easy to use
4. And importantly measurable for that business.
5. Create your scale for measurement either for one feature or for the entire solution.

What does a doer say?

Peter Reinhardt, founder and CEO of Segment, describes how product-market fit feels:

“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.

I think the Dropbox founders said this best that product market fit feels like stepping on a landmine…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.”