Easy sales happen when you get this right
99% of solopreneurs haven't heard about PMF.
Let me tell you a secret about your role models.
You know the ones:
They make millions of $$$ online,
They have 100k+ audiences,
They have book deals,
Speaking gigs, and
Sell out their products.
They do a lot of things right.
But there is one key thing. Without it, all the marketing, consistency and growth hacks in the world won’t help you.
They have product-market fit.
This piece is inspired by
posts about product-market fit and pivoting. If you’d like to read his work, I’ve linked the posts I’ve quoted below.What is product-market fit?
It’s a magical thing.
When you find a way to satisfy the exact needs of a certain market in a scalable way, you’ll notice:
Sudden, effortless growth OR slow but steady growth (for smaller niches & B2B businesses).
Happy customers, and great reviews (even without you asking).
Happy you — because you can deliver the solution in a scalable, profitable way.
Why does it matter?
Without product-market fit, your business needs to be “pushed”. You start looking for growth hacks and you’re willing to try anything because nothing seems to work.
With product-market fit, sales & growth feel effortless.
“When we hit PMF, we started feeling pull for the first time”
“Like getting pressed into the back of your seat by a fast car or a plane taking off”
“Word of mouth was uncontrollable”
“Why won’t you take my money???”
“Yeah, you really can’t miss it”
This is what you hear from successful founders when you ask them what product-market fit felt like. — Lenny Rachtisky
How long does it take to find PMF?
According to Lenny Rachitsky’s deep dive, the startup average is 2 years. I’d argue that the average for solopreneurs might be longer.
Eve Arnold says she “wrote online for 3 years before anyone cared.”
Kristina God started her online business 4 years ago, and she became a Substack bestseller and monetized YouTube just a few months ago.
Tim Denning started writing online when it wasn’t cool, back in 2010.
On the other end of the spectrum, some solopreneurs look for immediate signs of PMF before they invest time and resources into a business.
Sue Irvin says in this first-person piece for the Business Insider that she tried multiple businesses before choosing to sell notebooks on Amazon after it “immediately took off.”
Different solopreneurs have different levels of tolerance for waiting for PMF.
For some, the priority is to make money as fast as possible. Others want to make money by doing what they love, instead of doing anything that sells.
Consider your personal perspective, but also, expect to put in the work before you get the first signs of PMF.
Coming up:
Early signs that you have strong PMF (and a few signs you don’t)
How to find PMF
What to do if you’ve built a business with weak PMF
Early signs you have strong PMF
Here are a few strong signs that you’re on the right track:
Visible excitement. People talk about you & your product, and are excited to test it.
People are willing to pay for it before it’s ready.
recently pre-launched a coaching program only to his e-mail list. The program wasn’t even ready, and two women bought it on the spot.High retention rates. When clients keep paying you money, it means you satisfy a need.
Exponential organic growth, or highly cost-efficient growth through advertising.
Users say they’d be disappointed if your product went away.
Here are a few signs that you don’t have a strong PMF.
Low free-to-paid conversion. “Low” may vary across industries. Example: you have a big e-mail list, but no one buys your offers.
Diversity in customers’ favourite features. In other words, different clients like your solution for different reasons.
Potential customers are likely to prioritize buying other products/services.
How to find product-market fit
To find product-market fit, you need to:
Offer a product people want (better yet, need).
Generate profit by providing this product to a large audience. “Large” may vary across industries.
Here’s how to achieve this as a solopreneur.
What you love to do (your product).
This is where big businesses and solopreneurship differ.
When companies like Slack or Loom are looking for product-market fit, they’re playing around with their product features. It’s not about love, it’s about software (business) capabilities
When solopreneurs are looking for a product-market fit, it’s crucial to find a product or way of work that works for them long-term.
Your product can’t be driven only by what the market needs, because your business is you and you need to be happy about what you do.
I recently experienced this when I chose to switch the focus of this newsletter to high-level business advice.
I know the market likes posts about how to make your first $1000 online, but that’s not what I want to do.
Wanting to focus on a certain skill doesn’t mean you can only do one type of business.
Example: a designer could be a freelance designer, a designer of journals that he sells on Amazon (by outsourcing printing), or a writer who talks about design.
Figure out what you want to do and play with it to find your ideal approach.
Note: solopreneurs could build multiple products and have different levels of PMF for each. When you figure out which products have the strongest PMF, consider focusing on them, improving them, and scaling your business through them.
Audience.
Who needs your product and why?
The clearer you are about your audience, the easier it is to find PMF.
No product is relevant to everyone.
When defining your primary audience, try to focus on the people whose problems you can solve.
Example: If you’re selling photography prints, you can target homeowners (where wall art is nice to have) or you can target property investors & interior designers (where wall art is a must).
Exposure.
It’s critical to amass big exposure for your work so you have reliable data about your product.
To read more about how to gain more exposure as a solopreneur, read this.
Research.
In this story, Lenny shares a research advice by Matt Gallivan — an expert who has “spent over a decade leading research teams at NPR, Facebook, Airbnb, and now at Slack as their Director of Research.”
Here are a few effective questions Matt shares:
“For a survey with at least 100 participants:
How would you feel if you could no longer use this product: Very Disappointed, Somewhat Disappointed, Not Disappointed? 40% of users answering “very disappointed” is the critical threshold.
Compared to other ways you do X [where X is some essential function of your product], using this product to do X is generally: Much Better, Somewhat Better, Neither better nor worse, Somewhat Worse, Much Worse?
The last time you did X, what product or tool did you use to do it, and why? [Leave this one open ended]
If you can’t easily survey 100+ active users, talk to 6–12 users personally. Here’s what to ask:
Walk me through the last time you did X [where X is some essential function of your product]. This question doesn’t even refer to your product at all — ask it to understand how people typically do the thing you want them to do with your product.
What are the different products you use to do X? What are the best and worst parts of using those products?
Why did you try this product in the first place? What were you hoping it would do for you? How well has it delivered on that hope?
A warning from a top researcher: Don’t ask this.
Don’t ask what people want, so that you can go blindly build it.
This is why you’ll rarely hear user researchers wasting energy debating the tired old tropes about how Henry Ford or Steve Jobs would never listen to research: it’s just blatantly, obviously true that people sometimes don’t know what they want until they see it. Asking people what they want isn’t research.”
What to do if you’ve built a business with weak PMF.
One word: pivot.
Signs you need to pivot include:
Ongoing lack of (or lukewarm) interest.
Realizing your business is never going to be as big as you want it to be.
How do you pivot?
In the product world, there are four ways to pivot. Three of them apply to solopreneurship.
Focus on a “feature” your audience loves.
The moment I felt PMF as a copywriter was when I started offering About Pages. It turns out people were largely intimidated by having to write their bios/about pages and loved the idea of having someone put their story together and highlight the most important parts.
While other new freelance writers struggled to find clients for their Web Copy services, I got the attention, the sale, and eventually upsold Web Copy to my About Page clients.
Is there a part of your product/service/content that your audience is particularly interested in?
Is there a process you built for yourself that others find interesting?
Find a bigger adjacent market.
PayPal started as a company offering encryption technology. They pivoted a few times and eventually built a financial transaction product (it makes sense that a financial transaction product would need a robust encryption technology, right?)
If your offer fits in well with a bigger adjacent market, consider changing directions.
Example: a business coach could start an HR consultancy.
Ideating internally.
While big companies ideate in big teams, solopreneurs often ideate alone, which can be limiting.
If you’re looking for a way to redefine your business, consider joining a relevant community, a group coaching program, or even the right newsletter (wink wink) to get access to more people who can give you feedback on your ideas.
“During a hackathon, the mobile team came up with a couple concepts for something radically different from what Zimride had been. They were thinking about how the service worked and designing it for a mobile-first experience. After spending a few weeks on it, we launched Lyft as an experiment in June 2012.”
— Logan Green, co-founder and CEO, Lyft
Did you find this useful?
If so, please, restack it so more people can read it.
The 2-4 years range makes me feel much better about not reaching PMF, here I was panicking about not reaching it in a few months, but at least I will know the signs now