What Early-Stage Startups Need to Know about Product-Market Fit
One of the biggest challenges for most startup founders is achieving, measuring and maintaining product-market fit.
I recently hosted a fireside chat at the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center in San Francisco with Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder of Cloudflare, one of the fastest growing startups in the world. We discussed Cloudflare’s road from startup to successful global business and what lessons Michelle and her team learned along the way. Based on our discussion and what I learned in my operating experience at Cornerstone OnDemand and WageWorks. I wanted to share some important tips that apply to various key phases of product development.
STARTING OUT
- It's ok to be embarrassed by your product early on
- Make it easy for people to sign up for and use your service or product
- Start broad from the beginning and don't narrow down your potential customer base
- Communicate and demonstrate how your product will solve a problem long-term
NETWORKING
- Partnerships can help outflank your competition - start small, and make the partnership a win-win for both sides
- Show company momentum - it’s critical for an early stage startup
- Remember, when you're a startup, a single conversation can have a huge impact
- Be a thought leader. Don’t talk about your company, talk about industry problems
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION
- Customers will pay when you solve one of their top 3 business problems. Talk to them and find out what those problems are. Then solve them.
- Engage with the right customers early and be ready to support their needs
- The first few days really matter with customers. Make sure their experience is positive.
- Think of creative ways to address all new customer's issues at once, versus one off, such as a welcome video or product tutorial
- Recruiting tip -- use customer feedback to entice potential employees.
GROWTH
- Go beyond just acquiring new customers. You must retain customers by delivering on your promise. That’s the formula great companies are built on.
- Understand your customer’s business problems — and develop or deliver more solutions to meet their needs
- Churn is a good way to identify problem areas. Keep a close eye on pricing, competition, product issues - and address problems quickly.
Remember,
—Customers come first! Solve your customers business problems and support their needs
—Constantly evaluate and update product features and functionality to meet current market needs
—Stay true to your business goals and be open to change
A video recap from Norwest's Product Summit is below:
Sean, thanks for sharing!
Co-Founder and CEO at uSTADIUM
8yGreat stuff Sean - simple and to the core of key areas.
IT, Product Dev, Healthcare, Analytics, Branding, Strategy, Operations, Management, Sales, BD, Digital Marketing, PM
9yHello to All, Thanks for sharing the values as its a never ending learning process and its always good to learn and see things with a third eye. Along with the enlisted techniques & values the expertise which has helped are Time & Performance Management, Strategic Planing, Customer engagement & Team problem solving techniques which at the end does yield better customer satisfaction. (Time and Performance management are high pressured venues where adaptability rate is low as teams do not want them on their to do list along with existing tasks already assigned). My two cents hope this may help.
Influencer & Creator Marketing
9yThanks for sharing! Need to keep these in mind.
Lrinz technologies
9yhttp://TheTasksPay.com/?user=91970