from Hacker News

How did you find product market fit?

by warthog on 11/12/24, 9:43 PM with 6 comments

Talking to fellow founders whenever I can as a pre PMF startup founder. The stories are wildly different than those I read or hear about on podcasts, blogposts and newsletters.

HN mostly being anon, I thought it would be an ideal place to share how you found PMF as a service to other startups and founders. Whether you are a 1 person company or 1,000, it does not really matter

  • by Abubaker761 on 11/13/24, 2:41 PM

    We started by solving a problem we knew well.

    - Got feedback early – But we focused on usage, not just compliments.

    - Looked for real engagement – When users started referring others, that was a big sign.

    - Tracked metrics – Retention, churn, and whether people were paying.

    - Iterated based on feedback – Kept refining, but didn’t force things.

    - Let it grow naturally – When the product started growing on its own, we knew we had it.

    It wasn’t a single moment—just a gradual process of building, learning, and tweaking.

  • by bootstrpppin on 11/12/24, 11:45 PM

    I'm a bootstrapped founder (with some prior experience zero-to-one-ing startups before), and have spent the best part of this year trying to find PMF for two of my bootstrapped products.

    At least for the style of businesses i'm building, my biggest learning is quite simply that finding PMF can not be shortcutted (trust me, I've tried).

    For me, finding PMF has meant: - Spending as much time with potential customers as possible (on calls, in their office etc). Learn/Listen - Constantly playing with positioning/messaging/feature-set based on insights you're learning. - Building out a pilot/prototype and seeing if customers will pre-pay to be in a early pilot group

    The great news is, most of this can be done without writing a single line of code.

    Hope that's helpful

  • by olllo on 11/13/24, 3:32 AM

    They say, find you target customers and directly message them.