“At the core of PMF is the idea that you are producing something novel in some business and/or technical aspect, NOT that your are selling a product or service that already exists and PMF is there. For example, if you want to compete with Salesforce you already know there is a PMF, it is a CRM!”
PMF is not about building something novel. It is about ensuring your product solves a real and critical problem for your target segment. Only customers are the experts on their problems and priorities. Entrepreneurs are experts on solving problems but we too often solve the wrong problems in elaborate ways.
Salespeople buy Salesforce today because everyone else buys Salesforce. CRMs come in all shapes and sizes. To find PMF for your CRM you need to niche down to find a segment that is underserved by Salesforce.
You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their experience around specific problem areas without ever mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific solution is likely to bias your subject. This is hard for founders as we tend to fall in love with our ideas and often slip into pitch mode mid-interview. This is a fundamental mistake.
I am glad to continue the discussion and narrow it as much as possible:
Please forget the "novel" meaning for a while, and let's continue with the CRM example. I am a Hubspot customer now. As most companies we have used spreadsheets, vTiger [1], SugarCRM [2], among other apps. My main point was that if they are not/were succesful by the HN startup definition is because they had issues in the GTM not in PMF and this is a common confusion. There was always PMF for CRMs the problem is marketing/selling them. That market is so huge and known that thinking in PMF is deviating the attention from just selling! That is what my "middle east business side" says.
I don't exactly see it this way - "You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their experience around specific problem areas without ever mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific solution is likely to bias your subject."
Sometimes the entrepreneur needs to expand the possibility space, rather than just addressing an "unmet need". There's the Jobs-ism about figuring out what the customer is going to want before they do. Thiel also talks in Zero to One about some of the biggest innovations not spawning from customer feedback or lean methodology.
I wouldn't say that GPT addressed a problem I had per se. It just created a whole new set of activities I wanted to try.
“At the core of PMF is the idea that you are producing something novel in some business and/or technical aspect, NOT that your are selling a product or service that already exists and PMF is there. For example, if you want to compete with Salesforce you already know there is a PMF, it is a CRM!”
PMF is not about building something novel. It is about ensuring your product solves a real and critical problem for your target segment. Only customers are the experts on their problems and priorities. Entrepreneurs are experts on solving problems but we too often solve the wrong problems in elaborate ways.
Salespeople buy Salesforce today because everyone else buys Salesforce. CRMs come in all shapes and sizes. To find PMF for your CRM you need to niche down to find a segment that is underserved by Salesforce.
You can only do this by doing actual discovery interviews with prospects in an unbiased way where you explore their experience around specific problem areas without ever mentioning your brilliant solution - as proposing a specific solution is likely to bias your subject. This is hard for founders as we tend to fall in love with our ideas and often slip into pitch mode mid-interview. This is a fundamental mistake.