If PMF could kill: climate founders are being mislead
The way the startup community talks about product/market fit is hurting founders, especially in climate.
Climate PMF Newsletter by Peter Nocchiero
Hey! I’m Peter and I help climate founders find and improve product/market fit. I created a practical, experience-based approach called PMF 2.0 for Climate Startups.
Disclaimer: no AI was used in the creation of this post or any of my content. You’re stuck with the madness swirling around in my brain.
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Let’s dive in.
There’s a badass podcast called “if books could kill” that examines popular social phenomenon books like The Anxious Generation and Freakonomics. It makes the argument that these “airport bestsellers” are poorly researched and riddled with factual inaccuracies. Chef recommends the pod.
So what the hell does this have to do with climate PMF?
Every climate founder that has or will raise venture capital is plugged into the same unfair narrative.
Build a billion dollar company or you're worthless.
This has founders seeking advice from those that have built a billion dollar company before. And then two things happen:
1/ There aren't that many billion dollar climate companies.
2/ Worse, most info about any large scale, successful startup is revisionist history, PR, or interpreted from the outside by third parties that know nothing about what happened.
"Do what [Slack] did" is basically the worst advice on the planet.
Here's what happens to climate founders when they get sucked into this cycle of nonsense:
The innocent start…
Founders ask "was there a magic moment when you hit PMF"?
This assumes there was a moment. There usually isn't. It's many, many teeny tiny moments.
Confirmation and survivor bias…
Founders find resources that show how awesome companies like GitHub and Canva did it in under a year. Then they assume that one year is the standard. It's not.
This is a very small subset of startups and looking at the data coming out of them would be the equivalent of measuring water temp in the arctic ocean and assuming that's the global average ocean temp.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics…
These same resources show founders that companies like Figma, Airtable, and Slack took 4+ years to reach PMF and say "they were the exception" - on the late bloomer side. Four years is too slow? This is ridiculous.
The average age of a startup with strong PMF is 6.5 years. The average. Not the exception. Let that sink in.
Related: I will talk more about how timing is everything, but you can also buy time in an upcoming post.
So what?
If you're a climate founder, I'm sorry you have to absorb this nonsense narrative and feel a ton of unnecessary pressure from it. It's a wolf dressed in sheep's clothing and antithetical to startup success.
These benchmarks are not only damaging for mental health, but they also negatively impact operational decisions — wether you are aware of it or not.
Prevailing PMF narratives change the way you think about capitalization, burn rate, success metrics, making bets, and especially your daily decisions around product strategy and GTM approach.
It creates waste and is, in part, connected to the reason that 90% of startups fail.
In the first few miles/kilometers of a marathon, if you run as hard and fast as you can, drink all your water and energy goo, you’ll never make it to the finish line.
PMF cannot be reverse engineered.
Chasing a unicorn doesn't help you become one.
Ignore the nonsensical, honor your truth, and trust the process.
Climate PMF Newsletter by Peter Nocchiero
Share with a friend building in climate.
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