6 signs you don’t have PMF yet
What I suggest you do about them may surprise you
Climate PMF Newsletter by Peter Nocchiero
Hey, I’m Peter and I help climate founders find and improve product/market fit. The climate imperative isn’t enough for a startup to win.
I created a practical, experience-based approach — born out of my operational work with nearly 100 startups — called PMF 2.0 for Climate Startups. Learn More.
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Let’s dive in.
Buzzfeed style clickbait headline aside, I think it’s really important to look at signals that indicate you don’t have strong PMF.
Here are the top six:
Varying levels of engagement & value
A sprawling product roadmap
Too much service for value delivery
Differing contracts and price points
Incongruent use cases
Muddled ideal customer profiles
Part of this is probably annoyingly circular. If you don’t have PMF yet, you probably know it and could intuitively come up with items on this list. Maybe it’s helpful to have some mirroring anyways.
The other part of this is more important though.
Signals that indicate you don’t have strong enough PMF are not just a checklist of challenges to confront. They are a normalization of where you are at in your journey and depending on where you are, some of these signals are actually good things. Helpful things. Challenges that you don’t yet want to confront because they are helping you progress.
Here’s another way to look at this list:
Varying levels of engagement & value = Figuring out what users and niches have the most potential.
A sprawling product roadmap = Feature requests from engaged customers/prospects that want you to build for them.
Too much service for value delivery = One of the best ways to engage customers and conduct product discovery without over building products/features you aren’t sure if or how to build into production yet.
Differing contracts and price points = Price discovery and business model discovery.
Incongruent use cases: OK they can’t all be good.. Let’s fix this one asap
Muddled ideal customer profiles: Ditto.. Let’s fix this one asap.
Thanks for listening.
Peter💚✨
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