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Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
@lennysan
Jan 24, 2020 • 8 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X
This thread on PMF struck a chord, so as a follow-up I'll share my top five favorite frameworks for FINDING product/market fit (1/5) 🧐

If you've found anything else useful during your own journey, or have a story to share, I'd love to hear it in the thread below 🙏
1/ The classic Lean Startup process by @ericries:

1. Determine your target customer
2. Identify underserved customer needs
3. Define your value proposition
4. Specify your MVP feature set
5. Create your MVP prototype
6. Test your MVP with customers

leanstartup.co/a-playbook-for…
2/ The Never-Ending Road To Product Market Fit by @bbalfour:

"Instead of thinking about PMF as a definitive point on the startup path, I think about it as a series of tests and check-points that increase in difficulty, but also in definitiveness."

brianbalfour.com/essays/product…
3a/ The Only Thing That Matters by @pmarca:

"Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to,.."

pmarchive.com/guide_to_start…
3b/ "... telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required. When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else."
4/ @m2jr and @arachleff talking PMF:

"To me, product-market fit is when you have proven the value hypothesis. So the value hypothesis is the what, the who and the how. What are you going to build? For whom is it relevant? How's the business model?"

greatness.floodgate.com/episodes/andy-…
5/ How To Find Product Market Fit by @drusenko

6/ A few bonus pointers:

@naval

@justinkan

@reinpk

• • •

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More from @lennysan

Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Feb 27
In most hiring processes, you’re lucky to get 45 minutes to chat with a candidate before having to make a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision.

How do you use that precious time to get the most important information about the candidate?

For over a year now, I’ve been asking my illustrious podcast guests to share their favorite interview questions (nearly 150 guests now!), and the collection of questions that’s emerged is like nothing I’ve seen elsewhere. These are not just great questions—they are exceptionally good at pulling out the essential insights about the candidate in the least amount of time.

Below, I'll share some of my favorite high-signal-to-noise interview questions, including what to look for in a great answer, grouped by theme. To see the full list, don't miss today's newsletter post (link below).Image
How to learn the most about a candidate from a single interview question—High-signal-to-noise interview questions inspired by my 150+ podcast guests

Keep reading for some of my favorites 👇
lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-learn…
Theme: How do they handle the hard stuff?

Question 1: Talk me through your biggest product flop. What happened and what did you do about it?

“I look for people being brutally honest about how bad it was and why it failed. The rest of the interview, they’re trying to tell you all the wonderful things they did and all the accomplishments they had. And so I think the rawer the answer in terms of how bad it was and why, the better.”

—Annie Pearl, corporate vice president at @Microsoft, ex-CPO at @Calendly
Read 13 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Jan 16
Every startup can be distilled into a simple equation.

And until you can express yours as one, you don’t fully understand your business.

Having this equation gives you a map for understanding your biggest growth drivers, your key inputs and output, and once your teams are aligned behind it, and the equations operationalized, you’ll experience a huge force multiplier—because every team will be focusing their energy on the same (high-leverage) levers.

I teamed up with @danhockenmaier to collect the detailed equations for the eight most common tech business models:

1. Bottom-up B2B SaaS with seat-based pricing
2. Bottom-up B2B SaaS with usage-based pricing
3. Top-down B2B SaaS
4. B2C subscription
5. B2C free (ads)
6. B2C marketplaces
7. B2B marketplaces
8. DTC/e-commerce

👇🧵Image
(Keep reading for a summary, or bookmark this post for later)
lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-math-for…
1. Bottom-up B2B SaaS with seat-based pricing

Examples: @Figma, @SlackHQ, @Zoom, @Adobe Creative Cloud, @Asana, @Jira

ARR = New ARR + Expansion ARR + Reactivation ARR – Churned ARR – Contraction ARRImage
Read 22 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Sep 18, 2023
Some of my biggest surprises when researching paths to PMF for top B2B companies:

1. If you build it, they *will* come—if you have strong product-market fit.
Though it often takes years to find initial PMF, once you do, a common pattern across top startups is strong (and explosive) organic growth—primarily seen as cold inbound and word-of-mouth growth.

This was true for Segment, Loom, Dropbox, Canva, Sprig, Stytch, and most others.


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2. Stop thinking of product-market fit as a single moment.

It can be, but it almost always isn't.

Instead, think of finding PMF as an ongoing process of finding stronger fit with more and more segments of the market.

Here's how @shishirmehrotra describes it: Image
Read 15 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Sep 12, 2023
Though there will never be a foolproof formula for finding product-market fit, here’s my best attempt at creating a guide for B2B startups that'll save you much time and pain.

It's based on interviews and research into the PMF journeys of 25 top B2B startups.

Here's a peek: Image
Here's the full post: A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B

Inside:
1. A framework for finding PMF
2. Signs that you’re approaching PMF
3. What to do if you aren’t

It's one of my new all-time favorite posts, and I'm super proud of it.
lennysnewsletter.com/p/finding-prod…
@KiwiDenny I go into what exactly it looked like in the post itself.
Read 4 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Aug 16, 2023
A few of my favorite stories of how founders validated their startup ideas:

1. After 6 ideas that didn't work out, Rujul Zaparde (@rujulz) and Lu Cheng created a 16-point checklist for what a great startup idea needs to hit. Image
"We were very honest with ourselves. We worked on a bunch of terrible ideas before, and if there’s anything we had learned, it’s that today will be the easiest day to kill the idea and do something better. It’ll always be harder tomorrow. ...
"We did 75+ interviews with CFOs, heads of procurement, and heads of finance. It really helped refine the idea. We had 110 pages of notes from 3 weeks of chats. Turns out the response rate is pretty good on LinkedIn when you just want advice."
Read 10 tweets
Lenny Rachitsky Profile picture
Aug 15, 2023
4 ways for validate your B2B startup idea:

1. The do-it-manually path

@christinacaci manually created compliance reports for a few companies and noticed (surprisingly) that they all found them very valuable. She then built @TrustVanta (last valued at $1.6B): Image
2. The listening path: Talk to tons of potential users first, looking for signs of pull and pain—then start building

The founders of @TheZipHQ (last valued at over $1.5B) spoke with 75 potential users before committing to their idea:

Image
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Same story with @Amplitude_HQ and @snyksec
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Read 8 tweets

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