Thread by @jwdanner

When you start your company, you have a blank slate.

You can build anything you want, talk to anyone you want.

But most startups fail to build anything people need.

Here's how to make sure you find the need:

Buddhists have a concept called non-attachment.

The idea is that you work extremely hard to improve yourself and the world around you, but don’t become fixated on any one idea or approach.

Founders need to become masters of non-attachment.

The reason I see founders not find product market fit is attachment to specific ideas, methods, or sacred cows.

Finding product-market fit (PMF) is finding a needle in a haystack.

If you add constraints you are doomed.

This requires a change in mindset for founders.

PMF is very abstract to people.

I’m going to make it concrete. I call it the 80/20 rule.

80% of your leads come organically (unpaid) and you grow 20% month over month for six months = PMF.

So your job as a founder (possibly with one or two co-founders) is four steps:

1 - identify a PMF candidate (a need which you think people could go crazy for)

2 - do discovery yourself to see if you can find very strong user need and emotion

3 - assuming the idea fails (almost all will), go back to 1 until you are showing 80/20 for at least six months

4 - then (and only then), hire people to build it properly

It’s the third step that few do.

Everything in the ecosystem tries to convince you that once you have found something viable, it’s your job to execute on it and by doing that, you will discover the adjacencies as you go along.

Going to look for even stronger fit is ‘scattered’ or ‘unfocused’.

That traditional wisdom is wrong.

Only you as a founder can find the absolute maxima PMF and there is no job that compares to it in company value creation.

If you don’t agree, that’s cool, stop reading.

OK, you are ready to build an epic company.

How do you do that?

Think of it like the opposite of developing a new drug.

In Internet services, the discovery process is for the need. In medicine, the discovery process is for the solution.

Your problem with Internet services is finding the need. Once you have a strong need, solving it is more straightforward than discovering a drug.

I am a big advocate of doing your initial need finding almost completely through user behavior, rather than conversations.

When you first start, users give you their opinions, but that’s not important.

What is important is how strong the need is as measured by engagement.

So I usually start by running ads around a specific need and measure click through rates.

When you get something that consistently clicks through in the 10% range, you are probably in an area that a lot of people care about.

Send a user to a landing page and have them register for a waiting list.

Measure the percentage of users to your page who register.

This is a key metric for intensity of need.

You would like this to be 25% or so with little extra momentum coming from the page itself.

If that's working, start adding friction, like asking them some questions before you let them register and see how it affects completion.

When a user really needs something, asking them questions can lead to higher not lower completion rates.

Once you have a 10% clickthrough and 25% waitlist sign up, start talking to those users to understand what their emotional state is. What's motivating them?

Do this over and over and over until you find ideas that get to this state.

My first company I did this for nine months, a dozen ideas, but I had to do it manually rather than with google and facebook ads.

Today, I can try an idea each day rather than one a month.

I've seen founders do this for 18 months.

The important variable isn't how long it takes, but that you have approached your company this way.

My biggest companies were built by people that took need finding seriously and spent far longer in this phase than others.

That's because this is the point in time where you have no sunk cost.

You can pivot completely every day.

And you are learning a ton about the markets you are interested in without having employees, code bases, and all of the things that slow you down.

It will also reshape the way you look at your company once it does work. There will be hundreds of opportunities for need finding in your startup once it starts working, and now you are an expert at it.

I hope you liked this thread. I write about all of the issues facing early stage startups.

Please follow me @jwdanner and please retweet this to help other founders.

And here is the PMF framework I use with my founder's to intentionally experiment until they find PMF: docs.google.com/document/d/1ya…