Lenny's Newsletter · Product & Work
TIER 5 2022-08-09
 Welcome to part five (omg almost the end!) of our six-part series on kickstarting and scaling a consumer business. If you’re just joining us, here’s where we’re at: - **[Step 1: INSIGHT: Come up with your idea](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/kickstarting-and-scaling-a-consumer)** - **[Step 2: AUDIENCE: Identify your super-specific who](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-super-specific-who)** - **[Step 3: HOOK: Craft your pitch](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-kickstart-and-scale-a-consumer)** - **[Step 4: REACH: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scale](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-find-first-users)** - **Step 5: RETAIN: Iterate until enough people stick around** ← This post - **[Step 6: SCALE: Build your growth engine](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/growth-engines)** By this point, you have a startup idea, a product, some early users, and you’re on a quest to find that elusive product-market fit. For this post, I researched the PMF journeys of dozens of today’s most successful consumer products and will help you understand: 1. **How do you know when you’ve found product-market fit?** 2. **How long does it normally take to find product-market fit?** 3. **How do you iterate toward product-market fit?** 4. **What actually is product-market fit?** Per usual, this post includes new concepts I’ve never before shared, a bunch of brand-new stories that I’ve gathered directly from founders, and few new frameworks. Again, a disclaimer: following these steps (or any steps) will not guarantee you success. But I am confident that it will significantly increase your odds. *Big thank-you to [Alyssa Ravasio](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssa-ravasio-23114717/) (Hipcamp), [Amir Nathoo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirnathoo/) (Outschool), [Cem Kansu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cemkansu/) (Duolingo), [Chris Best](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjgbest/) (Substack), [Drew Houston](https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston/) (Dropbox), [Evan Goldin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/evangoldin/) (Lyft), [Gagan Biyani](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaganbiyani/) (Udemy), [Jonathan Badeen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/badeen/) (Tinder), [Kevin Systrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Systrom) (Instagram), [Kevin Tan](https://www.kevintan.me/) (Snackpass), [Marc Randolph](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcrandolph/) (Netflix), [Max Mullen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxmullen/) (Instacart), Mike Evans (Grubhub), [Rahul Vohra](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulvohra/) (Superhuman), [Ryan Graves](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanashtongraves/) (Uber), [Ryan Hoover](https://www.ryanhoover.me/) (Product Hunt), [Samuel Yam](https://www.linkedin.com/in/samyam/) (Patreon), [Sander Daniels](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sander-daniels/) (Thumbtack), [Sarah Leary](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahleary/) (Nextdoor), [Steve Chen](https://twitter.com/stevechen) (YouTube), and [Tommy Leep](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tommyleep/) for contributing to this post, to [Natalie](https://www.natalieharney.com/) for illustrations, and to [Alex Ross](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexross8/) ([Greg app](https://greg.app/)) and [Hayley Barna](https://firstround.com/person/hayley-barna/#mystory) ([First Round Capital](https://firstround.com/)) for inspiring the PMF archetypes 🙏* Let’s get into it.  Building something people want, and making money doing it at scale, is extraordinarily hard. [Ninety percent of all startups fail](https://explodingtopics.com/blog/startup-failure-stats), [75% of venture-backed startups don’t return cash to their investors](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578004980476429190#:~:text=About%20three%2Dquarters%20of%20venture%2Dbacked%20firms%20in%20the%20U.S.%20don%27t%20return%20investors%27%20capital%2C%20according%20to%20recent%20research%20by%20Shikhar%20Ghosh%2C%20a%20senior%20lecturer%20at%20Harvard%20Business%20School.), and the vast majority of startups [run out of money](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startup-failure-reasons-top/) before finding product-market fit. > #### “If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail.” > > #### —*[Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578004980476429190)* I’m opening with these dire stats because (1) I want to discourage people who are scared by this from starting a company and, (2) if you can’t *not* start a company, to help you stay laser-focused on finding product-market fit. As venture capitalist [Marc Andreessen put it](https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html): > #### “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, 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.” ## How do I know if I have product-market fit? Below are four tell-tale signs that your product has product-market fit. However, it’s helpful to think of PMF not as a binary “you have it” and “you don’t have it” one-way-door kind of point, and instead as a spectrum of confidence that changes over time. On one end of the spectrum, you are 100% confident you have PMF. On the other, you definitely do not. The more signs of PMF you see, and the more intense each sign, the more confidence you should have that you’ve found, and still have, product-market fit. Here are the four clearest signs, in decreasing levels of confidence, that you have product-market fit: ### Sign #1 of PMF: Cohort retention curves flatten There’s no better way to tell that people want your product than by people’s revealed preferences: using, and continuing to use, your product. In other words, retention.  There are a few ways to look at retention, but the most informative is to look at what’s called cohort-based retention: the percentage of users who continue to use your product x months/weeks/days later. You measure cohort retention by bucketing all the users who joined during a certain month/week/day (that’s your cohort) and looking at how many in this group are still active x months/weeks/days later. For example, if 100 users joined in January, and only 25 are still active in July, your six-month cohort retention is 25%. You can track this data either as a table:  Or as a curve, which is often more interesting:  If this curve flattens above 0%, that means there is some part of the market that wants your product. Good work. However, to build a durable business, you’ll need this curve to flatten a lot higher. **Based on [my research](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-good-retention-issue-29?s=w), here’s what is considered good and great user retention at six months:** - **Consumer social (e.g. Snap): ~25% is good, ~45% is great** - **Consumer transactional (e.g. Airbnb): ~30% is good, ~50% is great** - **Consumer subscription (e.g. Duolingo): ~40% is good, ~70% is great** [Read more about this here](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-is-good-retention-issue-29?s=w). And to measure cohort-based retention, you can use popular analytics tools like [Amplitude](https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/230543327-Retention-Analysis), [Mixpanel](https://help.mixpanel.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004546883-Retention-Report-Basics), [Google Analytics](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6074676?hl=en), [Mode](https://mode.com/help/articles/cohort-analysis-for-customer-retention-and-churn-rate/), or you can find some plug-and-play templates [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BWhbks4NhDOAoy3GEosD_PBff5eM5OfUYDcdQggw8ao/edit#gid=0), [here](https://andrewchen.co/the-easiest-spreadsheet-for-churn-mrr-and-cohort-analysis-guest-post/), or [here](https://blog.usejournal.com/how-to-perform-cohort-analysis-calculate-customer-ltv-in-excel-80bfed785ec4). Note, it’s OK if your retention is lower than these benchmarks if: 1. You have low CAC and marginal costs 2. You’re not building a venture-scale business 3. You’re just starting out [Read more here](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/465580/disclaimer-why-it-may-be-ok-for-your-retention-to-be-low). Broadly, as [Casey Winters](https://twitter.com/onecaseman/status/1230533020727304192) wisely put it: > #### “You have product-market fit when your retention creates enough money (or content/virality) to drive sustainable acquisition.” We’ll talk more about sustainable acquisition below. If you’re finding your retention metrics well below this, or don’t have enough data yet to know, keep reading. ### Sign #2 of PMF: Explosive growth through word of mouth Many of the smartest consumer minds out there consider exponential organic growth *the* sign you’ve hit PMF: > #### “For consumer apps, you have PMF when you start to experience **exponential organic growth,** driven by word of mouth. > > #### People can buy growth and they do it all the time, and I’m always amazed that people fall for it and that they kid themselves into thinking they have product-market fit because they bought it. The only way to know is if that you have product-market fit is if you get word of mouth. The best test of word of mouth is exponential organic growth because the only way you can get exponential organic growth is through word of mouth.” > > #### —[Andy Rachleff](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/andy-rachleff-on-how-to-know-if-youve-got-product-market-fit/id1488560647?i=1000458416917), founder of Benchmark and Wealthfront > #### “You can always feel product-market fit when it’s happening. **The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it—or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers**. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You’re hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they’ve heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house.” > > #### —[Marc Andreessen](https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html), investor > #### “The only way you know if you’ve built what customers want is because **they are using it in an explosive and destructive way**. If you are not getting explosive usage, you are not building what customers want, or there aren’t that many customers, which means you don’t have a big business.” > > #### — [Michael Seibel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBOLk9s9Ci4&feature=youtu.be), head of Y Combinator > #### “I think the right initial metric is ‘**Do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people** to use it?’ “ > > #### — [Sam Altman](https://blog.samaltman.com/before-growth), ex-head of Y Combinator > #### “**Are people grabbing the product out of your hands** saying: I want it, or I’m using it, or I’m buying it, or I’m downloading it, or I’m giving you my email address?” > > #### —[Steve Blank](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PR-8_6AzP8), creator of the lean startup movement > #### “Pushing a boulder: don’t have product-market fit. Chasing a boulder: have product-market fit. Both are very demanding but feel totally different. If you’re still pushing the boulder, you don’t have it yet.” > > #### —[Emmett Shear](https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1155180521485242368), CEO of Twitch, partner at Y Combinator > #### “Organic growth is the key indicator of product/market fit. People love to seem smart and cool. They want to recommend something great to their friends. They don’t need a share button to do it. If they love your product, they will tell people about it. Ideally more than 50% of your new accounts come from direct or organic traffic.” > > #### —[Merci Grace](https://mercigrace.co/about), ex-Head of Growth at Slack To make this even more real, here’s what the founders of some of today’s biggest consumer companies shared when I asked them what product-market fit felt like: #### **Dropbox** > “**For me there was a visceral sense of your thing taking on a life of its own and lurching forward, like getting pressed into the back of your seat by a fast car or a plane taking off.** The most standout moment for me was our demo video hitting the top of Digg (and then Reddit).” > > —[Drew Houston](https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston/), CEO and co-founder #### **Tinder** > **“The rise of Tinder was really fast, and there were very, very few changes to the product before it had already taken off.** The swipe had been added within weeks of launching in August or September 2012. I think we were working on the 2.0 of the app already before we rose, but it wasn’t finished or released until we were already spreading like wildfire.” > > ー[Jonathan Badeen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/badeen/), co-founder and CSO #### **Uber** > “Uber never really had a product-market fit problem—**zero marketing budget and we were growing like a weed. Word of mouth was uncontrollable**, and especially as regulatory heat started, it’s all anyone could talk about (is how it felt). Marketing was free because media loved the story.” > > —[Ryan Graves](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanashtongraves/), first CEO, founding team #### Instagram > “We spent about two months building Instagram post burbn, launched it quickly and it was an immediate success. **Loads of people signing up immediately and we never looked back.**” > > —[Kevin Systrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Systrom), CEO and co-founder #### **Robinhood** > “Up until that point, we never really had an idea of what success, at least in the consumer space, was like. **That was sort of the first moment where we built something that actually worked. We ended up getting 10,000 sign-ups that first day**, **over 50,000 the first week,** and almost 1 million in the first year.” > > ー[Vlad Tenev](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlad-tenev-7037591b/), CEO and co-founder, via [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/robinhood-app-vlad-tenev-founder-free-stock-trading-valuation-2017-7) #### Snackpass > “I knew we had PMF when users and orders kept growing without real effort to spread the word. **In other words, word of mouth started taking off.**” > > —[Kevin Tan](https://www.kevintan.me/), CEO Though explosive organic growth is almost always a very good thing, and usually a sign that you’re on to something big, I’ve also found that (1) many successful consumer startups never saw explosive organic growth, and that (2) sometimes this growth comes as quickly as it disappears (e.g. Clubhouse, Yik Yak, Poparazzi, Path, Vine). More on this below. ### Sign #3 of PMF: Sean Ellis survey Initially developed by [Sean Ellis](https://www.seanellis.me/), and more recently popularized by [Rahul Vohra](https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit), this survey asks your users how disappointed they’d be if your product no longer existed. Here’s an example of that survey as a live poll for this very newsletter that you can vote on🤞 > #### “After benchmarking nearly a hundred startups with his [customer development survey](https://pmfsurvey.com/), Ellis found that the magic number was 40%. Companies that struggled to find growth almost always had less than 40% of users respond ‘very disappointed,’ whereas companies with strong traction almost always exceeded that threshold.” Many question the validity of this survey approach (and surveys in general), but my feeling is that if you don’t yet have enough retention data, and you’re not seeing explosive organic growth, this is a really useful proxy in the meantime. For more advice on interviewing your users around PMF, [don’t miss this great post by Matt Gallivan](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/interviewing-users-for-product-market) (Sr. Director of Product Research at Slack), and for much more, read [how Rahul Vohra operationalized this PMF survey](https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit) to iterate Superhuman toward product-market fit.  ### Sign #4 of PMF: Visceral excitement Finally, if you’re just at the idea or early prototype stage, without any data, users, or growth, the best signal that you’re heading toward product-market fit is **a strong, visceral reaction**: > #### “**The real metric for both consumer apps and enterprise is—do someone’s pupils dilate when they use your stuff?** Whether you’re handing them a demo or if you drew something on the whiteboard, do they say, ‘You’re not leaving’ or ‘Where have you been all of my life?’ ” > > #### —[Steve Blank](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/steve-blank-great-entrepreneurship-is-artistry/id1488560647?i=1000459113604) > #### “At the end of your free trial, you should pull the trial. **If the customer doesn’t scream, you don’t have PMF**. Because if they aren’t going to buy it at the end of the 30 days, they aren’t desperate. And if they aren’t desperate, you don’t have PMF.” > > #### — [Andy Rachleff](https://greatness.floodgate.com/episodes/andy-rachleff-on-how-to-know-if-youve-got-product-market-fit-XxGvX8DH/transcript) Kind of like this:  Why does it need to be this strong? Because if it isn’t immediately blowing people’s minds, they will quickly forget and move on to the next shiny app. You need them to not want to let go. [Elad Gil](https://www.linkedin.com/in/eladgil/) [suggests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v0v5TLZKzA) a related signal: > #### “**If your product is broken and people are still using it, that’s a clear sign you have PMF**. When Twitter was constantly going down in the fail-whale days and no one moved off Twitter, that was a sign of raw market adoption.” [Sarah Leary](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahleary/), co-founder of Nextdoor, shared a story along these lines about when she felt Nextdoor found PMF: > “I distinctly remember one day when I thought we had reached product-market fit. We only had about 10 neighborhoods using Nextdoor at the time. One of our engineers needed to upgrade the database, which required taking the service offline for about an hour. As a lean team, he decided to start the migration (and make Nextdoor unavailable) around lunchtime in the middle of the week. We thought no one would notice the downtime since we had less than a few hundred users at the time. > > **About 10 minutes after taking the servers offline, I started getting emails and phone calls from concerned users. What happened to Nextdoor? One user called me in a panic because she needed to contact a neighbor immediately and the directory on Nextdoor was unavailable**. Another user was worried that the service was suddenly gone and he was trying to organize a neighborhood meeting that night to save a local park. We rushed back from our lunch break to get the servers back online as soon as possible. It was an embarrassing mistake to take the service down mid-day without any advance notice. But the good news was we had clearly built something that mattered in the lives of users—they noticed within minutes when the service was unavailable. > > **If your users are urgently calling and demanding access to your product, you have clearly built something of real value. That’s product-market fit.”** ## How long does it take for companies to find PMF (in B2C)? Here’s a summary of how long it took today’s biggest B2C companies to find product-market fit after launching:  **A few takeaways (and you’ll find their stories below):** 1. Over 80% found PMF within 2 years 2. Less than 20% felt clear PMF immediately 3. If it wasn’t immediate, most took 6-18 months 4. Most eventually got there by iterating on their product or finding effective distribution 5. When they got there, the moment they hit PMF was very clear **I also found five archetypes of the PMF journeys:** 1. **Lightning in a bottle:** Immediately clear, up and to the right 2. **Delayed lightning:** Eventually instantly clear, but after 6-18 months of iterating on the product, distribution, or business model 3. **Foothold:** Very clear with just a narrow segment, unclear if it’ll work broadly, but with growing confidence as you expand (usually takes 3-18 months) 4. **Milestone:** Glimmers early on, and with steady and consistent growth you hit a meaningful milestone that finally tells you it’s working (usually takes 6-24 months) 5. **Grind:** 2-10 years of iterating, and eventually you get there  Plus, a sixth, sad, archetype (let’s call it **15 minutes of fame**) that initially looks like PMF, but then fizzles out.  *Shoutout to [Alex Ross](https://twitter.com/AreteRoss/status/1556367453554413569) ([Greg app](https://greg.app/)) and [Hayley Barna](https://firstround.com/person/hayley-barna/#mystory) ([First Round Capital](https://firstround.com/)) for inspiring these archetype names.* Below are stories from founders sharing what it took for them to find PMF, across each archetype. Which bucket do you suspect you’re in? #### 1. Lightning in a bottle: Immediately clear, up and to the right **Instagram:** > “We spent about two months building Instagram post-Burbn [earlier app], **launched it quickly, and it was an immediate success. Loads of people signing up immediately, and we never looked back.** Of course there were chapters where things slowed, but the core product had PMF from the very start. We got very lucky in that respect. At the same time, this is an unfair answer because we only discovered IG through the making of Burbn, which took over a year.” > > —[Kevin Systrom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Systrom), CEO and co-founder **Tinder:** > **“The rise of Tinder was really fast, and there were very, very few changes to the product before it had already taken off.** The swipe had been added within weeks of launching in August or September 2012. I think we were working on the 2.0 of the app already before we rose, but it wasn’t finished or released until we were already spreading like wildfire.” > > ー[Jonathan Badeen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/badeen/), co-founder and CSO **Patreon:** > “**We felt we had PMF right after we launched with [co-founder] Jack [Conte]’s music video on YouTube and patrons and creators started writing in. I’d never seen that level of passion and immediate resonance,** and our launch was particularly fraught with stress, since weeks before, all the creators who were asked to launch rejected us. I actually emailed investors right after this, with a now cringey-esque note: ‘If you recall anything about me, I’m not one to exaggerate or overstate things, but based on the results and response thus far, I really think this company is going to be the one.’ ” > > —[Samuel Yam](https://www.linkedin.com/in/samyam/), co-founder and CTO **Robinhood:** > “I remember distinctly it was a Friday night. We had been working on the wait list in preparation for our press launch, which would have been, I think, the following Wednesday or Thursday. Everyone goes home, and I wake up Saturday morning, and I open up Google Analytics, and I see something like **600 concurrents on our site**, which nobody knew about at that point. I was just like, ‘What’s going on? This is not normal. Something must be wrong. Right?’ > > **I’m just screenshotting the page; I’m calling my parents saying, ‘Oh, this is crazy. It might actually be working.’** And up until that point, we never really had an idea of what success, at least in the consumer space, was like. That was sort of the first moment where we built something that actually worked. > > We ended up getting 10,000 sign-ups that first day, over 50,000 the first week, and almost 1 million in the first year.” > > ー[Vlad Tenev](https://www.linkedin.com/in/vlad-tenev-7037591b/), CEO and co-founder, via [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/robinhood-app-vlad-tenev-founder-free-stock-trading-valuation-2017-7) **Dropbox:** > “**For me there was a visceral sense of your thing taking on a life of its own and lurching forward, like getting pressed into the back of your seat by a fast car or a plane taking off.** The most standout moment for me was our demo video hitting the top of Digg (and then Reddit).” > > —[Drew Houston](https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewhouston/), CEO and co-founder #### 2. Delayed lightning: Eventually instantly clear, but after 6-18 months of iterating on the product, distribution, or business model **Netflix (after 18 months of iterating on the product and business model):** > “It took us at Netflix 18 months to finally find the repeatable scalable business model that worked. > > Hundreds of failed experiments later, and many a sleepless night of worrying, we finally tested the unlikely combination of No Due Dates, No Late Fees, and Subscription that ultimately was the thing that ended up working. And boy, did it work. **Within days of testing it, we knew we had a winner.** > > **Where before we were struggling to get traffic, all of a sudden we couldn’t keep up. Our previously prodigious amounts of inventory were suddenly not enough. Engagement soared, churn went dramatically down. Everything started working!** > > If there was a moment when Netflix stopped being a startup and became a real company, it was then.” > > ー[Marc Randolph](https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcrandolph/), first CEO and co-founder **Uber (after 1 year of iterating on the product and distribution):** > “One year in, we had obvious virality, and thus we felt we had PMF. When you’re putting almost no effort into growth but it’s clear the product itself is becoming ‘word of mouth’ viral, you know you have something really special. Then all efforts shift to keeping that magic going as long as possible.” > > —[Ryan Graves](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanashtongraves/), first CEO, founding team **YouTube (after ~6 months and finding an effective distribution channel):** > “We launched in May 2005, and we had the daily metrics that were tracking the number of videos uploaded, videos viewed, and user registrations. The daily video views were doubling every 1-2 weeks. But in the summer of 2005, even at that growth rate, the absolute numbers were still in the thousands. > > Six months after launch, we reached a million video views. That target number was always a metric that we had established as the most important. The numbers continued to expand after that, but it was around that time frame when we were all convinced that the YouTube idea had proven itself. > > **We did a lot of experimentation during the summer of 2005. Video bloggers. Auction videos. Embeds of videos on message boards. It ended up being MySpace embeds that drove the true virality of the service and the spread of the brand.”** > > —[Steve Chen](https://twitter.com/stevechen), co-founder **Snapchat (after ~6 months and finding an effective distribution channel):** > “The first version debuted in the iOS App Store on July 13, 2011...to yawns. ‘The Instagram fairy tale’—the app had 25,000 downloads on the first day—‘that was not us unfortunately,’ Murphy laments. The team had worked around a potentially fatal flaw—the fact that recipients can take a screenshot, rendering a disappearing image permanent—by building in a notification if your picture has been captured, a potent social deterrent. Still, by the end of the summer Picaboo had only 127 users. Pathetic. Brown toyed with positioning the app as a sexting tool. (‘Picaboo lets you and your boyfriend send photos for peeks and not keeps!’ reads a draft of a press release he wrote.) Murphy’s parents implored him to get a real job. […] > > But that fall Snapchat began to exhibit a pulse. As user numbers approached 1,000, an odd pattern emerged: App usage peaked between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.—school hours. Spiegel’s mother had told her niece about the app, and the niece’s Orange County high school had quickly embraced Snapchat on their school-distributed iPads, since Facebook was banned. It gave them all the ability to pass visual notes during class—except, even better, the evidence vanished. Usage doubled over the holidays as those students received new, faster iPhones, and users surged that December to 2,241. By January it was at 20,000; by April, 100,000.” > > —[J.J. Colao, Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2014/01/06/the-inside-story-of-snapchat-the-worlds-hottest-app-or-a-3-billion-disappearing-act/?sh=da02e4267d27) **Discord (after 3 months and finding an effective distribution channel):** > “When they released the product in 2015, it failed to make a dent. A few dozen people might mosey into the company’s servers on a given day, but it didn’t seem to be gathering real momentum. That might have been in part due to the fact that alternatives existed—TeamSpeak and Skype were both used by gaming communities—but seemingly had more to do with getting the word out and winning early customer trust. > > The tipping point arrived via Reddit. The team was connected with a member of the *Final Fantasy* subreddit and asked them if they’d mention Discord. According to [founder Jason] Citron, they posted something along the lines of ‘Has anyone ever heard of this new voice-over-IP app called Discord?’ > > **That one comment was a miniature inflection point. More users flowed in, and Discord had figured out a grassroots distribution model.** > > In the years that followed, Discord succeeded in growing rapidly, accumulating hundreds of millions of users and close to $1 billion in funding.” > > —[Packy McCormick](https://www.notboring.co/p/discord-imagine-a-place) #### 3. Foothold: Very clear with just a narrow segment, unclear if it’ll work broadly, but with growing confidence as you expand **Instacart (~1 year):** > “**For Instacart, product-market fit happened across a series of moments. We found product-market fit very early on with people who wanted groceries delivered as soon as possible and didn’t care which store they came from. This made us feel like we had achieved product-market fit, but it was only with a small sub-segment of customers.** > > The average customer wanted to shop from their favorite grocery store. So we formed partnerships with top retailers. As a result, customers started to seek us out and word of mouth grew. We then signed more partnerships, reached a larger scale with customers, and in turn attracted more partners. > > Ultimately we created a marketplace where most customers can shop from their favorite stores, and as a result, customers have a great experience using Instacart and want to share it with their family and friends. > > Initial signs of product-market fit feel a bit like a calm breeze, while true product-market fit feels like a powerful wind at your back, accelerating you forward and compounding over time.” > > ー[Max Mullen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxmullen/), co-founder **Lyft (~1 month):** > “**When we launched in San Francisco, PMF was obvious on day 1. Even with the demand limited to employees and 3-5 drivers on the platform, it was clear we had a hit. What wasn’t obvious was whether this was an S.F.-only product.** > > When we launched in L.A., we had dozens of drivers in the field on launch day. We launched at like 11 in the morning, and despite a ton (for a small startup) of marketing, we didn’t have a single ride request for hours. Finally, around 4 p.m., one came in … and then canceled. > > We were pretty unsure of whether this would really work outside of S.F. It took weeks to months of hard marketplace design work, better marketing, referrals, etc. for it to really start taking off in L.A. Once we figured out what made it work there, we replicated it in other cities in much better fashion and raised a ton of cash, which we then deployed to essentially speed everything up.” > > —[Evan Goldin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/evangoldin/), started Lyft’s product team **Cameo (3 years):** > “**It was immediately clear that this product resonated incredibly powerfully with consumers. The first-ever Cameo made the recipient cry.** > > **But it took a long time to feel confident that we had created a long-lasting brand and business.** Each round of funding was a step-function change in our confidence that Cameo would last. Lightspeed’s Series A in November 2018 (1.5 years in) was the point that, OK, this thing is going to be a rocket; but it wasn’t until 2020 (three years in) that I felt like Cameo would be here to stay. This is partially due to healthy paranoia and partially due to not having been on a rocketship startup before. Until then, it was hard to know what metrics to trust and how sustainable the growth was.” > > —[Devon Townsend](https://www.linkedin.com/in/devspinn/), co-founder and CTO **Superhuman (4 years):** > “**We found pockets of PMF with specific segments of founders, managers, executives, and business development professionals**. Once we recognized this, we were able to focus the entire company on serving that narrow segment better than anybody else. It’s a commonly held view that tailoring the product too narrowly to a smaller target market means that growth will hit a ceiling—but I don’t think that’s the case. > > The biggest specific moment of realizing we had PMF, though, actually occurred just when I had arrived at a conference. Before I’d left, I’d asked our Head of Growth to update all our analytics. **What we saw was that every single metric was amazing**—growth, DAU/MAU, PMF score, NPS, virality, CAC payback, CAC:LTV, activation rates, long-term retention rates, and so on. That was when I realized that I could put together a Series B deck that would raise an awesome round. And so I did! Just a month later, Superhuman was on the front page of the *New York Times*, in *The Economist*, and in the *Guardian*.” > > —[Rahul Vohra](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulvohra/), CEO and co-founder  **Product Hunt (~3 months):** > “**Product Hunt is unusual in that there were clear signs of PMF very early on, with a specific audience.** I started with very modest confidence, but it grew quickly as the newsletter (and eventually the site) became more popular. As cliché as it is, I was building it for myself, so my challenge was less about understanding consumer needs and more an exercise in finding if there were enough people like me.” > > —[Ryan Hoover](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanrhoover/), founder #### 4. Milestone: **Glimmers early on**, and with steady and consistent growth you hit a meaningful milestone that finally tells you it’s working **Substack (~1.5 years):** > “Early on, I had product-market-fit anxiety. Do we have it? How will we know? There isn’t really a moment I can point to where that changed. We’ve just been growing fairly consistently, and gradually the how-do-we-keep-up anxiety got bigger and bigger **until there wasn’t time left in the day to worry about whether we had product-market fit.** > > We did have retention curves that looked pretty good from early on, especially for paying readers, and writers with paying readers. > > ー[Chris Best](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjgbest/), CEO and co-founder **DoorDash (9-12 months):** > “We definitely didn’t feel like we had PMF immediately. Lots of days of small volumes and slow growth in the beginning. **At six months, there were finally sufficient volumes where metrics that suggest PMF (retention, order frequency, spend retention) were holding, and we were growing without marketing spend.** I felt we had PMF close to 9-12 months in, after we were able to replicate the same or better success in city 2 versus city 1.” > > —[Tony Xu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Xu), founder and CEO **Duolingo (~1 year):** > “In 2011, Duolingo launched as a private beta, where users could sign up to a waitlist to try Duolingo. For about 1 year, Duolingo stayed in private beta and let users off the waitlist in phases. This allowed the team to keep getting feedback from early users and making the product better. W**hen the team felt like the product was in a good place, they did the public launch. The DAU growth started happening immediately after launch (and never stopped after).** > > A combination of the following things made the team feel like they had PMF: > > 1. New sign-ups were growing without any marketing. Word of mouth spread was happening organically and was driving new user growth. > 2. Product changes the team was making were improving retention. As they kept improving the product, retention of the product kept increasing and the team felt like they were working on the right things. > 3. New users and retention going up created sustainable DAU growth. This made team feel good about having product market fit.” > > —[Cem Kansu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cemkansu/), VP of Product **Outschool (~6 months):** > “We spent two years prototyping and iterating to get to v1 release. It was six months after launch that we knew we had initial PMF based on growth and cohort retention.” > > —[Amir Nathoo](https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirnathoo/), co-founder and CEO **Rover (9-12 months):** > “At 9-12 months, it felt like organic customer and sitter acquisition was taking off on its own in Seattle, and we were able to raise our Series B (which was really an A).” > > —[David Rosenthal](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidjamesrosenthal), board member **Airbnb (~2 years):** > “When my mom booked her first Airbnb, I said to myself, I think we got something here!” > > —[Joe Gebbia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Gebbia), co-founder #### 5. Grind: 2-10 years of iterating on everything, and eventually you get there **Thumbtack (5 years):** > “**It took us five years to get to a place where we felt like we had PMF.** We spent the first two years focused on nothing but building supply, then the next two years focused on nothing but building demand, and finally one year building our v1 revenue model. Finally, at year 5, we had supply, demand, and revenue all come together, and growth took off. After having gone the first five years raising just a couple million dollars and few people paying attention to us, we then over the next couple years raised hundreds of millions of dollars and were finally being noticed.” > > —[Sander Daniels](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sander-daniels/), co-founder **Coinbase (~2 years):** > “I remember this light bulb kind of went off my head. I was like well, if I put a buy Bitcoin button in there, would you have used it? And he was like yeah. > > So we went about the process. Basically had to get like a bank partnership payment rails, basic exchange functionality, all that stuff. **And the minute we launched that feature, where you could just click buy, and it showed up in your account, from that day forward the number of users started go up like this, and so we finally had found product market fit, after two years of wandering in the desert.**” > > —[Brian Armstrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Armstrong_(businessman)), CEO, via [Lex Friedman Podcast](https://youtu.be/VBPTFlpv31k?t=1377) **Udemy (2-3 years):** > “If you ask Eren Bali (CEO and co-founder), we found PMF about nine months after our second launch. At that point, you could argue that we had PMF because we had a product we had successfully sold to the public. The day we had $15K in sales from our first paid course launch. However, growing and building the marketplace from there was a grind and it never really felt stable. > > **If you ask our board or other internal team members about how long it took us to find PMF, you might hear something like 2-3 years. Many people did not really feel confident in the business until we had raised our Series B, which was over three years after launch.** Even then, it took another 3-5 years of scrappy innovation until we realized we had a solid, sustainable business on our hands.” > > —[Gagan Biyani](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaganbiyani/), co-founder **OpenTable (2 years):** > “PMF Part I: We had PMF for the restaurant software within a year of rolling it out to customers. PMF in this case meant restaurants valued the solution, utilized it every day, and were willing to pay a $99/month software license. > > PMF Part II: We really knew we had PMF when we significantly raised the price. The reality is the initial $99/mo included the software, hardware, and their broadband, which we paid for at $99/mo. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t a winning pricing model absent superb booking fees. We raised the price to $199/mo and handed the broadband contract over to the restaurant. Effectively we tripled the price for many restaurants. We did this in year two and successfully navigated the price increase with very little churn. > > PMF Part III: We had a form of PMF for the demand side of the equation the day we launched the website. We knew it was a superior way to make a reservation, and our diner feedback was positive. However, absent enough supply, the actual benefit of our service to diners was limited. We had true PMF by year two when we could observe repeat bookings and an accelerated growth trajectory on bookings.” > > —[Mike Xenakis](https://www.linkedin.com/in/xenakismike/), ex-SVP **Hipcamp (2 years):** > “**People loved our product pretty quickly, but it took about two years to figure out how to partner with landowners and actually have a revenue model.** > > I knew we had something when I went to meet one of our first landowners, who immediately handed me a letter from a land development company trying to buy her land. She told me she hates these letters because she’s afraid one day she’ll have to call them. She told me Hipcamp makes this junk mail.” > > —[Alyssa Ravasio](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alyssa-ravasio-23114717/), founder and CEO ## What actually *is* product-market fit? I skipped this question up top in order to get right to the meat of things, but I thought it would be useful to get into the nuances briefly. A warning: I’ll complicate the idea of PMF for a bit, but then I’ll come back to where we started. What actually is product-market fit? On the surface, it just means that you’ve built a product that a market (i.e. people) want. If one person wants your product, you have product-market fit with that one person. Nice! But that’s just the beginning. For **True Product-Market Fit**, aka building a real business, your product needs to achieve three things: 1. **Product-market fit:** Enough people want your product 2. **Product-business model fit:** You can make a profit selling your product to these people 3. **Product-growth engine fit:** You can acquire these people sustainably I call this “True Product-Market Fit”:  [Michael Seibel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBOLk9s9Ci4&t=521s), co-founder of Justin.tv (aka Twitch), shared a perfect illustration of this trifecta (or lack thereof): > #### “If you look back at Justin.tv, by 2010 we were making $8 million dollars in revenue, $1 million in profit, with approximately 30 million monthly viewers on the product. And we were not a product-market fit. > > #### The reason why was that we didn’t have a repeatable engine to create growth. That 300 million monthly uniques—we couldn’t make that number go up. And then the second thing was that unfortunately we had tons of copyrighted content on the site, so we weren’t able to reliably monetize that over time.” Brian Balfour calls this [the four fits](https://brianbalfour.com/four-fits-growth-framework). [Elizabeth Yin](https://twitter.com/dunkhippo33) describes it like so: Companies like [Shyp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyp), [Cherry](https://techcrunch.com/2012/12/23/cherry-car-wash-shut-down/), and [Exec](https://justinkan.com/feed/what-i-learned-about-online-to-offline) found great product-market fit (i.e. people wanted them) but couldn’t find a business model. Products like [Clubhouse](https://www.clubhouse.com/), [Vine](https://vine.co/), and [Yik Yak](https://yikyak.com/) found great growth engines (up and to the right!) but couldn’t keep enough people around long-term. To find *true product-market fit*, you likely need to iterate on your product, your distribution, and/or your business model. Building a product people want is just the beginning. A mental model for thinking about getting to True Product-Market Fit is to imagine a series of milestones that give you increasing confidence in your business: - Milestone #1: One person wants your product - Milestone #2: Many people want your product - Milestone #3: Many people continue to use your product - Milestone #4: You can acquire new users efficiently - Milestone #5: You make money from people using your product - Milestone #6: You make a profit from people using your product - Milestone #7: You can continue to make a profit while acquiring new users efficiently Somewhere along these lines (usually after milestone #2) you hit a point that tells you that you have what most people refer to as “product-market fit”, and as you hit more milestones that confidence grows. If you’re still not sure where you stand, go back to the sections above. But also remember, there’s always a chance you need to re-hit a milestone (e.g. the market’s tastes change as in the case of Clubhouse, Apple’s tracking changes killing efficient acquisition for many startups, etc.). It’s tough out there. All this being said, nothing will will matter if no one wants your product in the first place. Thus, it still makes sense to start in the original spot—staying laser focused on the OG question of product-market fit: How do you build something enough people want? Which brings us to our next topic. ## How do I iterate toward product-market fit? Based on my conversations with many founders who had to iterate toward product-market fit (aka didn’t immediately have it), there are four situations you’ll find yourself in: 1. **Wrong product** 2. **Right product, wrong distribution** 3. **Right product, wrong onboarding** 4. **Right product, wrong audience** Let’s explore each, and what to do about it. > #### “It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.” —Charles Darwin ### 1. Wrong product: Iterate on the product As you’d expect, the majority of companies iterated toward PMF primarily by evolving their product offering. **Duolingo** added some core features (e.g. streaks; improved the teaching experience): > “**The most impactful thing at a high level was focusing product efforts on retention.** D1 retention was the simplest metric to reflect progress, and it was quick to see impact, so the company just focused on improving that. > > **Features that helped improve retention very early on:** > > 1. The daily streak mechanic (this was a very important retention mechanic for Duolingo) > 2. Improving Duolingo lessons to teach better > 3. Improving new-user onboarding > 4. Emails (Duolingo was only on web at first, so didn’t have push notifications back then)” > > —[Cem Kansu](https://www.linkedin.com/in/cemkansu/), VP of Product **Coinbase** added Bitcoin purchasing: > “The thing that I basically launched, the hosted Bitcoin wallet, there were people signing up (I just posted on Reddit and places like that), and maybe like 100 people would sign up and then nobody would come back. In YC, they often tell you to talk to your customers and improve your product—talk to your customers, improve your product; that’s all you’re supposed to be doing. Try to find product-market fit. So I emailed five of the users that had signed up, and I was like, Hey, I worked on this app, I saw you signed up, can I get on the phone with you? > > **I get on the phone with five of these folks and I was like, Why didn’t you come back? And the guy was like, Well, the app was OK for a beta, but I don’t have any Bitcoins, so I didn’t really know what to do with it. I remember this light bulb kind of went off my head. I was like, Well, if I put a ‘buy Bitcoin’ button in there, would you have used it? And he was like, Yeah.**” > > —[Brian Armstrong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Armstrong_(businessman)), CEO, via [Lex Fridman Podcast](https://youtu.be/VBPTFlpv31k?t=1377) **Superhuman** added a mobile app and calendar features: > “Once we recognized this, we were able to focus the entire company on serving that narrow segment better than anybody else. > > After some analysis, we found that the main thing holding back our users was simple: our lack of a mobile app. In 2015, we had taken the contrarian approach of starting with the desktop. Most emails are sent from desktop, so that’s where we thought we could add the most value. We were always planning on building a mobile app, but at the beginning of our journey—like every startup—we had the chips for just one bet. In 2017, it was clear that we could no longer delay this, and that mobile had become critical for product-market fit. > > Probing further, we found some less obvious and more interesting requests: integrations, attachment handling, calendaring, unified inbox, better search, read receipts, and so on into the long tail. For example, as an early-stage company, internally we weren’t making heavy use of our calendar and we wouldn’t have prioritized calendaring much at all based on our own intuitions about email. Hence this process of digging through feedback massively moved calendaring up on the product priorities list.” > > —[Rahul Vohra](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rahulvohra/), CEO **Snackpass** added a mobile app (and supply to their marketplace)**:** > “We spent nine months iterating on the product. We added essential features like a mobile app and rewards, plus we added more restaurant and promotion options.” > > —[Kevin Tan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinhuangtan/), CEO Marketplaces only often found PMF once they added enough supply, e.g. **Instacart**: > “The average customer wanted to shop from their favorite grocery store. **So we formed partnerships with top retailers. As a result, customers started to seek us out and word of mouth grew. We then signed more partnerships, reached a larger scale with customers, and in turn attracted more partners.** > > Ultimately we created a marketplace where most customers can shop from their favorite stores, and as a result, customers have a great experience using Instacart and want to share it with their family and friends. > > —[Max Mullen](https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxmullen/), co-founder This was also true for **Airbnb, Thumbtack,** and **Lyft**: > “**It took weeks to months of hard marketplace design work, better marketing, referrals, etc. for it to really start taking off in L.A.** Once we figured out what made it work there, we replicated it in other cities in much better fashion and raised a ton of cash, which we then deployed to essentially speed everything up.” > > —[Evan Goldin](https://www.linkedin.com/in/evangoldin/), started Lyft’s product team Companies like **Udemy** had to make changes across the board: > “It took months and months of trying things out to finally get to our first signs of PMF. The most impactful iterations were **(1) deciding that we would charge for courses, (2) videotaping live in-person lectures instead of trying to convince people to record themselves into a webcam,** and (3) partnering with email newsletters to promote courses.” > > —[Gagan Biyani](https://www.linkedin.com/in/gaganbiyani/), co-founder If you suspect that your product is what’s lacking (which is most likely the case), here’s my favorite advice for iterating your product, from the wise folks at YC: [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LNQxT9LvM0)[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhNnkPsdohY)[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C27RVio2rOs) Also some great additional advice: #### 2. Right product, wrong distribution: Iterate on your distribution Though normally your product is the core problem, in some cases, all you need is a spark of distribution. Here are a couple of examples of this that I’ve come across: **YouTube:** > “We did a lot of experimentation during the summer of 2005. Video bloggers. Auction videos. Embeds of videos on message boards. **It ended up being MySpace embeds that drove the true virality of the service and the spread of the brand.**” > > —[Steve Chen](https://twitter.com/stevechen), co-founder **Discord:** > “The tipping point arrived via Reddit. The team was connected with a member of the *Final Fantasy* subreddit and asked them if they’d mention Discord. According to [founder Jason] Citron, they posted something along the lines of ‘Has anyone ever heard of this new voice-over-IP app called Discord?’ > > **That one comment was a miniature inflection point. More users flowed in, and Discord had figured out a grassroots distribution model.** > > In the years that followed, Discord succeeded in growing rapidly, accumulating hundreds of millions of users and close to $1 billion in funding.” > > —[Packy McCormick](https://www.notboring.co/p/discord-imagine-a-place) Duolingo and Udemy also mentioned that distribution changes were pivotal to their PMF journey. Often, it’s a mix of these two. But don’t fall prey to the trap of assuming you’ve nailed the product and all it needs is a spark of growth. #### 3. Right product, wrong onboarding: Iterate on your onboarding Although changes in onboarding only came up a couple of times in my conversations with founders, onboarding goes hand in hand with PMF. Why? If retention is the ultimate measure of PMF, [onboarding is one of the best ways to improve your retention](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/854784/-improve-your-onboarding). Some of the smartest growth minds also point this out: > #### “When people talk about growth, they usually assume the discussion is about getting more people to your product. When we really dig into growth problems, we often see that enough people are actually coming to the products. The real growth problems start when people land … and leave. They don’t stick. This is an onboarding problem, and it’s often the biggest weakness for startups. It can also take the longest to make meaningful improvements when compared to other parts of the growth funnel.” > > #### —[Casey Winters](https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseywinters/), ex-Pinterest, GruhHub, and CPO at Eventbrite > #### “You can often attribute month 1-3 churn to be failure of activation/onboarding. > > #### —[ChenLi Wang](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chenliw/), ex-growth at Dropbox Pulling from [my previous post on the subject](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/854784/-improve-your-onboarding), some tactical advice for improving your onboarding conversion: 1. **Try manually onboarding users:** Superhuman is famous for [their 1:1 onboarding strategy](https://twitter.com/rahulvohra/status/1159611299740803073?lang=en), but in reality, many companies (particularly B2B) start with a hands-on onboarding. Why? Because it’s a lot easier to get your message across person-to-person vs. through the product, and it’ll give you a ceiling on your conversion rates. 2. **Make sure new users experience your value quickly:** How much work, and how long, does it take for new users to experience the value that you provide? What keeps these users motivated to keep going? How could you cut that time down and keep their motivation up, without sacrificing the experience? 3. **Increase the odds that new users have a great time:** What are all of the ways that your users set themselves up for failure? How can you proactively help them avoid this? 4. **Get more users through the flow:** You can’t retain users if they don’t make it through your onboarding, so look for ways to reduce friction, reduce distractions, and increase motivation. For example, a ✨ can go a long way: #### 4. Right product, wrong audience: Change your target audience A final path, and generally underexploited, is to change your target audience. As we saw in [Step 2](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-super-specific-who), Ben Silbermann was struggling to get anyone to care about Pinterest until he realized he was focused on the wrong group (e.g. tech friends vs. female bloggers). This also came up in the PMF stories of Udemy and Typeform. If you’re struggling to find PMF, spend some time with this thought: Is there a different [super-specific who](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/consumer-business-super-specific-who) that may benefit from this product that I haven’t yet explored? You never know—you may already have the perfect solution for a different crowd. With all of this in mind, zooming back out, I hope that you’re clearer on your next steps toward product-market fit. It’s never easy, and rarely a straight path. And nearly every early-stage founder is going through the same frustration, fear, and uncertainty that you’re going through. This is part of the startup journey, and exactly what you signed up for. Worst case, you never get there, and you’ve wasted your time and money, and you move on. Best case, honor and glory. Godspeed.  #### Next week: We’ll be transitioning away from *doing things that don’t scale*, to *scaling the things that you’re doing*: Step 6: SCALE—Building your growth engine 🚀 Don’t forget to subscribe to avoid missing future issues ### 📚 Further study 1. [The Lean Startup Playbook for Achieving Product-Market Fit](https://leanstartup.co/a-playbook-for-achieving-product-market-fit/) by Dan Olsen 2. [Why Too Many Startups (er) Suck](https://steveblank.com/2012/09/21/why-too-many-startups-er-suck/) by Bob Dorf 3. [How to Find Product-Market Fit](https://youtu.be/0LNQxT9LvM0) by David Rusenko 4. [The Never-Ending Road to Product-Market Fit](https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-market-fit) by Brian Balfour 5. [The Only Thing That Matters](https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html) by Marc Andreessen 6. [How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/-Market Fit](https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/) by Rahul Vohra 7. [How to Justify “Non-Sexy” Product Investments](https://caseyaccidental.com/non-sexy-projects) by Casey Winters 8. [Why Onboarding Is the Most Crucial Part of Your Growth Strategy](https://caseyaccidental.com/startup-onboarding) by Casey Winters See you next week! [Share Lenny's Newsletter](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/?action=share) ### 📣 Join Lenny’s Talent Collective [Join Lenny’s Talent Collective](https://www.lennysjobs.com/talent/welcome) to get bi-monthly drops of world-class hand-curated product and growth people who are open to new opportunities.  If you’re looking for a new gig, join the collective to get personalized opportunities from hand-selected companies. You can join publicly or anonymously, and leave anytime. [Apply to join](https://www.lennysjobs.com/talent) ### ❤️🔥 Featured job opportunities 1. **TaskRabbit:** [Director of Product, New Ventures](https://www.lennysjobs.com/jobs/6c0915d0-3ac3-4ba8-b53e-4684948711a6) (Remote) 2. **Credit Karma:** [Senior Product Manager - Recommendation Systems](https://www.lennysjobs.com/jobs/a2999f74-7e88-458c-bbd3-781b7ce48a3e) (Oakland, CA) 3. **Fountain:** [Senior Product Manager](https://www.lennysjobs.com/jobs/d1cac1a4-674a-4342-82b9-43373ea1c283) (Remote) **If you’re finding this newsletter valuable, consider sharing it with friends, or subscribing if you haven’t already.** Sincerely, Lenny 👋