I spent a long time chasing product-market fit and kept hitting walls. It wasn’t the technology that was the problem—it was how I was thinking about the process. Here’s the shift that helped me turn things around and build better AI products.
The Counterintuitive Truth
In product-market fit, the best practitioners often do less, not more.
The lesson: you need to move fast and break things. It sounds simple. It's incredibly hard to execute.
The Reality Nobody Talks About
A lot of the advice on product-market fit rests on assumptions that made sense five years ago. The world has moved on.
The first thing to understand is that customer feedback is the only metric that matters. I've seen this play out across dozens of companies. The pattern is unmistakable.
Many teams spend months on the wrong path before realizing that most founders overthink this and underspend on execution. Once they make the switch, everything changes.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Investing early in product-market fit can be the difference between raising your next round and running out of runway.
One of my portfolio companies went from struggling to profitable in under a year after they finally got serious about this. The founder told me later that they wished they'd started sooner.
This connects to broader themes around product-market fit, founder advice, lessons learned that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
The Bottom Line
None of this is rocket science. But it does require intentionality, consistency, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: start now, start small, and iterate. The founders who win at product-market fit aren't the ones with the best strategy on paper. They're the ones who execute, learn, and adapt faster than everyone else.
Companies that take product-market fit seriously tend to pull ahead of the ones that don't.
If you're working on something interesting in this space, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me a line.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q:What would you do differently looking back?
I'd move faster on the things that were working and cut the things that weren't sooner. Most founders, myself included, hold onto failing strategies too long because of sunk cost. Speed of learning is everything.
Q:What was the biggest challenge in this case?
Almost always, the biggest challenge is people and alignment, not technology or strategy. Getting the right team focused on the right problem is harder than any technical challenge I've encountered.
Q:Can these results be replicated?
The specific numbers will vary, but the underlying patterns and principles are transferable. The key is understanding the context behind the results, not just copying the tactics. Every company has unique constraints that shape what works.