The Real Product Market Fit by Michael Seibel

Hi HN, I was the technical co-founder of a couple of startups that showed early promise but didn’t ultimately succeed. After my last attempt, I started digging into the reasons why, and found that YC pretty much has all the advice I wish I had from the start. One thing that really stood out was their list of “What not to do as a startup” (aka “Typical Startup Mistakes”). It’s a goldmine of advice that could have saved me a lot of headaches. I’ve put these insights together in a presentation and thought this would be the right place to share them. --- For convenience, I’ve added the presentation content as text below. --- Y Combinator Advice Authors - Michael Seibel (YC Partner and Managing Director) - Paul Graham (YC Co-Founder) - Jessica Livingston (YC Co-Founder) - Dalton Caldwell (YC Partner) - Kat Manalac (YC Partner) Definition of a Startup - "A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model." [The Startup Owner's Manual, 2012]. Definition of Product/Market Fit - "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." [Marc Andreessen] Working on the wrong thing - You don't personally know 10 people with the problem - You solve a problem you don't care about - You solve a problem for people you don't care abo

I don't think you hit product market fit, though. It should be pretty obvious. If you had, and the market was as big as you say, then people would be flocking in just by word of mouth. I would suggest to iterate on product, talk to your users, get some good metrics on usage, etc. There's great content about that at the YC YouTube channel. link ▶ this video link

Two examples of rapid prototyping spring to mind: * Twitch, started as one guy streaming his life then they realised lots of gamers were watching, and that they'd like to be able to stream ▶ this video * Segment, started as a thumbs up/down tool for professors in lectures to work out when students are getting confused. They realised everyone just went to Facebook instead, then they wondered why they couldn't tell this when they were remote! link