StartUp Founders: Buying Market Fit
Dear Reader,
You can’t spend your way into product-market fit.
Early days you only have one job. Get people to need what you built. That’s it. Move from experiment to business. Anything else is a distraction.
🚀 Early stage? Money buys time.
​🚀 Some traction? Money buys growth.
​💀 No demand? Money buys nothing.
Almost every founder finds out too late they wasted money chasing fit, either because they run out of money or the grave yard of features no one uses.
Yes, one killer feature can unlock market fit. The trap is thinking that more features = better odds. The double trap is building features instead of asking tough questions.
A true 10x feature is the result of deeply understanding user pain. Startups don’t fail because they’re one feature short of greatness. They fail because they are not listening to the market.
When founders don’t feel that pull from the market, they panic. Instead of asking tough questions, they start throwing money at the problem in the form of features, often without even realizing.
If the demand isn’t there, all you’re doing is spending more to force what isn’t working. Pushing harder on a door marked pull.
Market fit isn’t a cash problem.
Market fit is a pull problem.
This has been all of us at some point, spending more, something not working.
And deep down, you already know this, it’s super scary.
It’s easier to throw money at the problem than face reality. Building features feels productive. Hiring feels like progress. Spending money feels like you’re doing something.
So much easier than asking the hard questions. Easier than admitting your market isn’t pulling you forward, or… that you might have built something no one truly needs.
So you spend.
Hoping volume hides the weakness is a strategy to convince yourself that if you just had more, did more, built more… then everything would click.
But you don’t scale into market fit. You discover it, earn it, and prove it. Fit is an outcome the market gives you, it cannot be purchased.
Breaking the Paradox
This is not chicken/egg. How do I know what creates demand without building features to test….
The answer isn’t “never build features.” It’s “never build features for features sake.” (and certainly not outside core)
We know this. Don’t build features. Build outcomes. Don’t focus on what to build. Focus on what behavior you want to enable.
The diff between:
– “Let’s add a dashboard” (feature-thinking)
– “Let’s help users understand their progress” (outcome-thinking)
Your job is to create the most value with the fewest features. Finding the simplest possible path to that outcome.
This isn’t about never spending on features.
Enterprise needs integrations. Competitive spaces need parity. Scale needs onboarding.
But these accelerate an already working machine. They rarely fix a broken one.
So. Chase necessity.
Instead of spraying and praying the market to get more beans into the top of your funnel, trying to get MRR up, figure out what’s keeping the ones inside.
- Map their value chain. Who else do they interact with in their workflow?
- Map their ecosystem. What tools do they rely on / integrate with?
- Map their behavior. What pain are they solving that’s bigger than your product?
You cannot spend your way into market fit. You can only find it, earn it, and scale it. So… What are you going to do differently today?
As always, if I can be of service, feel free to grab time.
LFG.
— James