Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how to recognize product-market fit, covering cohort retention curves, why marketing spend alone won't save a weak product, and examples like Slack and Skype. They explain how customer feedback and feature completeness drive sustainable growth.
We should talk about how to know if you actually have product market fit. And there's actually a great post over here. Product market fit means you're in— basically people are actually demanding to use your product, right? You're—
Yeah, like Slack in the early days.
Right, it's, it's, you're at an inflection point now. Like you're in a good spot, right?
And you can lose product market fit as well. Like Skype in its early days had product market fit. And stopped innovating. Yeah, they're dying. Everyone's like, oh, you used to, but other people have better products now.
He says this: You probably don't have PMF, product market fit. At some point, nearly every founder prematurely believes they have PMF before they actually do. This happens at least once in every startup. Almost after the post linked below, some of you asked what PMF actually looks like and how we had it at Anchor. So I'm not going to read everything here, but Anchor, the problem with it was that they were spending a ton on marketing, and the moment they stopped pushing on marketing, their DAU, their daily active users, started tickling, ticking down, right? And so what happened was that they were not feature complete. The moment they became more feature complete, so they had mobile first, they had a free podcasting platform, everything turned around. But I remember in the very beginning, it was very like, it was cool, but it wasn't, there's no reason for me to keep logging in, right? So the initial graph that they had with no PMF on the left side, do you want to describe that?
Yeah, so with no PMF, they went up and down and up and down. And the reason for the ups and downs is no product market fit is probably related more towards to when they were spending money on marketing, right?
Yeah, so you can see this, this bump over here in the very beginning on the left side. This is marketing spend most likely, and then they went down. Maybe they're like, oh, we got to turn it back on again. Yeah, but the problem is they did again. It doesn't come down to just marketing because if you if you market it. a leaky bucket, this is what's going to happen, right? And then it's going to go downwards. But when they have PMF, when they built in, they started talking to their customers more and they built in the right products and they built in the right features, it just started moving up gradually over time, right? Now the other thing too is you can see the cohort retentions or the retention numbers, right? So on the left side, this is like a bad YouTube video, right? People just churn out really quickly in the first, like, you know, beginning. The first—
That's almost every YouTube video.
Yeah, right? But a good YouTube video is on the right side where you have, you know, you have some drop-off in the beginning, But then it evens out and that's how you want it to look.
No, that's an amazing YouTube video.
This is an amazing YouTube video. Yeah. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's carrot.ai. Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T dot A-I, and we'll see you on the other side. So it's not like, by the way, this is a good way for you to, to, you look at your YouTube videos as a product and that's how you should optimize it. Now, if Neil and I were full-time YouTubers, we'd probably be optimizing hardcore for this, but that's not our job. So our, at least my videos look a little more, okay, maybe like in between these. I don't know about yours.
I haven't checked, but—
Yours have gotten better though with the editing.
Uh-huh. And I just increased production and spent more money.
Oh.
So now starting April, I'll record 8 long-form videos, which means by May I'll be publishing 8 videos a month. That's cool.
So you're upping your, your spend with them?
I'm upping my spend.
Wow. Okay, great. Anyway, that's it, guys. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. It helps us grow, and we will see you later.
