Bad products win because they become too expensive to replace. Salesforce is a terrible product, but its deep integrations into company workflows create switching costs so high that customers stay locked in regardless of how painful it is to use.
I always thought product market fit was bullshit. People talk about how if you have product market fit, your product grows really fast. I get it. But at the same time, I see products with terrible features, usability, and I wouldn't say they have product market fit, yet they still grow. And here's a prime example of this. Does your company use HubSpot or Salesforce? HubSpot. Okay. So if we use Salesforce for sales CRM, and no joke, you know, I don't know what divisions use it, but we have some divisions that use Salesforce as a CRM. It is a terrible product. We had to hire a lot of engineers to end up making it work. You know why they keep doing well? Because it's a pain in the butt to rip out, right? And if you look at a lot of these solutions that integrate within companies and they integrate deep, even if they have a terrible product, the cost and the pain to rip it out in many cases is more expensive than just continually paying for it. Switching costs. Yeah, that's why with products nowadays, I think you need to have as many integrations as possible, so it's hard to rip out. And I believe, assuming you can figure out how to get people onboarded and integrated, but even if you don't have the best product, the switching cost really to me is more important than, look, we got this best usable product that has product market fit.
