Peter Reinhardt warns founders not to copy Airbnb's years-long path to product-market fit. Instead, run cheap tests like landing pages and Hacker News experiments to quickly prove or kill ideas. A skeptical team member pushing for fast validation beats blind iteration.
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I think the debate was whether to build out the full product and then test for product market Fit by trying to sell it to people versus this super, super lightweight MVP landing page that we would put on Hacker News to see if there was interest in the concept. And what drove us towards the super, super lightweight test was actually the fact that there was a skeptical divide among the founders. And since the founders couldn't agree, the only way to answer the question was to go to customers ASAP and get an answer. Okay. It's tough. Like, the. The launching early thing is always a challenge because I think there have been instances where people are like, we'll just launch this early, but because they're like 10% off of what that product ought to be, or they're not very good at communicating it, they never really get the feedback that they need. Right. Usually that test is so cheap to run that it's worth running, even if you decide that it was inconclusive and you should go a step deeper. But I also think that the way you framed it is actually an excuse that a lot of founders use for not doing the cheap early test, when in fact, they should. I would say the Airbnb version of Product Market Fit is much more iterative. They struggled for years and years and made slight iterations and iterations and iterations, and finally it caught on, and obviously they're a runaway success. My feeling is that that's extremely rare and that, again, this is a really dangerous place to be because you can stay in this iterative mode for years, and it is unlikely that the iterations are going to get you to a good place. So I remember very clearly early on being really inspired by the Airbnb story and it being a logical reason why we should keep plugging away at a bad idea. And I think we abused the Airbnb story to just keep stringing ourselves along on a bad idea. So I would be very, very careful of following the Airbnb example. I don't know many other companies that. That hit product market fit that way. I think what you want is someone, either yourself or someone else on the founding team who's a skeptic, someone who's skeptical, who will question and push for the fastest reasonable test. So, in other words, if you have an optimist and a skeptic and they both agree on what a valid test is, then I think you actually will end up with a good test. But if you have three optimists in a room who all agree on what a good test is, I don't believe that that's a good test. Like, how hurtful can it be if someone is like, well, I really think you haven't thought this through. There's, like, these three things that you should really test asap, because I don't really believe that you have product market fit here. Right? That's what you want. You want someone who's going to be, like, pushing it, and you're like, well, yeah, how would we. And then who's willing to collaborate with you on how you should reasonably test whether those things are the case?
