The product-market fit map (where should you focus?)

Hey, Rob, how's it going, man? Good.

How are you?

I'm doing great. Uh, uh, we are now about halfway through the current PMF camp, and, uh, I think this one's been really great. More, even more interactive. Like, I feel like some of the ones in the past have been very interactive, but this one we're basically just doing teardown, teardown, teardown, teardown, teardown, getting a bunch of reps, seeing how founders are selling, debugging stuff. So far we've went through, you know, pull anecdotes and then did a session on demand. Do you have any, you know, kind of general reflections, things that are jumping out to you from the session so far?

Yeah, so I hit a 435 deadlift yesterday.

There we go.

No, so there's been, there's been, so I think these sessions, like just having a bunch of founders see a bunch of founders, situations and try to like respond to them. And then also testing, because it's not like, oh, here's my opinion on things. Like, I guess that's part of it, but like, here's what the model says, or here's what the model would predict is kind of how I approach it. And seeing places where the model is not quite clear is interesting. And so the places where people I think are getting stuck are, and I have things that we just haven't put into words yet. They haven't written into blogs yet for, but it's like, what's the right level of abstraction for a project or a pull? The second in my mind, so we have a so that rule, which we'll get to at some point. The second is a general misconception, which is that you fill out the pull framework sequentially. So you ask about project, Then unavoidable, then less than, than limitations. When most projects you find will not have, like, will have good enough supply. And so you have to ask about the full entirety of pull. We'll probably talk about that one next week. People get stuck on unavoidable, which is a hard thing to understand. There are some cases where it's like a wall is coming at you, like, and you can see the wall coming at you, but there are other cases where it doesn't behave.

Yeah.

Like that. And so trying to come up with better ways there. So I don't know, it's a, it's, there's a lot of, it's a good way to get a bunch of reps and for a bunch of startups to get a bunch of reps and for me to see where the model isn't yet ready.

Yeah. I, you mentioned 2 there that have been impactful for me, like one, the condensing the discovery, basically you've got, hopefully we get this soon in a post that we can discuss, but It basically like condenses it into how do I understand the holistic project that they can't achieve rather than, as you mentioned, like the individual elements. Like that's already changed how I'm approaching my kind of like startup call, sales call discovery questions. Um, and then the, yeah, the one, the unavoidability one is, is interesting to see because it's got, you know, you've got some folks in there that they are selling. and they don't understand the unavoidability element of it, or it's inconsistent. And so it's interesting, like seeing founders picking that apart. But—

Actually, one thing that I also have, like, as you're talking about that, the one thing I reflect on is like a lot of people are selling and they don't understand why, like they don't understand the pull behind it. And it's like total. And so one of the practices that we're seeing people do now is just like, Okay. If you don't understand what the pull is of why people are buying, like you can just play stupid and ask, right? And, and hold on, why can't you just use Claude code to do this? Like you already have a Claude setup that's automating this. Like, help me understand why isn't this good enough? And, uh, that's where you get the truth out of it. You can sell to people without understanding their pull.

Yeah.

That, that is totally doable. But, and they might not even have pull. They might just be like, I don't know, it's something interesting, something new, and they might buy randomly. That's not what you want to repeat. You want to find people who have real pull, who are running against an actual limitation. And so, and so that's been an interesting tactic. But anyway, let's jump to the topic.

Yeah, totally. And so today we're talking about the product market fit map, subtitle, Where Are You? We'll leave the link to the Substack in the show notes. Rob, today we're going to get into a couple different things. Like, one is understanding a, you know, the difference between a conceptual model of product-market fit versus a causal model of product-market fit and kind of like teasing those apart. Um, but then really the majority of our conversation is going to be highly practical. Like, how do you— like, we're kind of going to run through like Rob's brain basically. Like, how, um, when, when you're working with a startup, how do you decide where you're going to be focusing? And again, we're back to that core, like sweet case study factory model that we love and maybe fewer people love as much as we do. But Rob, what's going on that this is top of mind for you?

Yeah, so I just thought this would be like useful. This is basically what happens in my brain and I have almost like a flowchart in my brain for whenever a startup comes to me and like gives me a doc of contacts and a bunch of calls, what I'm doing is I'm basically following this flowchart. And so I wanted to give you the flowchart so you can just do this yourself or, you know, come to me, whatever. But this is a derivative of the Case Study Factory. It's like, okay, given the Case Study Factory, Therefore, what should I do and how should I think about like assembling the case study factory given what I have and where I am right now? And so it's a way to understand what your bottleneck is and the like, so what do I do about the bottleneck?

Yeah. Yeah. And so probably this will be most relevant for founders that, you know, it's just, it's really, it can be chaotic. Frequently is chaotic trying to start a business and find product market fit. You've got 1,000 things going on. Um, and so this is, uh, I think a post for a founder that's like, okay, there's, it's like 3 things on my mind. How do I choose the one to focus on? Yeah.

Yeah. Like the, the, like, uh, there's a million things I could do. I have a ton of time to do those things, but like, what's actually going to move the needle and how should I think about the thing that's going to move the needle?

Yeah, perfect. Um, well, why don't we jump into it then? Um, first let's, let's introduce a couple of things that, that you present early. One is the conceptual model of product market fit. The next is the causal model of product market fit. And then the, and then we'll get into this. So what do I do right now? Rob, this is the first time I've seen you use this language, teasing out the difference between the conceptual model and the causal model. We've talked about both of these. They probably won't be new concepts, but can you give us the background on what's going, like, what do you mean by conceptual model and what is it and the And then we'll get into the causal model. Yeah.

Well, so most of what we know about product market fit are the symptoms of product market fit. It's like when you have product market fit, people are ripping a product out of your hands. You're growing really fast. You can't hire fast enough. Things like you have so much demand and it's like, okay, cool. We can identify the symptoms, but we actually need to know how the phenomenon works. And so what are the pieces of product market fit. And what most people think is that it's like, okay, cool. I have a product, market wants product, right? It's like something that's like that straightforward. And for all the reasons we've been shouting about here for, I don't know, years now, I feel like that's not the right conceptual model. That doesn't reflect, like, people, nobody has ever wanted a compliance software. Like, that's not, that's not a thing. B2B software is not a thing that is wanted. And so that's the wrong. And then we have the kind of pain points, problems. Like, these are all the kind of wrong conceptual tools to explain product market fit and why, like, how does it work? And so that's where the case study and the factory come in. That's, that's that model, which is basically just like, what are the things here? Like, what, what is this thing? And how does it work? Then the causal model is like, okay, cool. I now know all these different pieces, but which piece causes the other so that I know where to focus at any one point in time? Because if I'm focused on something that's an effect, not a cause, then I, it's the tail wagging the dog. I'm focused on the wrong thing. I'm pushing on a rope. Like it's not, it's not, it's not going to— move us in the right direction. So we need to have like this thing of what that, what are the pieces here and how did these pieces interact?

Yeah. And the conceptual model, you know, it feels like the case study factory contrasts against the more common one that you mentioned earlier, which is like you have a product that the market wants. What you've built with the case study factory is you've said, one, you're not pushing a product through a factory, it's at the other end of the factory, there's like a suction force that's pulling it out. And it's not a product, you're actually manufacturing the thing that is being manufactured, what you call a case study, you know, people might recognize as like achieve, like unblocking the project, achieving the result that the specific result that the customer is focused on that they're not able to do without it. But it's, you know, there's, there's, it's a subtle difference. I find it actually hard for me to explain in conversations with folks. It's like, yeah, I get we—they're conceptually like there's linkages, but they're so different in the way that you behave when you operate with a case study mindset versus a build a product that the market market wants mindset.

Build a product, sell a product, right? There's this there's this kind of like model of it of you build a product, sell it, build a product market wants da da da da da. And like these models are fine. There, there, those, that's a conceptual model. It just doesn't work very well because you can go out and try to sell a product and people not buy it. Right. And so we need a conceptual model for when product market fit works. How does it work? Like how, what, how does it work? And the best way that I've found to do that is with pull and the case study factor.

Yeah. Yeah. And then on the, on the causal model like that, you know, the biggest, most obvious Contrast there is like pain points is not a causal thing to solve. ROI is not a causal thing to solve. And the way that you laid out here is the block project exists before a startup's product exists, and a startup succeeds if and only if it unblocks this person's project. Blocked projects cause everything else in the case study and the factory to emerge and evolve to fit. And so it's the block project being kind of the unique element, the really critical element of the causal model. Anything else we want to add on either the conceptual or the causal before we jump into, I think, the slightly more practical part of the post?

No, they're probably tied together. I don't know that there's a very sharp distinction between them, but you need to know the concepts and you need to know the causes. And so the The, I think the most important thing on the causal side is, is the kind of pull causes everything. Pull generates everything. Pull, this blocked project on somebody's to-do list that exists, it like exists out there in the world and it exerts an evolutionary force on business, on, on your product. And so when you're, when you, when you don't find that pull, then you build a product that there is no kind of force behind. The people aren't pulling it out of your hands.

Yeah.

Feels like you are pushing. When you build something that kind of fits that pull, kind of unblocks the project, you'll experience kind of like weird things. But those are evolutionary signals. People will like not understand what you're talking about or they'll buy, but they'll be unsatisfied. And that's, and that's an evolutionary force acting on your startup and on your product. is how they want to use it, what they want to accomplish with it, how they want it to be priced, like how these things are generated from the blocked project. And so everything is downstream of Polkadot.

Yeah, fascinating. I think we'll get into some of those. You mentioned pricing, you mentioned probably customer churn there, or I think, and we're going to hit those specifically. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen for folks that might be watching for some reason. I'm not really sure why somebody would want to watch this, but if watching, you can see the flowchart that Rob kind of has developed here. Rob, why don't we talk through this maybe just to frame this before we get into the individual elements? We basically start with a key question on, are you demonstrating that you can repeatedly Find, sell, deliver the same case study at an increasing volume per month where the customer pulls through buying and using more than you push, buying and using more than you push. So basically it's, you know, you've got a question on like, do you have pull essentially like early on that is, that's repeating? And it bifurcates from there. And then there's different processes that we're running through. Rob, why don't you give us the, like, what's going on in your brain and how are, And then, uh, if you want to give like an overview at a higher level here, and then let's, let's get tactical on each of these kinds of questions and what they look like, what the symptoms of each are.

Yeah. So this is, this question is essentially asking, do you have a functional case study factory? If so, just attack the bottleneck. And, uh, and so that's like the green side. You, you have something that's close to product market fit, just attack the bottleneck. There and like continually attack the bottleneck. There is no speed limit, attack the constraint. And so that's the kind of first thing. But most people who are listening to this are listening to this because they don't have a functional factory. And when you don't have a functional case study factory, it's like, they're not, it could be a variety of reasons. There's a lot of places where people get stuck in the assembly process of like, Figuring out their factory. And so the question is like, where are you today? What is your current constraint? And so in a lot of cases, it's, I don't have any customers or I don't have an idea. Okay, cool. If you're there, there is a kind of playbook for getting out of that spot. Or if you have customers, you could have a sequence of different, these are like the most common constraints that are, if you like have the case study factory model in your head, you can point to the different ones in In the kind of factory that is being assembled, where it's like, okay, we have a bunch of different, or we have a couple of different case studies. I can't figure out which to focus on. Or, you know, we have customers, but it's been a lot of me convincing and not a lot of them pulling. And so what do I do there? There's a common one of, I can't get anybody to talk to me. There's, okay, we're having, Once you, once you get people to talk to you, it's almost always, I have 10 sales calls this week and zero of them are converting to real deals. Okay. There's something there. And then it's okay. People are closing, but they are, they are churning. Or we're not getting like 100% retention or like people increasing usage. They're not super happy after they're buying. And so these are all places to like say, okay, what, as you're trying to kind of build this factory, that's just going to spin out a ton of case studies. super fast that look basically identical to each other. Where are you getting stuck?

Yeah, maybe, you know, as I was reading this, I was running through this with my, with Cumbre, with my, with my business thinking, okay, like what, how would, how would I progress through this? And so if the, if the listener wants to do that live, they can. It's like, basically, do you have a case study that is repeating and that your business is growing? If so, do you have a conceptual idea of what your, uh, of, of what your case study factory is and where's the bottleneck? And like, that's kind of like, stop there. Like focus, focus there. Like you probably have intuition around it. Let's say that, you know, for the, for the founder whose answer to that is no, um, you know, you, you, you break heart. Like the first question is like, do you have an idea or customers or not? Basically, um, you know, maybe before we get into that specifically, do you find that founders know or they're struggling to know what the thing is that's like blocking them from like having a repeatable case study? Like, yeah. What do you see?

Yeah. Uh, I tend to find that people come to me with a mess and want me to untangle a mess. Um, and then say, okay, cool. Based on all of this context, What is actually your bottleneck and what should you do about it? This is what I am doing in my head. So hopefully this works for you. I've tried to make it super simple, which is, which is, oh, we have no idea or no customers. Like that should be fairly straightforward. We, we, if you have an idea, but no customers, you're in that category. Right. And then, and there's a ton of things you could do, but actually only one thing matters in that state.

Yeah.

And so, uh, I, I tend to find that, I don't know, my hope is by putting this out there, you will be able to very easily self-assess of, of like, if you're thinking about this for Coomber, you look at this, can you say, yeah, it's that one?

Uh, yeah, it's, I fall in the customers, but I've, you know, let's see, multiple different case studies. Um, and then sometimes I cycle through, can't get sales calls like that. You know, I, I sort of like, those are the, those are the 2 areas. areas that I find my business in.

Yeah.

But yeah, we also hear from, as you mentioned, a bunch of founders that come in and they're like, all right, where do I— I know I want to— sometimes it's like, I know I want to sell into supply chain, but where do I get my idea from? And so it's, yeah, your advice there. Let's dig into that one. Find one person you want to serve, see what they'll pay you to help them accomplish. Sell, try to deliver, try to repeat. What are some of the things that are going on in this? Are there specific things that there's actually a thousand, like it's the, this one's too messy probably to get into all of it, but are there specific like common failure patterns that you see founders that are in this?

Yeah. So like the zero to one stage, the no customers or idea to customers stage is like I actually, at some point, I have like a set of memes in my head for the different like places where people get stuck. There's the Patrick Star wallet stage, which we won't talk about, but, but this stage is where, so this stage is where people get the most stuck. And it's because there's a ton of bad ideas out there that's like, okay, if you have no idea or no customers, here's what you should do. You should craft a mission, vision, values statement. You should, make a deck, you should make a business plan, you should interview 50 customers.

Yeah.

You should do all this kind of stuff and all of that stuff, uh, uh, like at the end of it, you wind up still with no customers and, and like, you might know things, but some of those things, you know, most of those things, you know, probably won't get you customers or won't, won't be anything relevant. And so here, The thing, the, like, cutting through the Gordian knot of that stage is just go find somebody, see what they will pay you to do for them. Where do they need help? And then see if that repeats versus doing a ton of research, most of which will not get you anywhere.

Yeah. I, my favorite version of that is like, find your identity as a founder. And it's like this weird, like, Turn inward stuff that is, you know, you come out feeling like, why did I do that? You know, I, the other thing that I tend to see with founders is that they try to find the perfect thing and they're projecting forward.

The globally optimal thing. Yeah. They try to like see the future.

Yeah, exactly. And so they get, you know, they get kind of stuck. Like, is, am I gonna be able to price this at the level that I, that I want to? Is the market big enough? You know, it's, How do you balance that, Rob, with, is there any amount of projecting into the future that you do with people? Is it literally like find anybody that will pay you? Like, how do you, what do you do there?

I don't know. Like, I haven't, I actually don't usually operate at this stage. So this is a kind of stage before people come to me usually. It's just, and so I just give advice for this stage. Uh, but I've, having done it a couple of times and seeing it a bunch of times, like there, you just don't know and you can't, you can't see the future. Who knows? We don't know. And so all of the like mental energy that goes into trying to predict an unpredictable future is like energy you could spend just working with customers today. And, and, and what I, what I've seen in basically every single company, Whenever they have like this, this concern about TAM or the future or whatever, and they find traction, guess what? They figure something interesting out along the way. And maybe it's a new product. Maybe it's a new angle on their product that makes it wildly more accessible to way more people. But it's like, it almost— and yes, it would be, it would be way cooler if you found it like way better if you found something that from day one had an infinite TAM. That would be great. But you, there's a kind of path dependence on like, you, you know what you know right now. And given that, you should just do stuff.

Yeah.

And there's infinite things you could learn, unclear what, like, and, and so it, it just kind of winds up being a, um, it winds up being like a never-ending research exercise to map the unmappable.

Yeah. Yeah. And the Cyberstarts thing that you wrote about with the idea stage is one that I'll frequently think about when we're talking about this, which was basically like, go try to sell things, see if you can sell it a few times and then build the thing.

And then once you figure that out, then you can say, okay, cool. If that's real, do I want to attack this? Like, is this something I actually Now that I know the shape of it, do I think this is a good thing to do? But like, that's from knowing that there is a thing there to be built.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, let's get into some of these other ones. Like, okay, so you've got a couple of sales, um, some, some sales, but something is not exactly working and you've basically laid out, uh, you know, uh, several of the key elements of the case study factory here. You have multiple different case studies. You have, uh, more push than pull, like the customers are not ripping it out of your hands. Uh, not able to get sales calls, getting calls, not converting to sales, converting sales, uh, but churning. Why don't, let's pick a couple of these. I don't, I think can't get sales calls. We could just like literally direct you to everything that Rob has written about, about pipeline. Um, but maybe, you know, one that we've seen recently is founders struggling with, I've got, I've got, you know, somewhere between 3 and 20 different customers and I'm doing something different for all of them. And I don't know what to do with that. Like, what do you, what, what you write here is. Pick one based on demonstrated pull, determine if it's repeatable by selling. What does that look like in real life?

Yeah. So what I will usually find is that a company, you know, with somewhere between 3 and 20 customers that you have like 3 or 4 different case studies and you're like, okay, cool. Are these all one case study? If I just look at them differently, are they 3 different? Are they actually 3 different case studies? If so, how do I— and the reason you need to get to one is because managing 3 adds just so much as it's basically creating 3 separate case study factories and it's hard to create one. And so sometimes if like, sometimes it's just, oh, I've been looking at this from the wrong direction.

Hmm.

And it's actually the same thing, just a couple different times, like with slightly different words, but it's actually the same thing versus no, these are actually totally separate things. So it's either like, oh, these are all modules of one core thing or whatever it is. And so, um, what I've found is as you, as you think about it, you want to kind of like write out each of the case studies and also pay attention to who actually pulled the hardest.

Hmm.

Who pulled the hardest, AKA like who bought the fastest? Because a lot of, a lot of times, a lot of early deals are like quite a bit of convincing. Or there's pull and then, but it's like, it's kind of idiosyncratic. Oh, they had something like, now that I understand what this person's pull was, like 40 things had to, 40 stars had to align here. And that's not, I don't think that's going to repeat very often at all.

Yeah.

And so, and so it's just kind of looking at each of the case studies using the pull framework to say, okay, Who's one, which was real pull versus more push?

Yeah.

2, do I like, do I actually think this repeats or have I seen this repeat? Are these all flavors of the same actual case study or not? And then it's kind of, then what tends to happen is you pick one and say, okay, cool. I'm going to test this one in my next 5 calls and see, right? Like, and just see what happens.

Yeah. Yeah. And that one resonated. I left one case study behind, which was working with universities because it was closer to creating materials for classrooms than it was to marketing. And so that one, thinking through this lens, actually bifurcated pretty hard between 2 separate case studies that I could go after. I didn't feel like universities was repeatable, and I think that was true. It definitely clicked with, uh, 10 different things had to sort of align and I couldn't see that happening a bunch of different times. Um, why don't we, let's pick, uh, another one. You've got more push than pull. What does that feel like? How does it feel when you are in that situation, Rob?

Yeah, it's like the symptoms are like you're doing all of the things to close the deal, which is like you're, you're basically twisting their arm to get the next meeting on the calendar. You're following a bunch of, following up a bunch of times, they're rescheduling and you're reaching out to get it back on the calendar. You're offering free pilots. You're offer— like you're doing all of these things to convince them to, to buy and use. And so that's, it's, it's just think of the amount of effort that goes into the deal closing and, and who, there's some amount of effort that goes into it, but who is exerting the effort is the real question. And is it if it's the potential customer that's exerting what they are doing is they're saying, oh my God, this is exactly what I need. Okay. Here's what needs to happen for us to buy this. I need to run it by da da da da da. Can we schedule a meeting tomorrow? Like that's them initiating a lot of the energy for purchase action. And and so like I just had an example yesterday where a startup met a potential enterprise customer on Friday. And says, okay, cool. We need to start talking about a contract. We need to, can we meet on Wednesday to talk about a $400K contract or something like that? And it's like, uh, it's like, okay, cool. That is them pulling versus the opposite of that is you saying, maybe we do a demo. Would you like to see a demo? Like, do you want to see it? And they're like, I guess so. Maybe we could bring the team. It might be good for them to see. Right. And they're kind of leaning back. Yeah. And so what, what often happens, what I'll often find in that kind of like 2 to 20 customer stage is that you're not going to have it be all push. There are going to be a couple of examples of pull in there that you're going to scratch your head and say, huh, that's nice. I wish that happened more. And if you're not, if you don't have this flowchart in your mind, you're just going to go back to business and like just keep doing the same thing. It's like, no, there is some really interesting information to be found there and why these people pulled and those other people didn't. That's almost certainly going to cause you to rewrite the kind of case study you have in your mind and focus slightly differently. And so when you find that there is a difference between some push, some pull, okay, cool. You can't scale that. You can't scale something that's like, 10% pull, 90% push. It's going to take way too much effort. I've seen a bunch of companies try. You just like, it eventually breaks you. So you have to find, you have to like unfold towards the actual pull.

Yeah. I love that as a reminder. Rob, I think we're going to hit time here. We don't want to go a lot longer. We won't get into the remaining 3. Is there anything that Is helpful to add on the getting sales calls, getting calls, but not converting to sales or converting sales, but churning?

Yeah, I think so. I think for can't get sales calls, like, please don't ask me that. But the other 2 are basically like, is this a product market fit problem or is this a kind of execution problem? That's the core kind of binary. there. And you know, it's a product market fit problem if there's not pull. And it's like, okay, cool. We need to go and figure out what pull is versus if there is pull, then it's almost certainly an execution problem or like a shooting self in foot problem, which, which, uh, you can then debug using kind of more traditional methods.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And, uh, you've got one of them there that's like, is, is the execution problem in the sale or is it actually in the Uh, and the delivery. Um, and what, what we can do with this one is, um, you've, you've actually, you've written about all these different elements. Like I can think of specific posts. Well, in the show notes, if there's something here that you're like, oh, that, that's it. I'll, uh, I'll make sure that we get a link in there that actually goes a little bit deeper than this one does. Um, Rob, anything else that, uh, we want to hit before we wrap today? I think this, like the body of this was pretty practical on where to focus, but anything additional that you would say founders should be doing?

No, I'd just say like, follow the flowchart and think less because the flowchart and these models are designed to have you not have to first principles everything, not have to go to the whiteboard on everything. It's like, here's the conceptual model, the causal model. If you understand these models, this flowchart should make sense to you and it should be like, okay, cool. That's what I need to do right now.

I love it. Awesome. All right. Well, hope this was helpful. Leave a comment if there's anything that was not clear or whatever. We'd love to, love to see what people are thinking, uh, and we'll catch everybody next week. See ya.