In practice, finding product-market fit is never a straight line. Instead, it happens in multiple iterative cycles. You start with a market, build an initial version of the product, see who actually gets value from the product, then redefine the market and redefine the product.
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This is exactly what happened with Signals. We laid out our early assumptions above. But once we dug deeper, we found that many more target personas outside of our sales audience assumptions were getting deep value from the product. Good news! We found that many marketers, business owners, and other professionals were using the product just as deeply as the sales professionals who were our core personas.
So we refined the categories, who, the questions, and the macedonia mobile database motivations we actually saw. The second version looked like this:
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The refinement didn’t stop there. About a year in, we had another major shift that I’ll discuss in a future post.
Market-Product Fit Is Not Binary
The iterative cycle of market-product fit brings us to another key point:
Market-product fit is not binary. Nor is it a single point in time.
A better way to think about market-product fit is from weak to strong.
When you imagine Market Product Fit as a binary concept, it means that your market and product components don’t change. In practice, we know, as in the Signals case, that this couldn’t be further from the truth. In this ongoing process, we should once again let the market lead the way.