Entrepreneur | Dreamer | Builder. Founder at Harness, Traceable, AppDynamics & Unusual Ventures
At my first startup, it took us 15 months and multiple pivots to find our PMF and ship a good v1 product. If we hadn't pivoted, we would have died. 3 mistakes we made 👇 1) Being too far ahead of the customer's current problems. Our assumption: Everyone would be moving to the cloud in 2-3 years and would need a cloud monitoring solution. The reality was that it was a much longer timeline and there's no funding for being right eventually. Our pivot: Fixed our product so that it could be used even if a company wasn't on the cloud yet. 2) Asking too much from our customers. Our assumption: We thought our software would operate as SaaS, which meant that customers would have to adjust their approach to be compatible with our tech. But customers were telling us the opposite: they needed the entire solution to be on premise. Our pivot: Modified our platform so that companies didn't have to make any changes in application architecture to use our software. They brought their existing applications, and we would set them up. 3) Trying too hard to sell our products instead of solving customer problems. Our assumption: We were designing a complex product that would manage the entire monitoring process — from finding to fixing issues. So that's what we kept selling. But customers only wanted the "find it" part. Our product would have been excessive. Our pivot: Cut back on our product roadmap and focused on simple application visibility. The hardest test for any startup is to find initial PMF. Finding it requires countless customer conversations and adjusting based on the feedback you get. #PMF #Founder #Startup
Your insights on pivoting resonate with me; a lot of times I had to recalibrate our strategy to align with customer needs, just as you did.
Dan Selman
5mo
The big one IMO is getting the timing right: solving the right problem at the right time, meeting your prospects where they are. Easier said than done!
Michael Chen
5mo
this is what i needed to hear thank you so much
Prasenjit Sarkar
5mo
This is a great insight Jyoti Bansal. IMHO, it is always best to validate the riskiest hypothesis early in the PMF journey. Btw, out of curiosity, how did you measure your PMF? I am still assuming that you are talking about AppD.
Sam Alex
5mo
You explained it perfectly in positioning and realignment to meet the customer needs. Also to mention you had an hypothesis to validate and was listening to the customers to steer the product roadmap aligning with the needs.
Rishi Singh
5mo
Each of the points are right on the money !!
Rob Cheng
5mo
"there's no funding for being right eventually" <-- tell it to poor Vine! 😂
Nothing is more of a turnoff than a get-to-know-you meeting that isn't focused 95%+ on solving my problems. It's great that you can also do X Y and Z, but we didn't ask, and you spend valuable time trying to sell us something we don't need help with.
This post deeply resonates, Jyoti. As an early-stage startup, my team had to cycle through several ideas, product-definitions before doubling down on a specific problem and product definition based on customer/market needs - all within the same idea space! False-starts, restarts, resets are all part of the game, and being honest about it matters a lot.