Fred has a good post to open the discussion over at AVC today on sales traction vs product-market fit. Go read that. Here's my two cents: I'm generally optimistic about the possibilities of a product given the right team and plan. When I started Mission Research (GiftWorks) with my co-founders, I felt we should take our time, map things out, develop the framework, etc. But my impatience exceed that feeling, and I pushed for an early release, which led to a total of 2 customers (more or less) in the first month. The product wasn't right. There were bugs. There were features the customer base thought should be standard that weren't in there. Some of our usability assumptions were wrong. It was a slog for the first year. But it was an invaluable year: by the next release, we had a much better product-market fit. We listened. We spent time on site with customers, documenting how crappy their experience with GiftWorks was. We refined it and made it a lot better. An
Charlie Crystle writes about startups, startup ecosystems, tech, food systems, and random things.