10 principles for finding product–market fit
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PMF is a truth-finding mission Either people buy your product or they don’t. Treat 0→1 like science: make a guess, run the smallest experiment that can prove you wrong, learn, repeat. Reality beats narrative. Ignore vibes, slides, and opinions. Pursue truth in the market.
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Revenue and retention are the only votes that count Good weeks aren’t busy; good weeks move the north-star. Track revenue and retention above everything else. A simple heuristic: get 100 people to pay you ~€100/month. Price high enough to hurt. Free means nothing; paying means the problem is real. Retain before you scale.
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Start from one behavior and one painful problem Great companies root themselves in one existing behavior (email, meetings, shopping). Find the sharp pain inside that behavior and solve it 10x better. One job-to-be-done, obsessively served. Don’t chase five problems. Earn the right to expand later.
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Build the obvious thing, not the clever thing Winning products look obvious in hindsight. Pair an available technology with a real pain and ship the simplest version that works. Fall in love with the problem, not your tech. Obvious and specific beats clever and vague.
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Be relentlessly customer-centric (in deeds, not decks) Talk to users daily. Learn their language. Ship changes that close the gap between what they need and what you offer. Customer-centricity is a behavior, not a slogan: fewer surveys, more conversations; fewer opinions, more usage; fewer promises, more shipped fixes.
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Ship daily. Finish. Iterate faster than anyone. Most founders avoid the thing in front of them. Don’t. Build → ship → learn → repeat. Short feedback loops beat brilliant plans. Institute a weekly operating rhythm:
- What shipped? Did it move the metric? Show numbers.
- What did we learn?
- What’s the one bet this week?
- What’s blocked and who unblocks it in 24 hours? Be on the hook. Volume plus improvement compounds. Use AI as your co-founder to go faster, but don’t delegate your thinking.
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Do things in order: foundations first, but only what’s needed Speed is created by quality. A clean repo, clear types, and sane structure make you faster after day three. At the same time, don’t build infrastructure for problems you don’t have. Solve today’s constraint with a solution just strong enough for the next hill.
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Simplicity and clarity beat brute effort Clarity unlocks performance. If your team can’t answer, “What matters right now and why?” you’re burning cycles. Simplicity makes execution inevitable: one sentence vision, one metric, one next step. Cut pseudo-work. Make the main thing the main thing.
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Kill the constraint with 10x moves. Play to win. PMF is a constraint game. Ask weekly: “What’s the bottleneck now?” Remove it with an order-of-magnitude move, not incremental polish. Don’t defend what you have; maximize upside. Ignore noise from competitors, press, and VCs. Your only judge is the market.
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Charge early. Filter hard. Niche first, expand later. Pricing is a truth serum. Charge to test pain and willingness to pay. Add intentional friction to concentrate on your ideal customer and increase perceived value. A small, retained niche beats a big, indifferent crowd. When people can’t live without you, then scale.
How to work
- Treat PMF as chapters. For the next 6–12 months, write the ideal ending, then reverse-engineer the steps.
- Spend >80% of your time on PMF work: talking to users, shipping product, learning from metrics. Everything else is avoidance.
- Use constraint-based thinking. Today’s bottleneck decides today’s work.
- Build with intensity and love for detail, but always finish. Half-done doesn’t count.
- Keep your mind sharp. Don’t outsource hard thinking to models or mentors. Use tools for leverage, not for judgment.
Hard truth Ideas are cheap. Execution, speed, and learning loops are everything. Find truth in the market. Make better things. Ship them. Repeat until it’s undeniable.