We’ve all heard that product-market fit drives startup success — and that the lack thereof is what’s lurking behind almost every failure.
For founders, achieving product-market fit is an obsession from day one. It’s both the hefty hurdle we’re racing to clear and the festering fear keeping us up at night, worried that we’ll never make it. But when it comes to understanding what product-market fit really is and how to get there, most of us quickly realize that there isn’t a battle-tested approach.
In the summer of 2017, I was waist-deep in my search for a way to find product-market fit for my startup, Superhuman. Turning to the classic blog posts and seminal thought pieces, a few observations stuck out to me. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham described product-market fit as when you’ve made something that people want, while Sam Altman characterized it as when users spontaneously tell other people to use your product.
