How to Find Product Market Fit - Stanford CS183F: Startup School

Jason Lemkin recommends giving it 24 months to start a B2B SaaS. B2B SaaS is a long road despite the big splashes sometimes seen like Slack or Intercom. [LINK] Also watch the CEO of Segment talk about their journey to product market fit. [VIDEO]

You and your team should watch this 3 times right now: [VIDEO] It’s about finding product market fit after a few different products. It talks about how their new successful product (150 staff) is a small feature from one of their other products and how they scaled that! Do it!

There's also the "open-core model"[^1]. From the Wikipedia description: > The open-core model is a business model for the monetization of commercially produced open-source software. Coined by Andrew Lampitt in 2008,[1] the open-core model primarily involves offering a "core" or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering "commercial" versions or add-ons as proprietary software.[2][3] Here's GitLab's CEO[^2] talking about "Offering an on-prem / self-managed version of your software" [^3] Here's a timestamped video titled "E05 Pioneering version control for data science with Pachyderm co-founder and CEO Joe Doliner" [^4], where Pachyderm's CEO[^5] addresses the business model. Here's a timestamped video, titled "How to Find Product Market Fit" , of Peter Reinhardt[^6], where he answers the question of "why would someone pay anything for an open source library that's 580 lines of code.."[^7]. There's a blog post detailing this, too[^8]. There are several degrees of what is open-source and what is not, and different ways to build a business around that. [^1]: [LINK] [^2]: [LINK] [^3]: [LINK] [^4]: [LINK] [^5]: [LINK] [^6]: [LINK] [^7]: [VIDEO] [^8]: [LINK]

For those interested in Segment, this is a talk of Peter Reinhardt about Product Market Fit and a bit of the history behind Segment. [VIDEO] I like this talk really much.

The first approach sounds solid but it's the kind of thinking that very easily leads you towards building a solution looking for a problem. See Peter Reinhardts talk about product/market fit: [VIDEO]

Having followed this exact playbook to validate several products I can confidently say this will give you false positives and the only reliable way to determine when you have PMF is: accidentally get PMF on something so that you know what it feels like (it’s unmistakeable). Peter Reinhardt from Segment has a must-watch talk for anyone interested in this topic [VIDEO]