Endless products are thought of and then made, day in and day out. But making something isn’t enough. If you want your start-up to succeed, your product needs a market.
That ‘ideal market’ is one with demand for an ‘unserved need’ that your product is going to serve. If you can do that, you’d have achieved what is called a product-market fit.
“Product-Market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”, said Marc Andreessen in a blog post from 2007.
In simple terms, you have to have a market with a substantial number of real users who are interested in paying actual money for your product.
But as mentioned earlier, products are available in endless numbers in the market. And only the most exceptional new products out of this endlessness will ever succeed in achieving the product-market fit.
One way of measuring the product-market fit is through Kickstarter. If you have a concept or idea, you can use websites like Kickstarter to see if there is a similar product or concept and if it garnered any interest or funding.
It can also help you find a niche. By finding a niche not yet fulfilled, your startup can create a product that will be of real value to its real users.
That said, use Kickstarter to answer these basic questions and you’d be on your way to figuring out if your product has achieved a product-market fit.
How do people deal with the problem you’re trying to solve?
Usually, there are two types of startup founders: the first group includes those who start with a product in mind and then seek the right market for it, and then there are those who first find the market and then work on the product and the business model they’d need for it.
Kickstarter, fortunately, serves the needs, irrespective of the type of startup founder you are. For the product in question, check Kickstarter to see if other people have developed products that are similar to the one that you want to make, or one that solves the problem that you wish to solve.
The product-market fit you want is to ensure that your product addresses the actual demand within the market.
Where are the pain points?
As a startup founder, your goal is to build a product that solves multiple pain points for customers. Irrespective of that goal, if there’s no market to support it, or the market is weak, your product will fail.
Kickstarter provides you easy access to products that people have put forth in a bit to solve a given problem for customers. Understand their products and analyze where the pain points are.
In fact, these pain points could be multi-faceted. The product could be seeking to solve pain points for the customer but as a potential competitor, you could also see what pain points that given product could have for the end-users.
Based on that information, simplify your product idea into something that a customer both understands and wants to pay for.
What are the common characteristics of people that care about this problem?
Kickstarter provides a built-in audience. These are people who are already interested in supporting new product ideas.
This low barrier to entry gives startups enough ground to engage in a feedback loop and see how the market responds.
Know your target audience and determine what characteristics are common to people who care about the problem that you also wish to solve. This will help you develop a product that people would pay to buy and also help you determine what features your product should have for its initial MVP release.
To sum it all up…
Achieving a product-market fit is crucial for the success of your startup.
To achieve that you have to be able to prove that it is something that the customers want to buy.
Use Kickstarter to establish that proof of concept by asking the three questions we’ve outlined in this write-up. Also, use it to connect with your audience early on so that they give you real-time feedback on what their pain points actually are and how they’d like their problem solved.
Once you have done that or while you’re doing it, connect with Aerion Technologies and CRINNAC and we can help you not only analyze whether there’s a product-market fit but also with releasing that MVP.
