A path to product-market fit
Follow the stages
Think of the old master in martial arts films who makes his student repeat boring chores for days.
The student wants to learn the flashy moves right away. Only later does he realize every chore was building the skills he needed to fight.
A startup works the same way. Each stage builds what the next one depends on. And skipping one leaves a gap you pay for later, like a debt.
Remember, in the early stages, your job is not to build a company or a product. Your job is to learn whether the problem is real and craft the best solution to fix it.
That is the core idea of the Lean Startup philosophy. Everything you believe about your business is a guess until the market proves it.
So you build the smallest thing that can test a guess, measure how users react, and learn whether to keep going or change course. Then you repeat that loop, and you only invest more once the evidence says yes.
Skipping a stage almost always means investing money and time in something you haven’t validated. Six months of development on a problem nobody confirmed is six months you don’t get back. Competitors may take the market before you within that time.
However, there are rare exceptions. This is what we call “fat startups”. They raise big money early and build heavily before validating, like hardware or deep tech companies that can’t test cheaply. But, if you are reading this, you are most likely not one of them.
At any moment, you should know which stage you are in and what must be proven before moving on. The Lean Startup path has three:
- Problem-solution fit. Pick a specific customer segment, validate the problem through interviews, understand the existing alternatives, and test whether people would pay for your idea. You are done when customers describe the problem without prompting and commit to trying your solution, with a preorder, a pilot or a letter of intent.
- Product-market fit. Build the smallest possible solution and put it in real hands. You are done when users come back on their own, pay, and would be upset if it disappeared.
- Scale. Build a repeatable sales and acquisition process, then grow. You are done when each new customer brings in more than they cost, and growth becomes predictable.
More importantly, each stage is a learning process, not a box to tick.
Finally, if you feel like skipping a stage, it usually means you don’t see its purpose yet. Stop and ask yourself why it exists before moving on.
Roles should come late
Titles like CEO, CTO or CMO mean little at the beginning. And anyway, most early teams don’t have the experience to fill them yet, and that’s perfectly normal.
The needs also change constantly. In the first month, the company needs interviews, the next month a prototype, and the month after that its first sales.
A role fixed on day one describes a company that doesn’t exist yet. Titles only start to mean something once the company grows and the work becomes stable enough to DIVIDE.
So, instead of handing out titles, focus on solving the problem. Let roles emerge from what the company actually needs, and from what each of you turns out to be good at.
The best startup cultures work this way. A problem belongs to whoever can solve it, not to whoever holds the title.
To convince you, take a look at Tesla. Elon Musk told employees that anyone can and should talk to anyone else, skipping the chain of command, if that is the fastest way to solve a problem.
At Stripe, the Collison brothers didn’t wait for a sales team. When someone agreed to try Stripe, they would say “Right then, give me your laptop” and set it up themselves.
Everyone should help, not only engineers. The CTO joins sales calls, the CEO answers support tickets, and nobody says “that’s not my job.” Put your ego aside. The company doesn’t need your title. It needs the problem solved.
So you may ask, why give titles at all? My reason is that it’s mostly cultural and convenient. A title is a shortcut that tells people roughly what you do in one word.
Explaining your actual week to your friends would take ten minutes. Saying “I’m a full-stack developer” takes two seconds.