Product Market Fit

Finding Product Market Fit, John Danner

• Use a PMF Report Card to evaluate progress towards product market fit (PMF).

• Stages to get through to build a real company and advance out of the seed round

• Key Tips: experiment every day, focus on one metric at a time, defer gratification, and don’t monetize too early.

Experiment to PMF, John Danner

• A startup is a series of experiments—need to experiment every day

• Experiments > User research

• Build a long list of experiments that you prioritize on a regular cadence

• Have good tracking and measurement in place early

PR/FAQs for Product Documents

• Popularized at Amazon, a PR and FAQ doc is created before building a new product.

• Clear pros for the is approach: align on what the customer needs, force assumptions to be explicit, and increase ownership of the work.

Funnels and Conversion

Increase funnel conversion with Psych, Darius

• Users come to your site with a specific state of mind—understand it and unlock more conversion

• Users arrive with a certain amount of positive Psych and interact with your page or app in ways that add to or subtract from this Psych.

• Reminds me of a concept discussed by George Saunders in “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain”—readers arrive with a certain amount of energy and a good story builds and pushes that energy forward, from one moment to the next. He described it as one of those hot wheel tracks with a gas station that adds momentum to the car each time it passes through.

Growth Loops are the New Funnels, Reforge

• Powerful growth happens as a series of loops—not funnels

• Growth loop ≈ compounding interest