One of the most common questions that I hear from seed and Series A startup founders is: “how do I know when we have found product-market fit?”
Finding fit is typically viewed as the threshold for starting to scale - raising money and hiring a team to pour fuel on the fire ignited by the right product meeting the right market. Most early stage companies are so focused on validating product-market fit so that they can then broadcast this to signal their readiness for growth and scaling.
Yet, a study by Startup Genome estimated that it takes founders two to three times longer to validate product-market fit than they initially expected, and that 70% of startups end up scaling prematurely as a result of this underestimation. To combat this trend, people have tried to quantify product-market fit with formulas or to define it in terms of certain growth metrics, but whether a company has achieved this state has yet to be reduced to a measurable fact.
How can the determination of whether a company has reached this critical inflection point in their growth journey be so subjective?
Recently, some prominent investors have shifted the focus from identifying product-market fit to finding product-market-sales fit. This more stringent definition incorporates the notion of a scalable sales process for a given product in a specific market. Requiring a company to demonstrate a capability to sell outside of a founder’s immediate network moves the goalpost further for when a company is deemed ready to scale.
Even with the inclusion of a more exacting sales requirement in the definition of fit, the concept still eludes an objective definition. Fit is clearly not totally subjective, since there is broad consensus on certain key elements. How is a founder (or an investor doing diligence, or an employee evaluating whether to join a company) to know for sure whether a company has achieved product-market-sales fit and should begin to scale?
Clarity on this question finally came to me during a piano lesson. I was learning about introducing harmony, and discovered that harmony in music is an apt metaphor for product-market-sales fit. On the one hand, creating harmony relies on certain established principles and is the result of inherent physical properties. At the same time, whether something sounds right to a given listener is ultimately subjective.
The longer, shorter way of appreciating this metaphor explores the similarities between musical harmony and finding fit to make this nebulous idea more tangible and then infer some advice for how best to achieve fit. For the shorter, longer way - skip ahead to the practical tips and advice.
The market is the melody
A harmony is typically built around a melody with the goal of accentuating its sound. The melody is the core - technically called the root - of the resulting harmony. Additional harmonizing notes are added to be supporting actors to the melody’s leading role.
Often, startups prioritize building a product and then think about which market would be most interested in the features and benefits that it provides (founding teams with more technical backgrounds are more prone to operating this way). They ask the question, “who would be the most willing to buy this product?” instead of starting from the perspective of a prospective buyer and building a product to solve their problem.
In other words, startups usually make their product the melody, singing its praises and testing which types of buyers harmonize best with that song.
The challenge with this framing is that markets, regardless of which ones you end up in, are the variable over which you have the least direct control. Buyer behavior is very difficult to influence (I’ll touch on market education or market shaping later) - it is usually more expedient to meet people where they are and solve their immediate problems. As an agile startup looking to quickly establish fit, it is typically more efficient to match your product and its positioning to a pressing market need.
In my work with founders, I advocate for the importance of making the client the central focus - of making the market the melody and your product and sales process the harmony.
Before even thinking about your product or how you’ll sell it, just listen. Hear what prospective buyers are saying about their needs. Attune your ear to what they share about their emotional state and their motivations.
Once you have an understanding of the melody for a given market, then start to think about whether your product and how you position it can strike the right chord (see what I did there?) within that market. How can your offering enhance your buyer’s story? What can you say to prospects about your product that most complements them?
A compelling business case is about the problem you can solve and the value you can add, not about the features of your tech.
For some startups, their intellectual property is in a particular technology that solves a different problem in each of a few defined market verticals. In such a case, one might argue that it is in fact easier to keep the product fixed and make the market and sales process the variable elements.
What I’m proposing is that because markets are more of a fixed variable than your product (and especially how you position, package, and price it), the best way to evaluate potential fit in a given market is to start with a clear understanding of the market itself. From that baseline, you can assess fit without having to fully even test it; once you know a melody you can have a jam session with your team to explore if there is even a potential to harmonize with it.
Your product and sales motion harmonize the market’s melody
In music, when the right harmony is achieved by finding the notes that best complement that melody, the result is called tonal fusion. This is when three or more distinct notes are played together and our ears perceive it as one uniform sound. Blended correctly, the whole of the resulting music is more than the sum of its individual parts.
In terms of finding product-market-sales fit, tonal fusion is achieved when you are able to articulate a compelling business case to buyers. When a pressing problem meets a valuable solution that is brought to life in the right way with decision makers, that’s where the magic happens. By tuning your positioning and sales motion to the market need, your product and your salespeople lose their individual sound, fading away to just become part of the value story for the buyer.
How can a company achieve this state of harmony once they’ve identified the market’s melody?
Different harmonic notes can be built around a melody to impact the overall mood or feel of a song. In music, it is called consonance when the accompanying tones produce a more pleasant, satisfying, or upbeat sound. When the harmony instead creates a feeling of tension or contrast, this is called dissonance.
One of the reasons why I find harmony to be analogous to product-market-sales fit is because while there are certain principles regarding which combinations of notes produce more consonant or dissonant harmonies, whether a listener hears consonance or dissonance is ultimately subjective.
There are certain rules and patterns in music (i.e. major vs. minor) that generally can impact the mood of a song, just like there are strategic frameworks for marketing or selling a particular type of product or service. In spite of those patterns, studies have shown that consonance is not universal, and how a listener hears a sound is a function of their past experience. So too every buyer and every situation is unique, and we cannot reduce the complexities of finding fit in a market to a defined formula.
That being said, consonance can generally be thought of as positioning a product as a clear answer to a known problem the buyer is consciously experiencing. A person’s familiarity with certain sounds is known to be a factor in determining whether they will be perceived as consonant, and it has been shown that brain activity responds more robustly to chords with greater consonance. Aligning your product and how you package and sell it in the most familiar terms to your buyer can be a path to discovering a harmony that resonates with your buyer.
Producing a dissonant harmony might be more appropriate for a company that is either introducing something totally new and different to prospects, or one that is competing not against other products but against the inertia of the status quo. In some cases it might be useful to lean heavily into certain pain points, creating a sound that is jarring or uncomfortable to wake up buyers from their complacency and open their eyes to the value of doing things differently.
Sometimes companies with this type of offering talk about the need to do market education or market shaping. This can be an effective strategy when your messaging and how you are communicating it are attuned to the melody of the market how it is today, not how you want it to be or think it should be. Crafting campaigns to challenge how people think can help start a conversation, which then opens the door to learning about your offering, when your messaging hits a dissonant chord that is built around your buyer, not your product.
Finding product-market-sales fit as sympathetic resonance
Extending our musical metaphor further, there is also a relevant concept in acoustics called sympathetic resonance.
Objects have specific frequencies to which they are attuned by the nature of their physical properties. When something is resonant with a particular harmonic sound, it will vibrate specifically at that frequency if that sound is produced in proximity to it. This is why an opera singer can shatter a wine glass with the right note.
An object will pick out its specific resonance frequency from a whole range of sounds; it effectively filters out all other frequencies other than that with which it resonates. In other words, the right harmony, attuned specifically to a receiver, can cut through noise.
The analogy here is that when you do find the right harmony - when you are calibrating your product offering and how you sell it to the market, you can break through all the other noise out there.
Finding fit is not about being the loudest or the most persistent or the most visible, it is about finding the right frequency that resonates with your buyer.
That being said, you do need to keep the context of market size and competition in mind. Another aspect to how we perceive sound is the acoustics of a space; sounds not only resonate but can also reverberate to cause echo. If you’ve ever been in a room with an echo and a lot of people in it, you know that it can be really challenging to hear anything as all the different sounds blend into a cacophony. Yelling louder only makes it worse, sometimes a whisper in someone’s ear is actually your best bet to communicate.
The lesson here is that if you are either in a densely crowded market or competing against big entrenched players, your message needs to be simple enough to make sure it gets through and isn’t drowned out by everything else. If there are multiple options for how you might harmonize to your market, in this case the simpler and more direct, the better.
When you do finally find product-market-sales fit, and thus achieve that harmony, you know because the market vibrates back at the same frequency - your offering truly resonates with your buyers.
The hallmark signs and symptoms of finding fit - enthusiastic champions, widespread word of mouth, qualified buyers seeking you out or willing to join waitlists - all are indicative of you having struck the right chord.
Practical applications of this musical metaphor for thinking about product-market-sales fit
Tune your engineering efforts to the melody of the market.
If the market is the melody, and you’re building the product for the market, it is critical that your engineering teams are in tune with the marketplace and the buyer persona. Whether this is done through a product manager or product marketing manager who represents the voice of the customer to engineers or by having engineers join prospect calls and ask questions (or at least listen to recordings of calls), it is critical to tie the execution back to the vision of solving a problem in the market.
Harmonic chords have at least three notes - incorporating a sales motion is key to assessing fit.
One way in which founders might mistakenly think they have found fit is that they find a lot of early success selling within their network. Through connections they have or that their investors make on their behalf, founders can usually land a few early wins without going through the type of sales process that would be used for scaling.
The most direct way to establish product-market-sales fit is to incorporate considerations of the eventual sales process into strategic thinking around the design and positioning of the product or service. This is done by looking beyond the pain of the buyer and moving towards identifying a business case, thinking about the motivations of a buyer and the mechanics of how they buy (e.g. what budget(s) they pay you out of or how they get approvals).
Your packaging and pricing should be consonant with your buyer’s perception of your value.
As you are moving through the sales process, making music together with your buyer that is building to a crescendo of a signed deal, the last thing you want is to strike a dissonant chord when you reveal your pricing. Like a string snapping on an instrument or hitting a wrong key, pricing that is totally off from your buyer’s expectations can kill the whole symphony you’ve been creating.
If you have been articulating your value successfully along the way, connecting your offering to the business case, then your pricing should be on the same frequency as their budget expectations.
A new product is a whole new song.
Sometimes companies make the mistake of launching an additional product, feature, or service as if it is simply adding more notes to the harmony they’ve already discovered. Most of the time, the new product or feature solves a different problem, potentially for a different buyer, and will have a separate business case. Instead of expecting the existing sales and marketing teams to start promoting the new offering, the best path is usually to take it from the top. Listen again to the melody of the market and attune your offering and positioning of it like you did when you first launched. Once you find fit, then you can scale sales back to your existing sales team.
The Tiferet Approach
One of the translations of the Hebrew word tiferet is harmony.
Tiferet achieves unity through providing a broader context that can connect seemingly disparate elements. By zooming out and focusing on the music, different individual notes can be combined to create something more rich and beautiful than any of the individual sounds.
In my work with founders, I encourage them to articulate and frequently revisit this context for both themselves and their business. The practice of returning to our mission - whether our personal mission in life or the strategic mission of a company - provides clarity on how to resolve what might initially seem like contradictions. It also teaches us how to listen and be receptive to what this context may be for others, so that we can learn to harmonize with them.
P.S. A more personal note
You may or may not be wondering why I decided to start taking piano lessons at the same time that I started a business and had my first child (my wife certainly did).
It was actually those events that catalyzed the decision - starting a new chapter in my life provided an opportunity to reevaluate my priorities. I have always wanted to learn the piano, and I used to tell myself that it was something I would eventually do in my retirement. One of the main motivators for me in starting my business was to have more time and mental energy to devote to personal development, and one of my main goals as a father is to help my son discover his passions and pursue them. So, it seemed like the right time to practice what I preach.
I have been practicing for about 15 minutes per day, and I am not embarrassed to say that I am horrible and progressing at a glacial pace. Despite my lack of any natural talent for music, it is fun and I enjoy the stimulation that comes from learning something totally new.
I think that it is this mindset of curiosity and openness, of engaging with all the particulars of life through the lens of my mission and values, that made me notice the similarities between harmony and product-market-sales fit. My core context for my life is to experience more direct awareness of how every moment provides a unique opportunity to glimpse the infinite mystery of how all things are really just one thing. I strive to live life “in real time,” being open to discover meaning and connection everywhere, while appreciating the richness of everyday life.