How to Find Product Market Fit - Stanford CS183F: Startup School
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN founders recommend it as a must-watch on recognizing real product-market fit and avoiding solutions in search of problems.
What it is
Segment co-founder and CEO Peter Reinhardt recounts how his company found product-market fit, including how a product grew out of a small feature of another. It is a lecture from Stanford's Startup School course.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2018 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec dawie · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?”
You and your team should watch this 3 times right now: [this 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!
Strong rec ed · 2024-08 · on “Superhuman built an engine to find product market fit (2018)”
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 [this video]
Recommends hhw3h · 2018-04 · on “Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?”
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. [this video]
Recommends thojest · 2020-11 · on “Twilio wraps $3.2B purchase of Segment after warp speed courtship”
For those interested in Segment, this is a talk of Peter Reinhardt about Product Market Fit and a bit of the history behind Segment. [this video] I like this talk really much.
Cites Jugurtha · 2020-06 · on “Ask HN: List of open-source business models?”
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
Cites kristiandupont · 2021-02 · on “How to Get Startup Ideas”
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: [this video]