Which Comes First, Product Market Fit or Go To Market?

How to overcome the PMF vs GTM paradox

When testing a new business, we run into this thing that I'll call the PMF vs GTM Paradox. It goes like this:

A - LOGICALLY, you need to solve Product-Market Fit / Problem-Solution Fit (PMF) before Go To Market (GTM), because you have to actually establish that you're building the right solution for the right problem before you can take it to market.

B - However, how do you know that it's the right solution if people bounce off of receiving it? PRACTICALLY, it seems like you have to figure out how to effectively get it in front of people and get people to buy into it before you can prove whether they will use it.

So which one do you do first? Is it even possible to do just one of them first, or do they have to go hand in hand?

I have very, very strong feelings about this. Essentially, the paradox isn't real.

We can make it a lot simpler like this:

Slice off about 70% of PMF and solve that first

We do this by:

1. Realizing that the VAST MAJORITY of reasons products fail on PMF are actually solvable through manual testing with a small number of users. These are issues like basic desirablity, overall approach/angle, feature priortization, user targeting, basic adoptability, order of magnitude price point/monetization model, etc. You can get close enough for approximation purposes on these in under 20 manual tests as long as you test a lot of variations.

2. Run the test by SKIPPING PAST GTM. When you run a manual 1:1 test, you can use social expectation management and instruction to get your user past the GTM gate by situating the test in scenarios where they have already bought in, E.g. via social proof. This doesn't work when you're running anything with a big sample size because you will need uniform communication and buyin that slams right into the "we haven't solved GTM" wall. But since you're typically running something like 18-20 tests to get to 70% of PMF, you can just manually coax each user past the credibility point to test their actual behavior.

Skip to solving GTM

Remember when we said 70% PMF was good enough for “approximation purposes”?

The specific purpose it's good enough for is being able to articulate, narrate, describe, and spec your product at a level of detail that will allow you to move into true GTM testing. (Think like a really detailed PR/FAQ or a full customer-facing site with feature details.)

It may not be built or volume tested yet, but the next priority layer of validation is seeing where/how it fits in market and how salable(!!!!) to is, before we get to dialing in the details.

So now we can run all our GTM positioning / sales / etc tests and THEY ACTUALLY MATTER, because we know we're selling something that people basically want that will work. So if people bounce off of it, we know that they're bouncing off at the GTM level rather than the value prop.

Profit?

Move forward, no more paradox :)