Finding Market-Product Fit

There’s a zillion articles written about product-market fit…the idea that you can find a resonance point for your product or service in some market that allows rapid growth of your business. On a Zoom call this week, I mentioned the idea of flipping that concept to put the market first - market-product fit if you will. I got lots of head nods and sparked some good conversation, so I thought it would be worth writing some of these thoughts down to share more broadly.

I can pretty distinctly remember the first time I heard this concept. The company I worked for at the time had recently been acquired, and as a result I was in seemingly endless product strategy and roadmap meetings. In those discussions, one of the VPs stated how we were going to be more market-focused.

What do you mean market-focused??

I remember initially being pretty put off on this idea. I of course believed that we were already market focused! After all we spent tons of time thinking about who the buyer was for our solution, how it would be used by the customer, and the value that we brought them. At the time I was more focused on R&D than marketing and I was proud of the innovative products that we had built. From my perspective, our products were awesome, and selling well to the customers we were targeting. What could be more market-focused than that?

But as I quickly learned, there was a subtle but profound difference. Our approach, common in R&D-driven organizations, was “product-first.” We had built an innovative piece of technology with some knowledge of the market need, and then gone out to find a market for it. This can and does work, especially in the early days of a product’s lifecycle, but it often has a ceiling. We were effectively defining our market as “people who will buy our existing product,” which limited our field of vision.

The “market-first” approach we moved to was different. It meant starting with a strong vision for a specific market, not a product. It involved deeply understanding a specific customer segment, their workflow, and their entire ecosystem. Once that was clear, we could work to identify the real needs, pain points, and gaps in that market. With that problem-space clearly defined, we had plenty of smart folks who could find ways to fill those gaps with innovative products. Market-product fit.

Shifting your mindset

This is a mindset shift that many smaller technology-led companies have to make. I’ve lived through at least one, and feel that I learned a lot as a result.

Startups are often born from a technical innovation - a clever algorithm, a novel scientific discovery, or a brilliant piece of code. The founders are, by nature, product-focused. They’ve built a “better mousetrap” and are now looking for the mice. The challenge arises when they try to scale beyond that initial niche. They risk trying to force their product onto a market that doesn’t really want it, or that can’t be sold to profitably.

My understanding of this approach was also influenced by this excellent article by Edward Ford. In the article, Edward discusses important decisions regarding the market SaaS companies can choose to serve and the impact that should have on your business model, pricing, and ultimately the product itself.

The market you choose dictates everything. It’s not just the product features, but the entire go-to-market motion.

• Want to sell to Small Businesses (SMBs)? That market demands a low-friction, self-service GTM motion. This means your product must be simple, low-cost, and easy to discover and adopt without a salesperson.

• Want to sell to Enterprise? That market requires a product that can handle complexity, compliance, and customization. It also dictates (and justifies) a high-touch, expensive, and long sales cycle.

You can’t successfully bolt an enterprise sales model onto a product built for SMBs, and vice-versa. As Edward’s article implies, you must start with an understanding of where you want to be selling and then build a GTM strategy and a product that fit that plan. The same applies for the street market in the photo above - if you’re not selling fish in the Jagalchi fish market, you’re likely going to have a hard time attracting and maintaining attention on whatever it is you ARE selling.

This flip from “Product-Market” to “Market-Product” isn’t just a semantic game. It’s a fundamental shift in strategy. It moves the core question from “How do we find customers for our product?” to “What product does our chosen market need?” For a technology-led company, that can be a difficult shift, but it’s often the one that unlocks scalable, sustainable growth.