Product Market Fix

$3K MRR two months after launch, $6K projected this month. But here's the real insight: validating hundreds of other startups taught us that success follows predictable patterns. Most founders just don't know what to look for.

Most startups fail
Everyone knows most startups fail, but knowing something and internalizing it are very different. Once you genuinely accept failure as the default outcome, your mindset changes. You become obsessed with shifting the odds.

Think of startups like baseball. Nobody hits perfectly. You win by taking many swings. Luckily, with startups you don’t have just three strikes. You get unlimited swings.

The real question: How many swings are you taking?

Pick your market carefully before you swing

In startups, you get to pick your pitcher. The pitcher represents your market.

Some markets throw fastballs at 97 mph. They're crowded, competitive, and extremely hard to win.

Other markets throw easy pitches straight down the middle. They're underserved, clearly defined, and convert customers easily.

Yet most founders don't intentionally choose their pitcher. They pick a problem they like, build something interesting, and wonder why no one buys. They're stuck converting just 0.1% of visitors instead of easily converting 10% elsewhere. That's the difference between needing 100,000 visitors and just 1,000 for the same number of customers.

That's a 100x difference in efficiency.

Smart founders carefully pick markets that make success easier from day one.

Quickly test multiple angles to find your winning pitch

Traditional methods (surveys, interviews, focus groups) are slow, expensive, and biased. People tell you what you want to hear. You get false positives and waste months.

Instead, rapidly test different angles with real audiences using landing pages and ads. Try out:

• Your original idea

• A new target audience

• Different messaging

• A different outcome or benefit

As April Dunford explains in Obviously Awesome, the same exact product can succeed or fail entirely based on positioning. A cake pop can be sold as a premium dessert, a casual snack, or party decoration. Each angle attracts a completely different customer.

Most founders test one angle, get poor results, and give up. But sometimes changing your angle can instantly unlock 10x better results.

Scale only after finding your winning angle

Once you've validated demand, scaling becomes straightforward. You're no longer guessing. Instead, you're serving people who already raised their hands and told you exactly what they want.

Now you're executing on a validated idea. You've chosen your pitcher, tested enough angles, and you're hitting consistently. It's time to run the bases.

The difference is simple. You're no longer guessing. You know exactly what's coming next.

Coming from Big Tech where I'd worked on products reaching hundreds of millions of users, I was confident I could launch successfully on my own. I was wrong. Twice.

In my early days as an engineer, I built a golf scorecard tracker capable of handling complex scoring like skins and match play, even managing multiple foursomes in low- or no-service situations. Everyone thought it was cool, but nobody paid for it. I launched it to complete silence.

Next, I created AutoPiilot, a technically impressive privacy solution. With just two lines of code integrated into an existing app, it ensured private data couldn't be accessed beyond permissible uses, perfect for GDPR compliance. But when I talked to customers after building it, I learned some critical lessons:

• Economics drive decisions: Customers weren't as interested in genuine privacy solutions as they were in limiting legal liability.

• Audience mismatch: The engineers who found the tech impressive weren't the decision-makers. Lawyers and chief compliance officers, who are driven by checklists and liability mitigation, ultimately controlled purchasing decisions.

AutoPiilot became more of a proof of concept than a viable business.

These cycles were exhausting.

For my next idea, I inverted the process entirely. I built PMFix, initially as a personal tool, to automate validation: instantly generating landing pages and ads, with built-in algorithms spotting genuine traction signals.

I ran PMFix's own idea through its validation process. The results were clear: immediate traction. On day one of our launch, PMFix had hundreds of signups and actual revenue.

Here's what I learned:

• Big tech vs. startups: Big tech companies can afford to throw countless engineering hours at speculative bets. Startup founders can't. You must validate quickly and cheaply.

1. Validate first, code later. No exceptions.

2. Cool ≠ revenue. There's a huge gap between "That's interesting" and "Take my money."

3. Raise your standards. As an engineer, your time is valuable. Never write a line of code until there's real traction.

4. MVT (Minimum Viable Test) > MVP. Prove willingness to pay before writing real code.

5. Warm launches beat cold launches. Having a waitlist of engaged users ready from day one provides invaluable rapport and early feedback.

Hope this helps someone avoid the pitfalls I fell into. Happy to answer any questions! Feel free to ask about my experiences scaling products at Big Tech too!