
Fundamentals of Product-Market Fit - SparksZilla
https://www.holloway.com/s/rvc-fundamentals-of-product-market-fit
======
Jun8
Wow, the two founders started awesome guides that I consulted in the past,
from
[https://www.holloway.com/about?section=story](https://www.holloway.com/about?section=story):

\- Josh Levy: _The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services (AWS)_
([https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws/](https://github.com/open-guides/og-
aws/)) and _The Art of the Command Line_ ([https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-
of-command-line](https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line))

\- Andy Sparks: _Everything You Should Know About CRISPR—And Where to Learn
More_ ([https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-primer-on-crispr-and-
how-...](https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-primer-on-crispr-and-how-to-learn-
more-c1b4ca7159f6))

~~~
SparksZilla
Aw thank you! We're glad you found them helpful.

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modi15
There is no such thing as a Product-Market Fit. The article is at best
marginally useful in thinking about your startup and at worst will take you on
a tangent of intellectual mastrubation which can be a completely misguide you
on how to think about your startup.

Startups exist in a complex ecosystem of competing forces. This ecosystem
changes all the time. Your product and the market are only two of the multiple
factors that could influence your startup. Even then, what constitutes your
product and how you define your market will also change throughout the course
of your startup.

The ideas behind 'product-market' reduce this complexity into an intellectual
exercise whose premise that product should fit market for success to happen is
too simplistic and inaccurate. Assuming the product-market fit theory and
extrapolating to corollary's and model's the kind this article portrays is
great for an MBA classroom workshop but little else outside.

~~~
luminati
PMF is nothing but a framework, a mental model, a bunch of heuristics rather
than a magic bullet.

Yes, the ecosystem is constantly changing - but at any given moment in time,
you have a specific product targeting a specific market. PMF is a framework to
see if you're delivering on your promise to that market in that specific point
in time. The corollary to PMF is that the market you've picked is big enough
and/or growing.

PMF is not going to save you from external forces (the arrival of the internet
in yesteryears or in more contemporary times, the SaaS-ification of
everything) happening and neither does it claim to be. That would be an entire
different topic ("Innovators Dilemma" \- but even then you need to have PMF in
the first place to even have that dilemma ;)

~~~
modi15
The fundamental premise of the framework is that PMF is a discrete event and
the journey of a company can be thought of as pre PMF and post PMF. The
reality is that most founders will be unable to articulate when and if PMF has
been achieved.

A journey of a startup to scale is better categorized as a continuous series
of PMF points where the product evolves to target a continuously changing
perception of the target market in the eyes of the founders.

Obsessing over PMF as a fundamental metric will limit founders from exploring
the true complexity of the ecosystem in which a startup operates in and can
often be a stumbling block in optimising for their subjective outcomes.

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Ozzie_osman
Excited to see this new form of content from Holloway!

If you haven't seen some of their past content you should check out their
(free) guide to Equity Compensation: [https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-
compensation](https://www.holloway.com/g/equity-compensation)

Disclaimer: I'm working with Holloway on a future guide (to Technical Hiring
and Recruiting).

~~~
dpods
Just took a look at some of their other stuff. Looks like it's high quality
and well researched.

Just curious...how did you start working with Holloway? Did you reach out to
them or did they find you?

~~~
Ozzie_osman
I've known the Holloway team almost since inception, and knew Josh (one of the
cofounders) from before that. I had originally cold reached out to him on
LinkedIn after I read some stuff he had written on Quora (where I was working
at the time), and we got coffee a few times and became friends.

I've been a huge fan of what they're trying to do. It's also a really strong
team—they're polymaths in some sort. They had wanted to write about hiring and
recruiting (and in fact had already started having conversations about it with
some really credible folk), and at some point we just decided I'd help out (I
had written some stuff on Quora and Medium but never worked on something of
this magnitude).

Anyway that's probably more detail than you wanted :) I'd say reach out from
their website (or by emailing contributing@h..y.com), they're pretty
approachable (Andy is in these threads too).

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jfals82
I'm getting a deceptive site warning from Chrome. Has the link been
compromised?

------
kine
This is phenomenal.

~~~
SparksZilla
Thanks! Everything we publish at Holloway is built to be improved over time,
so let us know if there's anything we missed so we can make this as helpful of
a resource as possible!

~~~
tschwimmer
What's the revenue model? You guys deserve to be compensated (richly) for the
content; it's awesome. I'm just wondering how you folks make money.

~~~
SparksZilla
What a lovely question. Top of mind for us, too. Our first Guide, on Equity
Compensation, is entirely free. Think of it like our public sandbox. For now,
we're thinking all future Guides will be available for purchase (one-time
payment and you get digital access + updates). The first Guide we'll launch
for purchase is The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital
([https://www.holloway.com/g/venture-
capital/about](https://www.holloway.com/g/venture-capital/about)), which we're
hoping to have out in June. This post is an excerpt from that.

We'll also be posting more on our blog, like this post, to build up awareness
of what we're up to. Our policy internally is that if we're going to post
content to promote one of our products, though, it needs to be helpful to
readers on its own. It can't just be content marketing junk to get you to
click.

So, fingers crossed. We're making a bet on people being willing to pay for
what we're creating!

~~~
luminati
You guys certainly have product market fit for the free articles (atleast
using HN as a proxy) :)

Curious to see if the same reception is there for the paid content, especially
given that the topics you cover have a lot of free articles and videos (e.g.:
YC has an entire library of it).

Good luck!

