Stage 6:
Product Market Fit
Congratulations on launching your new business!
While it's been a lot of work getting here, now the work begins to make your business successful. You will need to align your business ever more closely with your customers' needs.
Adopting an iterative approach will enable you to adapt your business to respond to customer expectations. Over time, this will make it more effective and more profitable.
Purpose
Match your business to your customers' expectations.
Steps
-
Refine your understanding of customer needs.
-
Improve business processes and collateral.
-
Improve sales volume and quality.
-
Improve the balance of income against cost.
-
Gradually develop from startup to fully-fledged business.
Target
Your business adapts and grows.
Product-Market Fit
Before you launched your business, you created a forecast of what your first year cashflow would be. To make that forecast, you made a lot of assumptions about things like sales, stock levels, marketing spend, employees, costs etc.
​​
Similarly, adapting a startup to customers' expectations requires you to make plans based on assumptions. You'll can then test your assumptions in a conscious, measured way. This is the core of the Lean Startup method. Adopting this method will enable you to get ever better at fitting your business and its products to your market.
You'll adjust your plans based on the evidence you've gathered from your experiments.
​
You'll be adopting a scientific method to improve your business:
-
Hypothesize.
-
Create an experiment to prove or disprove your hypothesis and assumptions.
-
Execute your experiment and collect date.
-
Review your results.
-
Adjust your business.
-
Go back to hypothesize.
​​
Develop plans that cycle annually, quarterly, monthly and per experiment.
Experimentation results will alter your plans, mostly resulting in minor tweaks to your business operation. Occasionally, results will make you think again about your monthly, quarterly or annual plans. Some results may be so unexpected that you change your whole business vision; this is known as a business pivot!
​
The key to success in business, is flexibility in adapting to what your customers want. Repeated application of this learning process is a way of being responsive to, and learning about, your customers' needs.
