Alex Beck

Finding Product-Market Fit: Lessons From Doing the Hard Way ( My Skull vs Concrete)​

"Product/market fit occurs when you feel like you're strapped to a rocket. Not because you landed a $15K pilot, not because 50 people told you your idea is great, and definitely not because a company said they would pay $1,000 (but meant $100, yep these all actually happened, to add to it that stakeholder left, so remember who you interview and sell to and what happens if they leave really matters). PMF isn't revenue, even bad products or services can make money.

It's repeat usage. Retention. Pull from the market, not push. Not customer acquisition costs that's more than Life time value.

How do I know?

• I’ve chased vanity signals, people want to be nice, they’ll tell you they’d use it. They lie.
• I’ve burned months building features that I wanted to believe were painkillers, but were vitamins and or the unit economics didn’t work, thinking I could brute-force my way to product/market fit.

This post is what I wish I'd read earlier. A no-BS guide to product market fit stages, lean product development, and the frameworks that actually help you get traction.

What is a Product Strategy Framework?​

A product strategy framework is a structured approach to planning, developing, and launching products that will actually sell. It's basically the roadmap that gets you from cool idea moment to actually making something for your customers and they actually love it (which usually means pay.)

Now this is mostly aimed at creating Product Strategy Framework's and not finding Product Market Fit or Problem Solution Fit, you should of course you should you apply a very similar rubric to new product too. Which in it's most basic form is:

• Who is this product for? (your target market or user personas)?
• What problem are we solving and what value will the product offer?
• Why will users care (what's our unique value proposition or differentiator)?
• How will we succeed?
• When and in what order will we roll things out (major milestones or phases, a.k.a. your product roadmap)?

And it should go without saying talking too 100s of clients, customers, users and finding common problems is always always always the way to start this.

Think of the product strategy framework as the bridge between your product vision and your execution strat like the product roadmap and development sprints. It's not about listing every feature you'll ever build; it's about setting guardrails/KPIs and context. This way, even when your team is busy building and iterating, they understand the context and ultimate goal. This differs from a public product roadmap in it's much more inclusive and covers off internal private things, ideas, more precise timelines, team planning, asset allocations but still high level.

Tl:dr A product strategy framework is essentially a structured approach to defining what you're building, why you're building it, who it's for, and how you'll make it successful. It's the high-level plan that connects your product vision to the nitty-gritty of development and go-to-market execution.

Source

What is an LMS​

An LMS, which stands for Learning Management System, is basically a digital hub where people can create, share, and track learning or training materials.

Think of it as an online classroom or training center. It's used by anyone from large uni's to smaller coaches, one person coaching businesses, online trainers, personal trainers, and nearly anyone sharing learning content or resources with their clients and students. LMS's can also be used just by you to manage your class, be it in person or digital.

Core Uses:

• Makes Learning Easy to Organise: You can build courses, upload videos, add quizzes, and organize everything in one place.
• Delivers Content Online: Learners can log in from anywhere on their computer or phone to access lessons, watch videos, or take tests.
• Track Student Progress: The system keeps tabs on who’s completed what, how everyone is doing in for example; quizzes, and even sends reminders if someone falls behind.
• Communciations: Many LMSs have forums, chat, or messaging so students and instructors can ask questions, share ideas, or work together.

Best Free LMS for Small Business​

Some of the best LMS's that are free, are open source. Unfortunately, with everything in this life, free doesn't always mean free. Whilst the software itself is free, the cost to implement these open sources platforms can come in hosting costs, development or configuration. They're great if you have a very large course and need a lot of flexibility and configurability. As one Redditer puts it:

"..real LMS systems are expensive to implement, tough to get right and require the dedication of a development and support team to help you get the most from your learning platform investment.There are plenty of free-ish options (WordPress. Moodle, etc.) but you trade off spending money for spending time configuring and managing the solution. You shift the cost from an LMS license fee to server hosting fees, sys admin costs, plugin fees, etc."

That said if you're looking for a low cost, low time/stress LMS for your small business. The best bet is via WordPress which will cost you a domain and hosting anywhere from $15+ a month.) using a Plugin like LifterLMS or LearnDash

Ever wondered why some tech companies nail product development while others leave their users guessing? You can find some answers in, which companies publicly broadcast their roadmaps, which is a pretty effective marketing tool as well as one that actually helps product direction, feedback and engagement. It’s also crucial for building trust with users and bringing them along for the journey.

However, it can be a double edged sword, too much information will likely, from my experience, not be the best for your developers. If you announce features with a strict deadline, all you’re doing to do is overpromise and underdeliver.

Even small firms can benefit from a public roadmap (something I’ll go into greater depth in our next blog post) but start High level and engage your users to actually help you prioritise. Things like a feature leader board, can you help engagement but you needn’t commit to all, and also help you start conversations.

What is a Public Product Roadmap?​

A public product roadmap can serve as a strategic communication tool that publicly outlines your product plans. It’s almost always a visual representation reveals what a company is currently working on, recent releases, and their general product strategy—which anyone can freely view.

Benefits of Public Roadmaps​

Best Tools for Small Business: The Basics​

To get started you’re most likely going to need an email address, I probably don’t need to elaborate on why, but very quickly email is where you’ll deal with nearly all of your suppliers, customer sand pretty much all other communications. For email there are a few free options:

Proton Mail - Security and privacy focused.

Proton Mail is a Swiss email provider focused on privacy and security, they claim, unlike other providers, they don’t scan your emails to build a profile of you which others sell to marketers. They also provide end to end encryption, so only you can see your emails. They state they cannot view the contents of your emails or attachments. The downside of the free plan, is you can’t use a custom domain. So you’ll end up with an email @proton. Proton in my opinion is one of the best apps for small business, it’s as easy as Google to use and it’s nice to know your data is more protected.

What is a Dashboard?​

When referring to a dashboard in software world, it is the command centre of your business. Much like a car dashboard, you see the key things speed, revs, miles travelled, oil temperature and any red flags. Unlike a car’s dashboard, you get to decide what you’re tracking. Is your north star only number of customers? Or do you need to track hot inventory and adapt your store as trends shift? A dashboard allows you to have an overview of your business without sifting through lots of data, spreadsheets or sales data.

Your dashboard is the key thing you need to know about your business on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Running software businesses today can get complex quickly, especially because we all rely on multiple software tools to run them. Personally I'm using Gmail, GCal, Stripe, Slack, Notion, Jira, Figma, Matomo, GA, Cloudflare and AWS and the team at EchoDash use many more. We've spoken to developers and business owners that use as many as 30+ tools to manage their businesses and projects.

It's a lot of pings, alerts, notifications and emails to keep track of everything going on. That's exactly why Jack (of WP Fusion) founded EchoDash. He was spending hours a week jumping between open tabs to check all the different software tools he was using to run WP Fusion. All this happens across multiple software providers, so it's a lot of work to understand what's going on. Did some one leave a ticket or a review? Are there any payment failures or churn? Did someone abandon a cart? Is there a PHP error or another error that has your site performance flagging or worst down?