Invalidating Your Way To Product/Market Fit

For early-stage startups, it's often easier—perhaps faster—to identify what's not working than what's 'sorta' working.

You can invalidate your way to market truth by treating your go-to-market as an experiment, testing your vision through a process of elimination — of course, assuming you're moving fast enough.

Hint: Your vision must be in the realm of market reality, as the market will never give you a vision but help you refine it.

Testing your market vision, rather than relying on informal customer conversations, is critical. The latter will never yield signal and nuance at a repeatable level. As with testing, it requires the proper setup of your conversations. It's not obvious initially, but this is more important than even holding the call. The setup determines the quality of learning.

Most people are unaware of this and don't fully understand the importance of consistency in conversation—just like it is in science.

In order to capture repeatability, founders must approach customer conversations with a well-defined structure. This means asking the same (non-leading) questions by the same lead experimenter (i.e., in the same manner) to ensure variations in responses are due to differences in perspectives rather than inconsistencies in the interview process.

The biggest challenge is that most founders test too many variables, leading to noise, confusion, and frustration. Variables can include multiple founders (i.e. experimenters), sub-segments, roles, use cases, etc. For example, if you have one customer at $10K ACV and another at $100K ACV, this indicates too many variables and that things are likely NOT repeatable — not to mention a lack of awareness of someone seeking to run two radically different go-to-markets.

It goes without saying, but never, ever, ever put a non-founder between you and your customer — another variable on top of the variables is someone else interpreting what they're hearing.

Invalidation is a critical validation component, yet many founders avoid discussing it. Embracing invalidation (i.e., actively willing to disprove oneself) helps quickly identify and eliminate, saving valuable time and resources. Yes, easier said than done, but startups are really, really hard.

Invalidation ensures you don't settle for early signs of something budding and immature but wait for clear and convincing evidence of a validated, present problem—preventing premature decisions and scaling.

Go a bit deeper here: https://www.jjellyfish.com/articles/invalidation-is-misunderstood