What To Do After Product Market Fit

Most startup founders work tirelessly to get to product-market fit. It becomes an obsession during the early years of any business. That makes founders and other startup leaders think that once they’ve achieved product-market fit the hard work is over. From there, everything will be settled and easy.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Finding product-market fit is actually just the beginning. Everything that came before it is just your company’s preamble. It’s what you do after product-market-fit that will determine your level of success and the legacy your business leaves.

After finding product-market fit, the goal is to turn that into product-market dominance. You do this by making one more big pivot. The difference is that this is a prescribed and purposeful pivot. This is an internal pivot in which your business shifts its focus from the product to creating a distribution machine, meaning sales and marketing functions.

At this point, you have something that you know fits the market. However, you now have to reach all of the customers who can use your product and benefit from it. If you can’t do that, all of the hard work getting to product-market fit will be for naught. You also have to figure out how to build that distribution machine before your competitors do or perhaps build a better one than the competitors who might be a step or two ahead of you.

In other words, after product-market-fit, the goal is figuring out how to sell at scale. That’s what’s going to turn your startup into a success. Once you’ve found product-market fit and discovered the key to selling at scale with a good distribution machine, that’s when you can raise another round and start to truly accelerate the growth of your startup. But that pivot to sales and marketing must come directly after achieving product-market fit.