The first step to product-market fit

It was 2006. We pushed our product to production for the world to see, and world returned with: crickets. So we did the next sensible growth hack — we emailed our friends and family and then asked to them to email their friends and family.

A few days went by, crickets. We were barely growing. We began to double down on marketing, finding a head of marketing to help us scour blogs to run constests as well as other ways to reach potential audiences. Still weeks went by — crickets.

We then went back and iterated on the product. We probably did 3 different product directions but all in the same space — each one feeling more lackluster than the next.

Suffice to say we did not have product-market fit. In fact product and market began to feel like the north and south poles of a magnet — in constant repulsion of each other.

When it came time to assess if we wanted to continue down this route, Facebook had launched its Developer Platform in May 2007. For those who were not around, this was a birth of many new companies: Slide, Zynga, RockYou, etc.. — and a birth of a whole new era.When we got feedback from the board about our possible new direction of going onto Facebook, she said:

Yes, go where the users are!

There were many reasons for the failure of our first product (and company) launch. The bottom line is:

We didn’t build something people wanted.

Looking closer, why we didn’t do this is not only because it is hard, but also because we approached product and market as two separate entities that worked in serially and sometimes against one another:

When something was wrong we looked at it this way:

But we should have looked at it this way from the beginning:

If you think product > market you end up with Google Glass. Well conceived product but no clear reason for me and many others to want it. If you think that market > product then you end of up with many startups that you never heard of that died on the vine thinking they could just spend their way into traction or use pure marketing buzz for traction like Color or Clinkle — Either way it is failure.