Building a business is a bit like driving a car. You don’t just look at the speedometer all the time – there is a ton of other stuff to focus on. It’s an analogy I often share with founders when trying to explain why having tunnel vision on product-market fit can spell disaster for their startup.
At BVR (later Intelysis Electronic Commerce Inc), my pre-sales role involved the 1996 launch of the world’s first web-based e-procurement system, done in partnership with Barclaycard and Chase Manhattan.
We got caught up in building tech and crazy product ideas but worst of all, we thought we knew our customers better than they knew themselves.
Our customers just wanted paperless catalogs, to procure online, and cut down on manpower and faster transactions. But we kept adding features until one day… nobody was quite sure what we sold anymore. We became so obsessed with finding product-market fit that we thought we knew what customers wanted.
It was too late before we realised we might have strayed a bit far from our core offering and the chance of a billion-dollar company.
Our competitor came straight in with a simpler offer and swept up our clients. That competitor got the multi-billion-dollar IPO. That’s the danger of product-market fit tunnel vision – it blinds you to what the market actually wants.
I learned this lesson the hard way a few times, which is why UK startups urgently need to hear it. It’s not a lack of ideas killing us, it’s overthinking them.
Remember Karhoo? No? Neither do their would-be customers, who just wanted cheap taxis as fast as getting an Uber. I remember meeting the business in 2015 and them showing me ‘what their customers want’. You would have thought their customers were booking flights, hotel, dinner and more when you saw the product list of ‘must haves’.
Always question why you started in the first place. BVR solved a major pain point early on – that should have been our NASDAQ IPO, not just the launchpad for endless additions and inflamed egos. E-fundamentals, which was later sold to CommerceIQ, even got it wrong at one point during an eight-year journey.
But the company’s eight fundamentals stayed with us from start to finish, even when we got carried away. This isn’t about ignoring feedback, it’s about being hypothesis-driven and adaptable:
- ‘Fail forward’ iterations: Log every product change against clear metrics. Did it boost adoption? Does lack of X feature really block sales, or is it just noise?
- Define pain tolerance: 15% churn at launch stage might be the price of rapid growth. Know your danger zones for every core metric.
- Pivot readiness: Spend time mapping out how your minimum viable offering could shift value propositions quickly – a feature becomes a standalone product, etc.
- How wide am I looking: Look beyond the product for customer experience.
- Play devil’s advocate: Challenge yourself and your team on assumptions made. What if my competitor built the product tomorrow? And what if some of our technology has the risk of becoming obsolete?
Customers might surprise you with their patience when the underlying solution is rock-solid. They’ll tolerate bugs or clunky UI if it saves them time or hassle. Yes, you may have your account managers coming back to base saying all these features are needed.
In reality, though, customers are happy if they see a roadmap promising that their feature will happen. Another thought is get them to pay for it. The real trust killer is when you become so enamoured with your own tech specs, you lose sight of the customer’s core needs.
But my biggest advice to any founder out there would be to speak to your customers. Walk a day in their shoes. Understand them – the good, and the bad.
Find out what challenges they have in the next 12 months that your product might fix.
Have some patience to watch a product evolve. Many founders are in a rush due to revenue or shareholder pressure, not usually the customer applying pressure. I understand I’m risking stating the obvious here, but I’ll say it anyway: Rome wasn’t built in a day.
David Murray-Hundley is the CEO and co-founder of Pario Ventures.
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