It is perennial Question for early stage startups: How does one find the right product to market (PMF)? What do you do to ensure that your idea takes a form that meets some kind of demand in your target market? How do you get an echo of your idea in the world?
At a TechCrunch early stage event two weeks ago in Boston, David Thacker, General Partner at Greylock, advised startups to keep it simple: Focus, Tune and Adapt.
The definition of the popular crowd is, for the most part, subjective, but Thacker is looking for something more concrete.
“It does not mean that you launched a product and expanded it to millions of customers and users,” he said. “What I’m looking for is some similarity in that what I’ve built resonates with a group of clients.”
This metric may vary by stage, but Series A and beyond are when it becomes necessary for the company to have a PMF. At that point, Thacker said, investors want to see moderate scope for consumer use, and since the company is eyeing a Series B round two, you’d better start thinking about total addressable market size (TAM) and where your product is in relation to it. .
“You may have found a niche product market for that audience, but how big is that audience? How profitable is that when it’s expanded? These are the things we start to think about,” he said, urging the founders to define their company’s PMF on a metric that aligns with the company’s values.