Not achieving product-market fit can significantly affect both your morale and that of your team.
And because you don’t have results, you’re more confused than ever. Your team sees that and suffers from that as well. You’re becoming burned out.
And I get, it’s tough, but the reality is the solution is not to improve your product. It’s improving your product presentation and how you position your product.
What’s your message to the customer? What do the customers like? What are the jobs that the customers need to do?
What are the needs that they have and problems that they want solved?
Not getting sales is not a sales problem
A lot of founders see that they have a marketing problem or that they have a sales problem because the bottom line is suffering, right?
We don’t get enough sales, so it must be a sales problem, but in reality, it’s not.
If you have something that hits you sort of all across the board, if you can’t acquire, if you can’t convert, if your customers don’t understand what you do, or if they compare you to the wrong competition then improving the product, cutting the marketing budget, hiring a salesperson won’t do you any good.
All of these approaches are wrong.
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Why?
Because marketing and sales are just amplifiers, right?
You’re amplifying your core, your core being the positioning, the messaging. We have a message for our target audience.
With marketing, we wanna spread this message, virally, hopefully.
We have this pitch for our target customers with more salespeople.
We want to spread this message to the right target audience.
And if your message is wrong, you’re just spreading the wrong thing.
So the better solution is not to cut the marketing budget or hire another salesperson.
The better solution is to check your positioning and check your messaging.
To achieve product-market fit, you need your foundations
What kind of context does the user get when they get in touch with your product? Does the product fit their needs? Does it solve their problems? Are they even aware of their needs and problems?
And if you want to do that, here is a quick tip. Get five people who don’t know your product. Ask them to get more information. They have five minutes. Give them your product or the landing page or whatever.
Give them five minutes and then ask them questions like, how will they describe your product? Is that what you wanted to convey? Is what they answer, what you wanted to say or wanted to show about your product?
Because if it isn’t, then you’re just giving out the wrong context. If a person can’t go to your website and in 50 seconds knows exactly what kind of problem they’ll solve, then your messaging is off. Your position is off.
When your marketing isn’t working, when you know your click-through rates are too low, when your conversion rates are too low, when your sales numbers are poor, when you can’t acquire or convert users, instead of improving the product, instead of hiring another salesperson figure out your market fit component.
We did exactly this at my last startup, Kobi. We repositioned the product. We just changed the context.
We presented ourselves as a mobile app that helps dyslexic children learn to read.
And we changed that to an electronic reader that helps dyslexic children learn to read.
And our cost of user acquisition went down by 52%.
Why?
Because if you say to a mother with a dyslexic kid: “Hey, this is a mobile app that’s gonna teach your kid to read” they’re gonna come in expecting this is a sort of gamified mobile app, a game that will sort of teach their kids to read.
Whereas in reality, our mobile app was an e-reader, so they weren’t prepared for what they were getting.
And so they turned away after the first five minutes because they had to put in a lot more effort than they were expecting.
When we changed that to an electronic reader, that helps your kid learn to read, the expectation was what they got. And so they were happy to stay.
If you need help with repositioning, schedule a call with me.
If you want to DIY your positioning, here are the steps you need to take.
If you’d like to download a product-market fit checklist, 86 questions to determine your P-MF, click here.
