The Path Towards Product-Market Fit

The path toward product-market fit remains elusive and windy as ever for startups. In recent months, this challenging climb for founders has gotten even steeper with an unforgiving financial market -- making capital more scarce -- and the powerful disruptive force of generative AI.

I had the opportunity to speak to the recent MassChallenge Israel cohort about applying the scientific method to finding product market fit -- something I love doing every year as these founders are sophisticated about the work, wildly ambitious, and passionate about the impact they believe their startup can have on the world.

Below are the slides from the presentation. Much of this work is derived from my popular Harvard Business School course, Launching Tech Ventures, which is now available as an online course, and further informed by our seed investing work at Flybridge. In it, I cover concepts such as:

• The diamond-square startup business model framework
• How to design and sequence startup experiments
• What consumer value prop experiments to run
• The 40% rule
• The sales learning curve
• How to calculate startup unit economics
• The key metrics that point to product-market fit

I welcome any and all comments!