Slide 1 Summary

I'm Jessica, a co-founder and CEO of Playbook. Playbook is a cloud storage designed for creative and collaborative workflows. Before this role, I worked as a product designer and founding designer for 10+ years at 3 startups and also contributed to new products at Google (Remember Google+?!). I'm here to share my experiences of building successful and not-so-successful products, as well as my personal formula for achieving product/market fit.

Slide 2 Summary

Lots of VCs or MBA programs can teach you what pre-PMF and post-PMF look like from the outsider perspective. This talk is about what it’s like to experience (or not) PMF from a company insider’s point of view.

People say it feels like the strong wind that blows in your direction. They also it’s the inflection point where everything goes up and to the right. PMF seems like it’s more clear from the outside.

As someone who’s seen startup successes and fails from the inside, well.. it’s not that clear.

The market picks up the product at seemingly random times. You think you have it, and poof, it’s gone. That happened to Google+; more recently it happened to Clubhouse. For example, there wasn’t one moment at Opendoor when I felt like, "Wow, we have it; now we can relax." Every day was a struggle to maintain, get more of it or question its existence altogether.

Slide 3 Summary

I came to realize that everything in life is grounded in basic rules. Warren Buffet who focuses on investing in companies with good fundamentals would say the same thing: there are no hacks in investing. The same is true for startups. For PLG companies, it’s even more important that founders to know this. There are growth hacks, but from what I’ve seen, they work only temporarily and only to give a growth boost, but it almost never last long without good fundamentals. Luckily what founders can control 100% is the product. But for everything else, you leave it to luck.

Slide 4 Summary

A more data-driven approach to defining PMF (that investors prefer to use) is that a startup is in a large, highly fragmented industry with a low NPS. Its product is a vertically integrated solution with a simplified value prop. It includes a built-in viral loop and generates an LTV that’s three times higher than CAC. The leadership knows how to build a strong team and infrastructure to scale and execute that at the right time to produce repeatable results.

Slide 5 Summary

It’s true that by focusing on these details, you will increase the probability of achieving PMF.

However, keep in mind that trying to achieve product/market fit too early is like a gymnast attempting to perform a triple backflip on their very first day of training. Just as the gymnast needs time to build strength, skill, and technique before attempting complex maneuvers, a product needs time to evolve and master the fundamentals of becoming a great one.

And no, throwing more people to move these metrics almost never works.

Slide 6 Summary