Having potentialities indulge in the product is candy phase of product-market fit
Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding accomplice at Floodgate, a seed-stage VC company. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas Listing and the Unique York Instances Top 20 Challenge Capitalists Worldwide, she earned a PhD in math modeling of cybersecurity at Stanford University.
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Hi, I’m Ann.
I was one in every of the first traders in Lyft, Refinery29 and Xamarin. I’ve been on the Midas Listing for the past three years and was lately named on The Unique York Instances’ record of The Top 20 Challenge Capitalists. In 2008, I co-founded Floodgate, one in every of the first seed-stage VC funds in Silicon Valley. Now not like most funds, we make investments exclusively in seed, making us consultants find product-market fit and building a minimal viable company. Seed is basically diversified from later stages, so we’ve made it bigger than a specialty: It’s all we sort. Every of our partners sees hundreds of corporations every year forward of electing to make investments in supreme the head three or four.
For the past 11 years, I’ve invested on the inception phase of startups. We’ve considered startups plug wildly factual (Lyft, Refinery29, Twitch, Xamarin) and wildly unfriendly. When I replicate on the mess ups, the root motive inevitably stems from misconceptions round the personality of product-market fit.
The magic of product-market fit
Most successful entrepreneurs and VCs agree that product-market fit is the defining quality of an early-stage startup. Attending to product-market fit allows you to be triumphant even while you aren’t optimized on diversified fronts.
Most entrepreneurs conceptualize product-market fit as the point the assign some subset of customers indulge in their product’s parts. At Floodgate, we forensically analyzed corporations that died and concluded this conceptualization is unfriendly. Many failing corporations had parts that potentialities loved. A majority of these corporations even had just a few loved parts! We figured out that having potentialities indulge in the product is merely a phase of product-market fit, no longer your complete thing. This raises the ask: What had been they lacking?
