Developing products for customers to stick to🕶

Building a product-market fit is only the beginning. The real challenge is to cross the "Product-Company gap" - the transition from a successful product to a sustainable business with strong market access mechanisms. This requires founders to design a Business Model, pricing, and distribution strategy to be embedded in the product in the first place.

1.Going beyond PMF: the product-company gap

Product-Market Fit confirms that there are customers who want to use your product but do not guarantee the sustainability of the company. To cross the Product-Company gap, you need to understand the differences in economics:

Turning point in economics: At the beginning, the main expenditure was product development (R & D), but as the company grew, the model would turn around to marketing and sales, which had a clearly higher proportion of R & D expenses (i.e. the 40-20-20 rule that 40% of revenue was allocated to sales and marketing).

Lessons from failure: Companies like Padiant fail because, despite their good technology, they underestimate the complexity of installations in large businesses, which makes it impossible to scale up.

Lessons from Success: YouTube has great products, but it needs to be acquired by Google to provide the missing monetization model, allowing the platform to grow into a huge company.

2.Design for market entry (Go-to-Market Fit)

Bridging the Product-Company gap must start by embedding sales strategies into product design from the beginning.

Minimum Viable Segment (MVS): Instead of creating feature-filled products for a broad market, the most effective strategy is to find the smallest and most specific initial customer group (MVS) to meet their acute needs in a repeatable way. Focusing on a small group will allow businesses to prove value and build repeatable models before expanding.

Verification: Identifying the correct MVS requires talking to 200 leads before they start writing code, to understand their most important "pain," and willingness to pay.

3. "☀" mindset frame: Create products for smooth use.

The <--plhd--11/> framework is an approach to product design that is easy to distribute and apply, consistent with the product-led growth principle:

S - Simple to Install and Use (easy to install and use): Simplicity is the key competitive advantage. Initial experience (Onboarding) must be seamless.

L - Low to No Initial Cost (Low Initial Cost): Offer Free Trial, or Fremium to Reduce Initial Financial Barriers

I - Instant and Ongoing Value (Instant and Continuous Value): Products must express value quickly to overcome customer inertia in transitioning from legacy solutions.

P - Plays Well in the Ecosystem (with Ecosystem): Design products to integrate with other tools or build strategic alliances to leverage their large customer base (e.g., Clavio sealed with Shopify).

4. Strategic decisions of the founders

Tiered pricing: Using multi-level pricing is a highly effective strategy to create an easily accessible entry point (Land) and increase revenue from existing customers as their demand grows (Expand).

VC vs. Lifestyle Choice: Founders must carefully decide whether they want to create a fast-growing "Performance Business" to divest themselves (Venture Scale) or a profitable "Lifestyle Business" and provide personal freedom. This choice determines the entire financial structure and strategy of the company.

Building a sustainable company is a long journey beyond just creating great products, but rather creating a business architecture that can scale up and is ready to pay the "price" of sales and marketing when the time comes.

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