it's a story All the time: A startup founder raises a lot of sweet money from VCs. Next, you must look for product-market fit. It's easy? Just put all that money into sales and marketing and they're off to the races. It's not that fast. Anyone can draw an upward growth curve by investing enough money in advertising. But the important thing is right It's a way to grow, but it's very difficult.
Matt Lerner spent 11 years in marketing at PayPal, then four years at 500 startups, so he's seen companies of all sizes struggle to find customers. In his new book, Growth Levers and How to Find Them, he makes a case for finding the right way to sell. your product.
For PayPal, the first product-market fit turned out to be eBay, which they discovered more or less by accident by closely monitoring how people were using the product.
“One day, someone noticed that 54 of the sellers had actually written 'Pay with PayPal' in their eBay listings,” he told TechCrunch+. He communicated this to the management at the time.
Initially, management's reaction was to remove those people from the system because it wasn't the focus.
“Fortunately, David Sachs came back the next day and said, 'I think we've found our market,'” Lerner said. “Instead of forcing these power sellers to write to a list and pay with PayPal, let's actually build a tool. What if we had an HTML button that they could just insert? And that actually worked. He thought, why do we have to have it inserted every time? Why not insert it automatically? That's what made PayPal successful.”
What worked for PayPal is a great example of how your startup can also start exploring the best route to market.