Series Growth Hacker? Marketing your app is not an extra task 2/6

Product market fit

The very first step to achieve in growth hacking marketing is ‘Product market fit’. It is where the foundation of your app or mobile service repose. To better understand what is ‘Product market fit’ and how you can achieve it, we go back to our dialog between the ‘The old way’ and ‘The new way’ of doing marketing. Let’s see what they have to tell us about it!
Product market fit Marketing your app is not an extra task - series 2/6

The talk-show

MobileThinking: “Dear friends welcome back to the MobileThinking growth hacking debate. Today's topic is ‘Product market fit’. Let’s discuss it with our guests: ‘The old way’ and ‘The new way’. What is your point of view on ‘Product market fit’?

The old way’: “Let me start please!”

MobileThinking: “Yes, go ahead ‘The old way’...

The old way’: “For me ‘Product market fit’ is all about feelings. You know, this feeling you have that you are going to rock it no matter what and you are certainly right to score big. The idea is so good that it can only work, this is for me the best definition of ‘Product market fit’. My product is good because I simply know it, because my way is the only and right way. For example, look at Apple with their first iPhone. People were not even aware that they needed a big touch screen phone. And they made billions on with it. Steve Jobs had the right feeling!”

The new way’: “Well, this is a one in a million success story. Unfortunately, there are plenty of products and companies that failed following this approach. Achieving ‘Product market fit’ means iterating your idea with the help of your target customers, not simply assume that what they need and like is what you think that is best for them. You need to figure out who they are and what their needs are to create the perfect product. Yes, it is about feelings, but as Ryan Holiday says: ‘feeling backed with data and information’. There are some tools to achieve ‘Product market fit’ without the need of investing too many resources as money and time. For example, landing pages, FAQ, apps mockups, user studies, and always questioning every assumption. MobileThinking can you explain to the people watching us what you do in the context of mobile apps and services to achieve product market fit?”

MobileThinking: “Thanks ‘The new way’, well said! In our opinion, taking care of ‘Product market fit’ from day one is the KEY to succeed in your endeavor. You need to do it in a smart way, without spending the whole budget you have at disposal, before even starting to collect useful data. This is why we offer consulting services via our ‘Design Sprints’ and Workshops’. We created these services so that you can experiment with ‘Product market fit’ rapidly and at lower cost than directly developing your app or service. We can help you to create a first landing page to present your product to the market, define the product main features (and therefore create a hypothetical FAQ or user manual of your product), create apps mockups and prototypes, present your product iterations to target customers via user studies, and we will be there to constantly question your assumptions to get you as close as possible to ‘Product market fit’ even before writing a line of code.“

The new way’: “Yes, this is exactly what I expect when looking for ‘Product market fit’. It allows to embed growth hacking marketing in your product from day 1.”

MobileThinking: “Excellent, let’s thank ‘The old way’ and ‘The new way’ for these important insights about ‘Product market fit’. We meet them again next time to talk about ‘Finding your growth hack’. That's all for tonight folks.“
Design Sprint - Loyco & Piguet Galland
All the concepts we presented in the dialog above might appear daunting, but they are the result of years and years of experiments. Amazing companies are always on a quest to reduce the risks in investing time, resources, and money in the creation of products that appeal to customers in the market. Start-ups are the pioneers but also innovative SMEs and Multinationals are now adopting well known techniques to minimize the risk of failure and be able to rapidly adapt to new technologies and surf the momentary hypes. Start-ups as Uber, Slack, our beloved Proov, or big companies such as Google and Facebook are few among many examples of companies adopting the growth hacking marketing technique of ‘Product market fit’. They often started with a basic app and iterated to create a very good app. In the case of the big companies, almost every day, they launch new micro apps that, if successful, they augment with the feedback of their users.

At MobileThinking via our ‘Design Sprints’ and Workshops’, we simply apply the same proven concepts and we can help you achieving ‘Product market fit’ for your app or service independently if your product is for your customers or for your organization internal management.

In the next article of this series, we will talk about ‘Finding your growth hack’ and why it is important to explore innovative ways to forster your product adoption and integrate them directly in the product conception and design.

Stay tuned

The next articles in this series are:
  • Finding your growth hack
  • Going viral
  • Close the loop: retention and optimization
  • Conclusions
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