At Connect, we’re early stage investors. We back everything from “person with an idea” to “team with product in market”. However, there’s one thing all our investments have in common: they don’t yet have product-market fit.
When I joined Connect, part of my role was to help our founders reach it. For a generalist product builder, it really has been something of a dream job.
I get to dedicate chunks of time to diving into product challenges, and working with founders on how to solve them. Sometimes that’s just a Zoom call, other times it’s getting much more hands on. I’ve been able to work on consumer stuff, healthtech stuff, fintech stuff, B2B stuff. Lots of stuff, all of it interesting.
There are three main tools that I have to help our founders:
1/ My own experience: sharing what I’ve learned from quite a few years building different kinds of products.
2/ The experience of my network: whenever there’s a challenge I’m not too familiar with, I’ve dropped a line to people I know that can help.
3/ Curating content: there is a lot of great product content out there. From books and blogs, to podcasts and talks, there’s a huge amount. This can get really overwhelming for founders, so I can add value by filtering through it and simplifying it.
As I’ve been doing all of this, I noticed that the same topics were coming up over and over again. Hiring PMs, product processes, how to delight users, measuring success etc. The same topics, just wrapped up in different ways.
I shared this with the team at Connect, and we realised that if our founders had these problems, others probably would too. And if we could find a scalable way to help people, we could have a pretty big impact on how startups build product.
So we’ve created the PMF-Ready Playbook, a series of how-to guides for founders that are trying to get to product-market fit.
We’ll be releasing these over the coming weeks and months. We’d love your feedback so that we can constantly improve these guides, and we’d love you to share them with founders who could benefit from them, so they can also get to PMF as efficiently and as fast as possible.