Speaking to several early-stage startups, we see founders operating with a lot of biases when it comes to transitioning from the idea stage to a product-market fit. As a startup founder, it can be difficult to identify and rein in certain biases that could be adversely affecting your decisions.
As a founder, you are likely to have thousands of conversations with potential customers who seem to love your product. While this is possibly a reason to celebrate, it can often cloud your judgment and make you ignore the flaws of the product or the negative feedback you have received. This can potentially result in building a product or service that does not solve a broad problem, making it less marketable. As a startup founder, you have to keep in mind that scalability is the most important aspect of achieving success, and ignoring certain aspects of your product or business model will impede your progress towards achieving product-market fit.
Like we discussed in our previous piece, product-market fit does not just relate to achieving success on the demand side, but also pricing the product appropriately enough to reach the said target market. Founders, who set the price of their product based on similar products from competitors without considering the true value they provide to the customers often have issues achieving scalability, because their products are either overpriced or underpriced which affects their demand.
Founders ought to know that these biases are not uncommon and being aware of their existence can take founders a long way. By being aware of these biases, founders can be more open to taking feedback from multiple sources which includes a wide range of potential customers, investors and other industry experts. Through these inputs and information, founders become more flexible and open to changing directions if the current product is not meeting the market needs.