“It is what it is,” quipped some random friend whose relationship did not work. A friend who couldn’t find the right match also said something to that effect. 

Perhaps, it is the best segue to talk about a fundamental but sometimes elusive aim in business and product development: PRODUCT-MARKET FIT. 

Product-market fit is easy to escape our attention, especially when it exists. The customer needs a product that fills a need, the business provides a solution that provides exactly that. “It just clicked,” another friend said of how they came together. 

But the lack of product-market fit isn’t difficult to spot. Everything becomes a hard-sell. Sometimes, no matter how revolutionary a product’s attributes are from a supposedly objective lens, someone who doesn’t need it could only appreciate all its glory but never purchase it. “Let’s just be friends,” they said. 

In fact, CBInsights, after a thorough study of startup failures has cited the lack of product-market fit as the top reason why startups fail, aside from the lack of funding or running out of cash. For extremely product-centric companies, the priority is to sell products hoping that customers come to fit them to their needs, rather than the other way around. The recent trend toward “customer centricity” refocuses business priorities to build and continuously develop products and solutions around the customers’ specific needs. 

Treacy and Wiersma (1997), in the “The Discipline of Market Leaders” outlined three possible considerations as to why a customer will make a purchase. It can be due to the superiority of a product vis-a-vis their needs (product leadership / performance superiority), the ease of doing business (operational excellence), or the personalized quality of their relationship with the company (customer intimacy).

It is argued that for a business to become a market leader, it has to at least serve the best product, provide a hassle-free experience, or employ a personalized approach to satisfying a customer’s requirements. “Omg, we have the same love language,” they said. 

For someone starving, a diamond is a speck of dust.

In the search of the right customer, i.e., the best product-market fit, one has to understand a target market’s particular needs and preferences; then, the entrepreneur needs to reflect if they have what it takes to satisfy them, or at least cares enough to work on it. For someone starving, a diamond is a speck of dust. “I can’t force it. It just doesn’t work,” they said. 

When all is said and done and it’s time to move forward, someone might find it best to say… 

“It’s not you, it’s me.”