huge respect. this is the wisdom founders need. we track which positioning angles are landing across the rounds and pitches we see in our briefings; would love to see if you find it useful for pre-seed
It's an awkward place to be but I think the flip side of the coin is, this is an incredible opportunity to unlock something much greater. The worse position to be in is if nobody gets it... I've been there, and THAT was horrible. Where we are now feels like we're just getting started again, but without a limited timeline because we are profitable.
I was going to comment on your excellent metaphor choice of “hockey stick growth”, but in the process, I learned that it’s actually common speech and not a strictly Canadian reference. 😆
I’ve been helping my dad define his goals for his business to help provide a ramp to retirement, and these questions from your list are particularly pertinent:
What do you wish you could be doing more of?
If you could have your dream scenario, how would that change your business?
Melissa, I think I read this 3 or 4 times already. It's ironic, how you admit not hitting PMF yet you understand it better than anyone else in the sphere.
The article perfectly captures what building a category-creating company feels like.
The biggest realization for me was understanding that the friction wasn’t coming from the product itself, it was coming from the market not yet having the language for the behavior change.
We’re seeing this right now while building demand routing infrastructure for commerce. The moment buyers and sellers experience it, they “get it” instantly. The challenge is translating a behavior the market has never structurally seen before.
“Product messaging fit is the beating heart of product-market fit” is a line I’ll probably remember for a very long time.
When I opened the company that years later would have become my biggest success, I was making 4 customers per month. Ridicolous, right?
I was working into a very narrow niche, and in a country like Italy where language and geography are real limits, especially for a phisical business like mine.
My competitors in the same city were doing maybe 15 customers per month. Still ridicolous.
We were all getting what the market was giving organically, until I started to look actively for customers in a way others were not doing.
I understood that every business has direct competitors, but even more indirect competitors who often become alternatives to buying from you, buying from others and doing just nothing.
Years later, I passed to over 1.400 customers a year in the very same niche, and still in Italy - even if a few were coming from all over the world just to spend a month or two with us in Rome or Milan, where we had our venues.
Not only the number of clients grew, but also the number of services they were buying and the average ticket skyrocketed as long as we developed the best solutions for our small niche.
We went up to over $4M+ per year from those 4 customers per month. And I was planning to expand abroad, before exiting the company after losing control to my job partner - bad story, too long to tell here.
I believe there are no pink, red or blue whales, but that every business as a rainbow of customers with different levels of consciousness about your brand, your product, your category, and even a problem they have noticed - or not. And most businesses, just scratch a color or two, leaving the rest to the indirect competitors - that is where the most of the money is, and where I found mine as well.
And I know the world is too big to say "my niche is too small". Especially if your market is not tied to a language spoken by a few, and if you can go online to find your people.
We cannot be a perfect fit for everyone, but we can be the best and only fit for a specific type of people who have a very detailed problem that nobody else is solving the way we do. There's no "perfect market fit" in general, but a PMF for someone that won't be so perfect for many others.
I haven't made a market research in your specific niche, but I would ask myself:
"Am I really, really, really sure I can't find more people like my best customers out there? Am I so sure that ALL of those people, already know about me and already decided not to buy my product/service?"
I wonder why people treat PMF as a single thing instead of three separate things. To get to PMF, one needs to independently define "product," "market," and "fit."
Take early Amazon. What was the product — books, a website, or a service? What was the market? were they competing with bookstores, catalog shopping, or early internet retailers? And what did "fit" mean — did Bezos want to own a niche or build a monopoly?
Each of these is a distinct strategic choice. Good thought exercise.
huge respect. this is the wisdom founders need. we track which positioning angles are landing across the rounds and pitches we see in our briefings; would love to see if you find it useful for pre-seed
This is a horrible place to be as a founder.
You’ve got enough proof to know the product works, and enough confusion still hanging around to keep slowing everything down.
Some people get it straight away. They see the value and they’re happy.
Then the next set look at the same thing and you start wondering if the whole product is wrong.
That can mess with your head for a long time if you don’t realise the product and the message might be two different problems.
It's an awkward place to be but I think the flip side of the coin is, this is an incredible opportunity to unlock something much greater. The worse position to be in is if nobody gets it... I've been there, and THAT was horrible. Where we are now feels like we're just getting started again, but without a limited timeline because we are profitable.
I was going to comment on your excellent metaphor choice of “hockey stick growth”, but in the process, I learned that it’s actually common speech and not a strictly Canadian reference. 😆
I’ve been helping my dad define his goals for his business to help provide a ramp to retirement, and these questions from your list are particularly pertinent:
What do you wish you could be doing more of?
If you could have your dream scenario, how would that change your business?
Brava Melissa, great piece 👏
Haha, not just a Canadian dream 🏒 thanks, Laura!
Great article
Thank you, Allison! Appreciate you taking the time to read it :)
Thanks for this honest reflection ❤️
Melissa, I think I read this 3 or 4 times already. It's ironic, how you admit not hitting PMF yet you understand it better than anyone else in the sphere.
The article perfectly captures what building a category-creating company feels like.
The biggest realization for me was understanding that the friction wasn’t coming from the product itself, it was coming from the market not yet having the language for the behavior change.
We’re seeing this right now while building demand routing infrastructure for commerce. The moment buyers and sellers experience it, they “get it” instantly. The challenge is translating a behavior the market has never structurally seen before.
“Product messaging fit is the beating heart of product-market fit” is a line I’ll probably remember for a very long time.
When I opened the company that years later would have become my biggest success, I was making 4 customers per month. Ridicolous, right?
I was working into a very narrow niche, and in a country like Italy where language and geography are real limits, especially for a phisical business like mine.
My competitors in the same city were doing maybe 15 customers per month. Still ridicolous.
We were all getting what the market was giving organically, until I started to look actively for customers in a way others were not doing.
I understood that every business has direct competitors, but even more indirect competitors who often become alternatives to buying from you, buying from others and doing just nothing.
Years later, I passed to over 1.400 customers a year in the very same niche, and still in Italy - even if a few were coming from all over the world just to spend a month or two with us in Rome or Milan, where we had our venues.
Not only the number of clients grew, but also the number of services they were buying and the average ticket skyrocketed as long as we developed the best solutions for our small niche.
We went up to over $4M+ per year from those 4 customers per month. And I was planning to expand abroad, before exiting the company after losing control to my job partner - bad story, too long to tell here.
I believe there are no pink, red or blue whales, but that every business as a rainbow of customers with different levels of consciousness about your brand, your product, your category, and even a problem they have noticed - or not. And most businesses, just scratch a color or two, leaving the rest to the indirect competitors - that is where the most of the money is, and where I found mine as well.
And I know the world is too big to say "my niche is too small". Especially if your market is not tied to a language spoken by a few, and if you can go online to find your people.
We cannot be a perfect fit for everyone, but we can be the best and only fit for a specific type of people who have a very detailed problem that nobody else is solving the way we do. There's no "perfect market fit" in general, but a PMF for someone that won't be so perfect for many others.
I haven't made a market research in your specific niche, but I would ask myself:
"Am I really, really, really sure I can't find more people like my best customers out there? Am I so sure that ALL of those people, already know about me and already decided not to buy my product/service?"
I wonder why people treat PMF as a single thing instead of three separate things. To get to PMF, one needs to independently define "product," "market," and "fit."
Take early Amazon. What was the product — books, a website, or a service? What was the market? were they competing with bookstores, catalog shopping, or early internet retailers? And what did "fit" mean — did Bezos want to own a niche or build a monopoly?
Each of these is a distinct strategic choice. Good thought exercise.
Because each one of those individually mean it’s own thing. And those 3 together mean another thing.