A Thought Experiment on Product and Company Market Fit for SaaS CEOs.
Products working well. Key customer renewed. Hires in place. A CEO’s days are focused on building and selling their products. They are consumed with trying hard to get customers to like it and ensure it ships on time and to sell more of it. They may even be experienced product leaders and know enough to start with a difficult problem. To then work hard to develop a novel solution customers love, building to Product Market Fit (PMF).
One layer beneath PMF is a harder question: does the company itself have a market? Investors have been answering this question about you from the day you took their cheque, and they have not been asking whether customers love your software. They have been asking whether, in the ecosystem you operate in, your company occupies a position that someone else would pay a premium to inherit. Whether you are the default integration, the assumed partner, the name that comes up in the RFP without being invited.
To investors the company is the product.
Investors are often more concerned and aware of market dynamics, competitors, and trends that can hurt or help their ‘product’ than CEOs.
Going up a level to Governments. They see industries as products to develop their country and solve some fundamental problems, such as energy shortages, immigration attractiveness, and aging populations. You can see this in the Middle East as they seek to attract millions of immigrants through importing and creating sports industries from scratch.
If company CEOs did this thought experiment, how would their behaviors change? They would likely align in their thinking with their investors, and pick a strong market with attractive properties.
Let’s do the thought experiment for them:
Comparison Table
Thinking about Industry Country Fit, Company Market Fit & Product Market Fit
Definitions
Product Market Fit is building a unique superior solution to solve a valuable pain point. It needs a common set of customers, that are willing to pay for it, in quantities and prices that sustains the business (profitable).
Company Market Fit means your business is recognized as the leading solution provider in your ecosystem and is integrated with your customers' key systems & partners.
Industry Country Fit means the selected industry is on a government’s strategic priority agenda and tax and incentives to innovate are attractive and the industry is set for fast growth.
Reviewing the table above, should lead a CEO to a reconsider how a product and company is developed and maybe the industry they select. Below is a simple guide CEOs could follow. Allowing them to try and achieve Company Market Fit at the same time as they are building to Product Market Fit:
Tablestakes for Achieving Company Market Fit:
Understand the Ecosystem:
Map out the key players in the ecosystem (users, suppliers, partners, media, events, competitors).
Identify potential partnerships and integration opportunities.
Enhance Product Integrability:
Ensure your product or service can be easily integrated with popular platforms and tools.
Develop and document APIs for seamless integration.
Leverage No Code Tools:
Enable customers to integrate your service using no code tools like Zapier.
Provide tutorials and support for using these tools and your services.
Network and Partnerships:
Build relationships with key players in the ecosystem.
Seek out strategic partnerships that enhance your value proposition.
Regularly review and expand your network.
Market Presence and Awareness:
Participate in industry events, webinars, and panels.
Publish thought leadership content and case studies.
Apply for industry awards and recognitions.
Customer-Centric Approach:
Engage with customers to understand their broader needs and how your product fits into their workflow.
Develop features and services that address these broader needs.
Monitor and Measure:
Track the number and quality of integrations and partnerships.
Collect feedback from customers and partners to assess the value of integrations.
Monitor market trends and adjust ecosystem strategies accordingly.
Metrics to Measure Progress:
Number of technical integrations.
Importance and usage of partnership channels.
Customer satisfaction and feedback on integrations.
Market presence indicators (awards, speaking engagements, published content).
Growth in network and strategic relationships.
The product is what the customer buys. The company is what the investor buys. The industry is what the country buys.
Once you see it this way, the work changes. You stop measuring yourself only against the product roadmap and start measuring yourself against the ecosystem map. You ask which two integrations are load-bearing in your category and which ones are vanity. You ask where the distribution bottleneck lives that your competitors have not yet noticed. You ask which standards body, which procurement framework, which government agenda is quietly deciding who wins the next decade, and whether your company is inside that conversation or outside it. You stop treating thought leadership as marketing and start treating it as positioning: the ecosystem only defers to companies whose view of the future it has already absorbed. None of this replaces product market fit. It protects it. It is the difference between a company that exits at a financial multiple and one that exits at a strategic multiple, and in the end that difference is ten years of the founder’s life.
Conclusion
Product market fit is what keeps you alive. Company market fit is what makes you inevitable. Industry country fit is what makes the wind decide to blow in your direction.
Company Market Fit is: Maximizing the value of the ecosystem surrounding your business to gain most-favored-nation status for your specific solution. If you follow it as a strategy, everything you do in achieving product market fit will be more sustainable and secure.
The founder who only builds a product builds something that can be copied. The founder who builds a company and chooses an industry builds something that cannot.
Sources:
Lee Arthur Company Market Fit:
https://leearthur.substack.com/p/product-market-fit-is-no-longer-enough
Barrons: Slack accuses Microsoft of illegally tying Teams to Office in EU complaint
QuickBooks: Intuit QuickBooks
Stripe: Stripe
Zapier: Zapier