Hello, welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I might pass since I'm the CEO of quality runs. And here we are, again, it's lean startup and we are going to discuss measuring product fit. And boy, is this one going to be good? Because when I first discovered these three levels of product fit, it made so much sense similar to when I discovered rapid prototyping and how helpful that is in the journey of building a product, this measuring fit.

Uh, thinking, and this three-step framework I'm going to take you through is fantastic. So there's actually, there are three types that I'm going to take you through. I'm going to discuss how you actually achieve that fit. And I really want to place it in perspective. So that you feel [00:01:00] that you know where you are with your product or service and how you might build out, um, through these three stages.

And, um, this is going to give you the chance to know where you are on this journey as a designer, creator or entrepreneur. Okay. Step number one, there are three stages of fit. The first stage of fit is what we call problem-solution fit. Now, this is largely making sure that the problem that you, uh, might have in yours.

Business idea, product idea. You're actually just want to make sure that the product problem that you perceive we've actually existed for users now, right? The reason why this is so important is we so often guess that a problem exists and it's a very famous adage that so many products, uh, solutions looking for problems.

Um, and. What I'm encouraging you to do here, when you think about the problem, solution fit is to go out and make sure that the problem [00:02:00] solution fit is actually there before you do anything else. Now, obviously the previous episode, we talked about MVPs and how you can test your ideas. What you would want to do to bring the two episodes together.

If you're looking to create a problem, the solution fit very early stage, that's the problem exists. You want to go out there and you want to recruit potential customers or users, and you want to determine through a survey or through an interview, or even if you're just doing a diagnostic, discover how their world exists around a given problem.

So, this is large, if we think about areas of expertise, there's going to lean heavily on user experience in design thinking, because you're going to have to have empathy for the user and, um, What you will do is you'll use a tool code, a value proposition, canvas. This is a very good way to map what the [00:03:00] problems and solutions might be.

And this breaks down into a number of different areas. And if you want to know more about that, you can head over to bottom-up dot IO, where you can get all our free masterclasses on design thinking on lean on agile, because we break this down a lot more than we're doing just on the podcast. So back to value proposition, canvas, this will have the user's pains and gains matched to how you relieve them and how you create gains.

And so I think, um, A way to think about your approach here with these recruited users is it's all about discovery. You just want to be one curious cat, does this problem really exist and be honestly be tough on yourself? Because the worst thing to do would be to go out into the world and build a product that was built on a problem that actually didn't exist, or maybe the problem exists, but the solution was a guess and you [00:04:00] didn't actually validate, is this the right.

Solution. And so I think a great way to think about the journey of stage one problem-solution fit is it's a search for desirability is the solution idea that I have the thing that's going to solve things. Is it really desirable? Like when people hear the idea of like, Ooh, that sounds good. It's like Uber taxis, but better, faster, cheaper, safer.

Oh. Yeah, well, that sounds pretty great. And you could just riff on this for, for ages, but you really want to make sure that you've actually uncovered a really strong problem and a really strong possibility on how you might solve it. So let's assume you've got your problem-solution fit. You can move to stage two.

This is called the product-market fit. Now at this point in time, we're starting to adopt some pretty serious of lean thinking, uh, some pretty serious product management. [00:05:00] And what you're really looking to do here is to use a couple of tools. You might have a prototype. You might even be at MVP. You might be, have a little bit of code now.

Uh, you might have a landing page, something up and working. And at this point you want to use that stimulus to validate product-market fit. And the thing that captures that thinking is going to be what we call a lean business canvas. And this goes beyond just the problem and the solution, right. It's going to look at everything, including your customers and your segments, and, you know, value props, unfair advantages, but it's also, and this is why it's getting more on the business side.

So also going to have, you know, revenues and costs associated with doing this idea. Now, when we talk about with whom are we testing in a product-market fit, we're actually going out to early adopters. So we go out to them and what we want to do is have them successfully complete a task because [00:06:00] that's when we know that we actually have product-market fit.

Yeah, we had an idea of the problem solution. Then we put it into action and early adopters did it. They were happy. They were satisfied and you know what? They were prepared to share to advocate and to create what we call the viral coefficient, which is where for every user you attract, they bring in another customer.

So I think this is a slightly different mentality. Um, you know, obviously you're still going to be curious here, but do you want to have a real strong bent? For validation. Do we really have something you really want to make sure that this is a viable and feasible product? The idea was desirable. We saw that in a problem-solution fit, but now can we still deliver on that promise, but also be viable, right?

Make some money. And two, is it technically feasible? Really important questions. All right. I know we're covering a lot of ground. You're like, Whoa, Mike, this is a lot. [00:07:00] Stick with me. We've only got one more stage to go and that's called distribution conversion fit. This assumes that you've done the first two levels of fit.

Okay. So we're all good there. Now we previously, we, we really convinced early adopters. Now it's all about working with your large-scale mass audience and you are using your paid at your earned and owned media to grow like crazy. Growth is the key here. It's the key mentality and you want to achieve growth through seeing traction for your product and profitability for your product.

So you want people to really love it and be bringing new people in. But if you have to pay to acquire your users, you need to make sure that you can cost-effectively acquire a customer, and that you don't have some really expensive cost of acquisition, which is really going to hurt your growth. So this is distribution conversion fit and together this journey of problem, solution fit, product, market fit, and [00:08:00] then distribution conversion fit.

It's the life cycle of a product it's so clarifying when you sit back and you look at these because really it is quite phenomenal that years and years of hard work with lots of people and effort and. So much testing with users, it fits so nicely into this three, uh, stage, uh, the process of product fit. I hope what you see here is that if you continue to test and learn, you'll enjo...