Startups with lukewarm demand must have a perfect go-to-market process. In contrast, when you find intense demand where customers are pulling the product from you, the rest of your "factory" (pipeline, sales, delivery) can be messy and still function, allowing you to iterate and improve.
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Founders who have truly 'found' demand can break free from copying other startups' playbooks. They can confidently deploy unique tactics in product or marketing that seem strange to outsiders but perfectly fit their specific, proprietary understanding of customer needs, leading to outsized success.
Product-market fit isn't just growth; it's an extreme market pull where customers buy your product despite its imperfections. The ultimate signal is when deals close quickly and repeatedly, with users happily ignoring missing features because the core value proposition is so urgent and compelling.
A perfectly clean GTM process at a startup is a red flag indicating over-engineering and a lack of real-world traction. True growth creates chaos and pain points ("dumpster fires"). RevOps should let these constraints emerge naturally before attempting to solve them, avoiding premature optimization.
A business's core function is to become a system for repetition. This starts by finding one customer with strong demand, delivering a supply that fits perfectly, and documenting that success. The entire business then becomes a 'factory' optimized to find and replicate that initial case study.
Frame your entire startup not as a product, but as a three-step factory (pipeline, sales, delivery) designed to repeatedly produce one "hell yes" customer success story. This tangible model clarifies the core business function and helps identify bottlenecks in the system.
When sales stall, founders assume the market isn't interested. More often, it's an execution problem: they fail to listen to clear demand signals or pitch irrelevant features, creating a self-inflicted "demand problem."
Founders instinctively obsess over the product as if it's the primary constraint. In the "case study factory" model, the product is not a stage itself, but a tool that enables sales and delivery. The true bottleneck is almost always in pipeline, sales, or delivery—not the product.
Founders often over-index on early user complaints. However, if a product addresses a powerful, unmet demand, users will endure significant flaws. The existence of strong market "pull" is a more important signal than initial product imperfections. The market will effectively fund the product's improvement.
A startup's core function is to find one successful, repeatable customer 'case study' and then build a factory (pipeline, sales, delivery) to replicate it at scale. This manufacturing-based mental model prevents random acts of improvement and helps founders apply concepts like bottleneck theory to know exactly where to focus their efforts for maximum impact.