I have spent about 15 years working on Product Market Fit. At 100 year old established companies, early-stage startups and now at my own company. I’m not an expert, but there are some things I know about it that I have to keep fighting hard to remember.

Product Market Fit is defined only by if a customer will consistently buy your product.

I believe this is all you need to focus on, and the easiest one to forget when you start your own company. Your bias is to think that you have PMF but you need to spend more on marketing or you just aren’t getting lucky. You need to fight that constantly. You can waste a lot of time and money that way. There are a lot of ways to test for PMF, and lots of great books on it, so I won’t get into that.

It is easy to fool yourself into thinking feedback from customers/friends/colleagues validate your product. Neither does website traffic, social media engagement or how many people interact with this LinkedIn post and read this blog (though I appreciate it!).

Here is how I am trying to test PMF with PhoenixGK. We have two hypothetical target markets: Parents and Clubs.

I had always wanted a great goalkeeper camp for my son near to my house, so I decided to start one. This is great for me (my son has an awesome camp experience and improves) but also great for PhoenixGK because I am giving away 3 free game analyses with each sign up. I am hitting my exact target market (high-level full time goalkeepers with parents who are willing to spend time and money helping their kid improve) and am testing two hypothesis:

1. If a parent won’t sign up for the three free games (despite repeated reminders), then parents are not a target market.
2. If a parent does sign up for the three free games, but will not purchase more games for their kid after they receive the free offering, then there is not PMF with parents.

Actual PMF comes over time, but I am using this as a test to see if I have PMF at all with parents.

I am writing letters and sending booklets clubs around the my area (it is a soccer hotbed) and offering to meet and talk to them in-person. I am testing a single hypothesis:

1. If I send an physical booklet, letter and follow up with an email all showing the value of PhoenixGK and offer to meet in person, and I cannot get any of the clubs to sign up, then there is not PMF with clubs.

You can see I set the bar low here. I just need one club to sign up. I have had some interest from a few clubs, but we will see if any sign up. PMF is if they pay me money for what I do…not if they meet with me.

I am doing two things (camps and writing letters) that don’t scale easily. Some of this comes from my reluctance to have my business rely on other companies algorithms, which they can (and do) change. But I think there is something in providing excellent customer service and scaling organically.

So every single customer of PhoenixGK will get a hand written note from me. If someone reaches out they will receive a response that day. If a customer has a feature request we will add that in ASAP and make sure to communicate timelines.

From my very first B2B work experience through PhoenixGK (B2C), I have seen how extraordinary customer service pays dividends. At my first job I was one of the guys who went in the field to fix big issues customers had. There were times customers were waiting in the parking lot to yell at me when I first showed up. But by showing up, working hard and helping customers with issues and questions we never left a customer disappointed, and most of the time those customers ordered from us again.

It may not always be “cost effective” but my belief is that over time providing extraordinary customer service pays off with positive word of mouth and repeat business. Maybe it will even tilt some of the above hypothesis in my favor. The cool thing is we will see in real time over the coming months.