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When we launched our first product, monitor.website.io, a set of tools for monitoring online services (website, database, and other services), we had no traffic. We knew there was a demand for our product, but we didn’t know the best way to invest our time and resources into marketing.
If you’re like us, you don’t have a dedicating marketing team or an unlimited budget to throw at marketing. You understand that the marketing decisions you make early on will determine if your company thrives or dies.
This is where product market fit comes into the picture which will abbreviate as PMF in this article.
PMF is the process of determining which marketing channels will provide you consistent customer growth to reach profitably. The other part of PMF is getting product feedback early on in the process to help remove assumptions and improve your product.
Taking a closer look we have,
In the world of online marketing you have more choices than ever before.
When we started with our first product, we decided on a marketing strategy that was a mix of paid and organic. We split our resources between cultivating community through social media and spending time planning paid advertising via Adwords and sponsored podcasts.
Without having a good way to measure success, we ended up sinking more time and resources into marketing strategies that provided little to no value. To make matters worse, we made incorrect assumptions that sent us in the wrong direction, instead of helping us reach PMF.
Even though we used Google analytics, we still couldn’t easily tell which marketing strategies was most effective and how our customers were using our product. We researched other tools on the market, but it seemed complicated and resource intensive to setup.
Last year, we built our own analytics tool that provides real-time insight into PMF metrics. The goal was to help us determine which marketing strategies had the best ROI and get product feedback in order to take actionable steps to reach PMF.