On today’s edition: my (tough) journey to early product market fit & how to find yours.

What’s the hardest thing in startups?

Raising funds you may say.

I believe it’s about finding early product market fit.

You can start an online business and relatively easily start making sales (e-commerce, newsletter, affiliate, agency etc).

But no investor is interested in that.

To be fundable we needed to find an application of a new technology with scalable market potential.

But here’s the thing - trying something new fails 99% of the time.

That’s why I am more excited that ever now that (we think) we found early product market fit at hypeal.com

So this has been our journey in a nutshell:

• March ‘23: Building a crowdfunding platform to tokenize startup equity & making it tradable 24/7
  —> We couldn’t find Product Market Fit even if the market is huge and the idea sounds “cool”
  

• Nov ‘23: Launching Limited Digital Collectibles (HYPES) For Brands for exclusive experiences on VIP customers
  —> We actually made sales here, but after launch we couldn’t sustain momentum of sales, making the market “not interesting” for VCs
  

• Feb ‘24: We had the idea to rebrand the HYPES as loyalty cards and sell them directly on the brand store
  —> To our surpise, we achieved >8% of orders of the brand containing a loyalty card, growing our sales month-over-month consistenly.

This was great because it gave us the opportunity to go after a much bigger and more interesting probem.

69% of shoppers think that loyalty programs are too hard, complex and struggle to manage multiple programs from brands (KPMG).

At the same time 70% of brands are worried about the decline of 3rd party advertising tracking and are focusing on loyalty more than ever before (EPSILON).

Thanks to constant testing we were able to redefine our vision based on early product market fit.

Today hypeal.com is a B2B SaaS empowering brands to launch open loyalty programs, where shoppers can swap benefits across stores. This reduces complexity of managing multiple programs for consumers, while creating a new 1st party marketing opportunity for brands. 

We found Early Product Market Fit on upselling loyalty cards as digital assets on brand stores. Next we need A/B test and learn how to allow swapping benefits across brands - wish us luck!

How do you find yours?

Product Market Fit is a full-time job (if not more) and it might take years to reach. Here’s my tips:

• Run A/B tests weekly. This could be on your messaging, audience. You will have a lot of failures, inconclusive tests and some major wins (e.g. just renaming HYPES from digital collectibles to loyalty cards improved conversion rate by 400%.

• Plan for long periods of failures. How’s your startup doing? This is hard to answer when you are not getting traction. Know that this is a process and know that you need 6-18 months before you see any traction on a new category or category killer (even if you are a rockstar and an overachiever in everything else in life).

• Constantly ship features. Living by the 80-20 rule, 80% of what you do will be useless and not adopted by the market. Keep shipping and testing new features until you hit your 20%.

I hope this was helpful and can give you a blunt perspective on how to go through the hardness of finding early PMF while mantaining focus and momentum with investors & customers.

Don’t worry, afterwards it only gets harder!

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