0 ➡️ 1 Products: Do They Exist?
Lately I have been hearing opportunities described as “0–1” more often. I think I understand the gist of this framing, but I don’t know if it’s helpful. I’m not sure I have ever seen a “0” opportunity, and I have never seen a “1” solution.
Mark Andreesen famously described the “hair on fire” problem as the essential ingredient in product-market fit — one felt so intensely by your customers that it’s as though their hair is on fire until it’s solved.
Read this YCombinator post on the subject, it’s delightful: https://lnkd.in/e_HVrGsj
From that post: “If you handed [customers] a brick they would still grab it and try to hit themselves on the head to put out the fire.” This is awesome because it’s true: It describes behavior I have seen so many times from customers who are trying to use my product to solve a “hair on fire” problem that I have misunderstood.
I worked on a product called Typekit that was created to solve problems with web fonts. Today nobody even remembers these problems, but trust me, there were hair-on-fire problems that prevented people from using fonts on the web.
Typekit solved them, and found pretty quickly that we had earned product-market fit with web developers. But before we could rest, we had thousands more people asking us “How do I use these fonts in Photoshop?”
Customers *built* websites with web fonts, but they *designed* websites with “Photoshop” (well they did, then) and you couldn’t use our web fonts to make your designs.
Our new “hair-on-fire” problem had emerged. This eventually led us to what’s now called Adobe Fonts.
I think the “0–1” is meant to say that you are starting with nothing in the market. But let’s not focus on what you have. What is the customer starting with — that’s the important thing. Our customers had never seen a cloud font before.
The next step in product-market fit is to visualize an MVP solution that solves your customer’s problem, and work backwards from there towards the implementation. Any obstacles that offer friction to that experience should be treated as obstacles you must overcome.
With Typekit, it took a couple of years of focusing on the licensing and implementation issues for us to grow confident that we’d found the right focus for the business. Eventually we were serving a vastly larger population of users, and only a tiny fraction were even using web fonts.
That’s not the complete story about Typekit, nor does is it a complete product-market fit curriculum. But I hope it’s interesting.
Is it a 0–1 story? I’m not sure. I think we never really start with 0. And to me, “1” would mean it’s finished. if I ever get there, I’ll let you know.