A customer you understand

Founder-market fit

Founder-market fit means you are the right person for a specific market you chose.

I can think of three levels for a good fit:

• Experience: you have lived the problem. For example, you managed a restaurant for years and reordered supplies every morning at 7am.
• Knowledge: you know the users, workflows, jargon and existing tools. For example, you know which suppliers only take orders by phone.
• Access: you can reach users, experts and distribution channels without cold outreach. For example, you can call ten restaurant owners tomorrow.

Always prefer markets you are part of. This makes you credible from day one, without months of research, allowing you to go even faster.

For me, the strongest signal is having lived the problem many times and already built your own workaround. That beats anyone saying “I think this would be useful” or people pretending to know everything, which is just Dunning-Kruger doing its job.

Find 20 users in two weeks

Understanding the problem means nothing if you can’t reach the people who have it. Before building anything, you should ask yourself:

With zero product today, could I find 20 relevant users to interview within two weeks?

Prefer markets where users are reachable through professional networks, events, existing relationships, companies, search, partnerships, or physical locations.

Be cautious about markets where reaching users first requires building a community, an audience, or a new ecosystem. I’ve made that mistake multiple times.

So why shouldn’t you build an audience at first? Because building the audience becomes the job, and the REAL job, which is understanding and solving a painful problem, waits.

Even worse, most people it attracts come for the content, the community or the hype. Their feedback looks like validation, but believe me, it really is not.

Keep access to users

Finding users once isn’t enough either. Ten great interviews at the start get you a thesis, not a product. You need to reach the same kind of user again and again.

You will want to test your first draft with them, watch them use it, and ask why they stopped using it after a week.

Every step of building raises a new question, and only those users can answer it. If you lose access after the first round, you end up guessing, and guessing is how you build something nobody asked for.

So before you commit, ask yourself whether you will still be able to talk to these people in six months and preferably every week if possible.

The ideal market gives an ongoing loop: problem, hypothesis, interview, new hypothesis, experiment, feedback, iteration.

The opposite is building, launching, hoping users show up, and only then trying to understand them.