I wrote about how we built a product with PMF at Atlas in an earlier post. lately I've been thinking about other ways of building products that have PMF, and I've come across other examples worth writing down.
sell before building product (the Atlas way). an MVP you can build in an afternoon (a Stripe link is enough when the pain is sharp) and sell subscriptions. only start building real product when volume gets high enough that solving things by hand stops scaling compared to solving them with tech. the problem with this approach is that it doesn't work for every industry (I'm thinking of products that are complex to build, like biotech or hardware), and over time I'm more and more convinced it's a brute-force approach when you have no idea who your customers are or where they are. I think there are better ways. more on this model here.
build a product inside another company (the spin-off way). the main problem with those of us who build product is that we often build product because we like it, even when nobody's willing to pay. the advantage of building a product inside a bigger company is that you're necessarily building for a customer (aka the company you're inside), and you can be sure the product is needed and that someone would pay for it.
(I'll share an example of an idea like this because I think it can help others think through whether an idea has PMF.)
at Atlas, teams always need more tech, and sometimes an idea comes up that I think could be a company on its own. I've been thinking a lot lately about one of those. my indicators that it would have PMF: 1) I understand the problem completely, and I know for a fact no solution exists because we already searched for it in the tools out there (so this product would be a "category-defining product"), 2) I know it's needed because our team needs it, and I've interviewed enough people in that role to know it's always a pain, 3) it's an industry that's ready for a refresh, and a tool like this would deliver it (better UX/UI than what's available; a different approach from existing solutions), 4) I know the first 20 customers of this company and I know they'd use it (I'd start with our current customers, the ones I already have a relationship with and trust), 5) I can describe the ICP of the first 100 customers exactly (engineer-founders with this problem at small companies of <100 employees, B2B, US-based), 6) I know it's a sticky product because it integrates with your whole current stack, 7) I know the team I'd be selling to has budget and is easy to sell to.
I think there's another approach, but I haven't fully cracked it yet: the Notion/Figma way. building something behind closed doors for years and coming out with a great product that does well. the issue with this approach is that everyone thinks they're Ivan from Notion or Dylan from Figma, when the truth is very few people ship product of that quality with zero user feedback. the question I keep asking, because I don't actually know, is whether those people really had no feedback or whether they were shipping small iterations along the way. with the info I have today, I think the only way to make this approach work is to know enough about an industry to be sure the product is necessary. if you're an expert in a problem, you can build something on the strength of what you know, and the solution will land. maybe the real question is whether the people who use this approach are absolute experts in their problem. going by my experience with Palabra (my startup without PMF), the answer is no. I wasn't an expert in that problem. I needed feedback to build a better product.
be an absolute expert in a problem and build behind closed doors (the Notion way). like I said, this approach only works if you're an expert in a problem and you're also an incredible executor. I'm not willing to bet on it, because I've seen it go wrong many more times than I've seen it go right (I'm thinking of Humane and the product they launched recently). I want to keep thinking about this option, but if I were a founder without experience, I'd definitely go with one of the first two.