Good Positioning = Product Market Fit
If you don’t feel like you have product-market fit, you have two options for getting there:
Change your product so that it matches the market you’re going after
Change the market you’re going after, based on what the ‘product in hand’ actually does really well right now
Which of those options do you think is faster? Which one requires hundreds of engineering hours? Also, which one is most likely to actually result in you getting to product-market fit?
There are all kinds of outcomes from better positioning: better conversion rates, high margins, increased leads…. but they all fall under the rubric of product-market fit. And the fastest way to get there is to take the product you have now and think really critically about what audience and situations it is absolutely best for, what differentiated value it provides, and orient yourself towards that audience and market. To get to product-market fit, change the market, not the product.
But wait! Where does open source fit into this discussion? If you’re an open source startup, product-market fit is not enough. You need to also have project-market fit. Your project and product positioning can not be identical, because if it is, you’ll leave people confused about which one is best for them, and confused people don’t buy. But as with a commercial product, it is always easier to adjust the audience a project is aimed at than to adjust the project itself — and you’re more likely to get to project-market fit if you get there by way of positioning rather than by way of ‘let’s see what happens if we build this cool new thing.’
If you don’t have product-market fit, or if you feel like you had it and you’ve lost it, the first step is to really interrogate your positioning. If you work with someone like me, you can fix your positioning in a week. How else would you get to product-market fit that quickly?