This is a cute categorization. The stories they tell are charming and reinforce the categorization. But, I've never found things to be so cut an dry. For example, a lot of the work we did in AWS often fell into the hair on fire category, and the products that showed future vision e.g. AWS Glue, Aurora, DynamoDB were the ones that rose above the noise.
It mostly boils down to this: delight customers and iterate as fast as you can.
> delight customers and iterate as fast as you can
One thing is the product. Another thing is your messaging. Yet another thing is what goes in people's minds when they interact with your product and your messaging. Fourth is how you reason about the complex interactions between the three prior factors.
This categorization helps entrepreneurs with #4. I found it very helpful.
> It mostly boils down to this: delight customers and iterate as fast as you can.
This is maybe the second phase after AWS found a fit and built a consumer base? Once I am in the housing market, I have a need for everything (mortgage, building contractor, construction materials, designer, hardware and accessories, upholstery, decor, etc).
My entry to AWS started with EC2 in the very early days because it of its commodity nature (any size and shape, for however long, with per-minute billing) and instant availability. The elastic nature solved scale. A lot of people didn't move to RDS until later but it was inevitable.
Everything else followed on from there, cross-sells and up-sells for reliability and convenience were always a click away for captive consumers who were already onboarded.
My perspective changed from thinking PMF was a lottery when in reality its just sales/marketing grinding until something works.
The reason I used to think this is like other technically orientated founders. If I build for a market that doesn't exist then you are playing lotto. It's not even good odds, you are better off playing 0dte spx coin flip.
What you fear you build for and if all you have are unknowns then you are going to simply end up building everything lose differentiation and your potential customers even if they find you will walk
Despite classics like the SBF article that was taken down, this framework is quite good but the best thing to do as bootstrappers is to focus on generating net positive cashflow as soon as possible not running a PMF search engine which requires lot of minds and capital injection.
My partner started a business and literally from her first ad she was inundated with customers. Now it's a $10m/year bootstrapped business. I've done exactly the same thing and had 0 customers.
If you are falling into the Hard Fact / Future Vision categories it can very hard to get customers because no one is ever looking for your product.
There's not enough details here to say what she did right and you did wrong, but it generally comes down to her idea probably solved a problem customers were willing to pay a lot for today and your idea didn't.
If her idea was "when you pay me x, you get 3x back in new revenue" and your idea was a tarpit idea like "help people find what to eat tonight", it's really obvious why you failed.
I spoke with the ceo of a top ten AI company on Friday. They are definitely playing the PMF lottery and there is no alternative to this. They have lots of very smart people and tons of conversations with customers. But nobody has any idea what will end up working.
Its not a lottery, most people just arent intelligent enough to anticipate new market needs. They have no business trying to innovate at that level, but are unaware of their inadequacies. Some people do have the raw intellectual and societal horsepower to bring new paradigms to life.
I wouldn't say its intelligence as there are different types of intelligence but more specifically emotional intelligence and self-awareness that is key.
The guys writing PMF is a lottery are jaded because they are afraid to admitting their own weak points. They failed because they ignored something. The ones with emotional intelligence and self-awareness are able to navigate and negotiate.
Founders keep fixating on pick-me startup, hoping for a cushy exit, that happens less than 0.1% of the time, the odds are as bad as wanting to go to NFL, if not WORSE. VCs and investors also have to deliver returns they can't keep bank rolling something that they don't see a market in.
You don't. And most of these OpenAI wrapper startups are failgets. The consensus from the buyers side is that they are disillusioned by the hype and dealing with the true reality of this hype cycle.
Can you recommend any practical resources on the topic? Not fluffy business-orientated self help books like all the product management books that are recommended.
Obviously coming from Sequoia there won't be an bootstrapped approach, but I'd love to see one for that.
For bootstrappers, the approach I've heard of is simply just nicheing down to find a segment of the market that is big enough to support you, but small enough to not be worth it to bigger players.
This has little to do with whether you are VC backed or bootstrapped.
The amount of effort to sustain yourself is going to be almost the same regardless of which category you are in. Either you have a category that is popular but will attract dozens of competitors no matter how small your niche is or you have a product that requires effort to market.
These days with so many no/low-code tools getting a product into market has never been easier. And that's both a positive and negative for bootstrappers.
> For bootstrappers, the approach I've heard of is simply just nicheing down to find a segment of the market that is big enough to support you, but small enough to not be worth it to bigger players.
Thank you, as someone hoping to bootstrap myself this is makes sense. Any idea how to make the niche smaller? The broader market I'm thinking of is huge (likely billions of customers), I suppose I could charge more to narrow it down but that has other risks.
Pick one single customer and fanatically meet their individual needs. Then add a second. Repeat until you’re no longer needing to tweak your system to delight a new customer. At that point you need sales and you have a business! :)
While I'm not convinced it is VC vs. bootstrapped that should differentiates frameworks, you should read this book, it is simply the closest thing to a step by step user guide to finding PMF as I've seen, and it worked for me: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...
you just need to solve a problem. you need to go talk to people and help them.
if someone isn’t using your product that you’re building to solve their problem and they are complaining about said problem, it’s because nobody else has tried selling to them.
I feel like there is quite a bit of overlap in hard-fact and future vision, and I'm not quite sure where our company would fit.
We're in the neurotech/sleeptech space, and while the majority of the market is selling "fall asleep faster", "sleep more", we're improving the efficiency of deep sleep with the health benefits.
This is a hard-fact - people are resolved to poor sleep quality, or no "real" solutions to improving deep sleep quality - yes, sleep hygiene is important, just like brushing your teeth is important, but that isn't the answer to a poor diet.
So customers are resolved to the "I'm just tired, that's the way it is" mentality or "I'll track my sleep, and now I know why I'm tired".
At the same time, they don't have the context of "there is a way to do this", which is why they were resolved to accept the status quo in the "hard-fact"
Does anyone else feel they are falling between the hard-fact and future vision?
Is anyone falling between Hair on Fire and Hard Fact? I feel this is possible too.
> I feel like there is quite a bit of overlap in hard-fact and future vision
Not to mention revisionism.
> Customers must believe that your product represents a whole new paradigm—often with its own ecosystem. (The iPhone wasn’t just a device; its App Store was a new way of interfacing with the internet.
"Its App Store" didn't come until a few years later. It was not a part of the iPhone vision, certainly not at launch.
There was a kind of behind the scenes ecosystem building in terms of AT&T's giving Apple an unusual (for the time) level of direct and complete customer/device control.
The iPhone wouldn't have been the iPhone without the work to create that wider context.
The better user experience that enabled Apple to give customers counted for a lot. The easy to use, free of telecom interference, App Store is a prime example that the unusual Apple/AT&T relationship allowed, even if it was not v1.0.
Looked at your product. If your marketing copy reflects reality, your product is Sci-Fi.
"The next phase of research is measuring the effect of stimulation on removal of beta-amyloids, related to Alzheimer’s prevention, concussion & TBI, and more. We’re actively speaking to researchers interested in examining the impact on insulin response for improved outcomes in people with type 2 diabetes, as well as athletic recovery and this is just the beginning."
But if you believed that this would actually have a significant effect, I feel like that'd be way up top, not an aside in a blog post. Which means you're a "Hard Fact" ("sleep is sleep") that isn't marketable, and you're reaching beyond your grasp to try to become "Future Vision."
Good point. The reason we don't lead with future impact is that we don't know if any of those things will work out. The reason researchers (not us, independent researchers) are looking into these areas is because they believe, and there is some evidence, that the stimulation could have an impact. Where our customers are focused on their problem.
This will become more obvious as we get closer to market and we start more directly targeting specific markets. We are currently building out our separate website which is more targeted at supporting researchers and other collaborations.
> This is a hard-fact - people are resolved to poor sleep quality, or no "real" solutions to improving deep sleep quality
I glanced at your website, and there’s already a product on the market that does the same thing (headband using EEG techniques to provide auditory stimulation based on the same research your site points out): The Philips Smart Sleep https://www.usa.philips.com/c-e/smartsleep/deep-sleep-headba...
So in your case, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say there aren’t any “real” solutions when a major market player has already released a product in the exact space. I think it’s more likely that wearing a headband every night isn’t an attractive proposition for many. That’s an entirely different problem to solve.
> I think it’s more likely that wearing a headband every night isn’t an attractive proposition for many.
Case in point, I personally cannot use wrist bands or any such accessory for sleeping as I sleep with my forehead on my wrists. Neither the wrist band nor the hand band are good options for me to use.
I wonder if there is something that can help someone who sleeps on their stomach not have to choose between crushing their nose or cramping their neck when they sleep...
Philips has not been available for years, and though there are many other EEG headbands, they are not focused on improving deep sleep. Though I agree, getting people to wear a headband is a difficult problem to solve as well.
iPhone was considered a future vision, but we had smartphones and even smartphones with apps previously, but at the bottom of the page, Sequoia points to the iPhone and Vision Pro as Future Vision examples.
I'm curious to see how that actually compares in effectiveness to wearing headband-type speakers and listening to sleep brainwave stimulation music (which I tried).
Completely different. Not only from a comfort perspective, but show me a decent study which looks at the impact of "sleep brainwave stimulation music" on immune function, cardiovascular function, memory, reaction time, etc etc.
This isn't "gentle tones to help you sleep". Directly interacting with slow-waves can increase the spectral power by 30%.
> Deep sleep is not improved by consistent sleep/wake times, and adjustments to noise/temperature/light conditions?
Deep sleep definitely benefits from consistent sleep/wake times. Your body tries to play catch up if you break from your normal rhythm but it’s not entirely effective.
I think the parent comment might be exaggerating the futility of sleep hygiene because they have a product to sell. :) Proper sleep timing, duration, and sleep hygiene are inarguably valuable for proper sleep architecture.
Sleep hygiene impacts sleep duration, which can impact all phases of sleep. It impacts the sleep phase potential, which is different from directly impacting sleep.
Measuring only sleep duration is like measuring only how much time you spent at the gym, ignoring what exercises, weights and reps you did.
Yeah I’m not sure where mine fits either. I have a video editor that removes pauses, saving lots of editing time for (certain kinds of) videos/podcasts. I would say I hear from 3 kinds of customers:
- They know about tools like mine and have compared a few
- They have had this problem for a while, decided to Google it one day, and found my Recut app
- They stumbled on it randomly via social media and say things like “where has this been all my life”
I would guess that some people from all 3 groups would describe it as Hair on Fire, but they have different levels of awareness of solutions. Maybe they just live with it as a Hard Fact, maybe they live with it because they know of solutions but don’t like them (of the flavor “I want to automate this but I don’t want to lose all creative control to AI”).
It’s tough to find good ways to get in front of the people who aren’t looking! It feels like that way lies a lot of broad/expensive advertising.
> It’s tough to find good ways to get in front of the people who aren’t looking! It feels like that way lies a lot of broad/expensive advertising.
What unrelated (to your solution) place are your potential customers looking for solutions to other problems they have, for whatever reason? Or at least a segment of them? Then figure out how to be of interest based on that motivation, in a way that lets you also naturally introduce your product - directly, or maybe better, seemingly incidentally.
There is currently a generation of founders who think that talking about PMF somehow gets you closer to PMF. Talking about it, having a great following online, being a decent marketer - does not mean zilch.
Knowing everything about PMF probably moves you single digit percentage-wise toward it.
It's like being a vampire, avoiding garlic (hell, even drinking blood) doesn't make you one.
However, OpenAI is a bad example of the future vision paradigm. In fact it fits 1/6 of the characteristics they identify in this paradigm. A better example would be something like Tesla.
I would say OpenAIs backing of the GPT model family in itsself is a better example of the future paradigm than anything to do with OpenAIs founding or non profit status that sequoia discuss. Going all in on GPT gave them a big headstart (although google should have been fighting much earlier if they had listened to internal researchers).
iPhone and Vision Pro are also not future vision. Both enter a market at the high end, with established competitors. BlackBerry and Nokia had smart phones that were functionally equivalent, but they were marketed towards business users and worked best with corporate integration. Apple delivered a phone that focused on personal use. Vision Pro is entering market where the competitors are focused solely on gaming or augmented work (hololens) with a product that doesn't do either, yet... but everyone is starry-eyed about what it might enable, some day.
I'm curious how education or entertainment companies fit into this framework, or how they think about PMF in general.
Was Duolingo targeting customers who accepted the "hard fact" that passive audio was the only way to learn a language? Was MasterClass a "future vision" because people didn't believe celebrities would spend their time teaching? Or is it that we NEED education and entertainment, so these two providers just differentiated from a crowded market.
Alternatively Duolingo sells a casual memory game that differentiate by giving the illusion of productivity. And Masterclass sells attention and status to a class of people who are already attention-oriented by stroking their egos. I’m not saying this hot take is necessarily true, but the market isn’t always categorized by what we intuitively think. And realizing that can sometimes give you a massive benefit, simply by applying existing and effective techniques (in these cases gamification and people-oriented success storytelling, respectively) from a domain your competitors don't understand or care about.
Yeah, to me, Duolingo seems to be Hard Fact. But MasterClass might be also Hard Fact. MasterClass is not a totally different education service compared to the existing incumbents. Online university could be MasterClass.
For our company we are in 2 phases.
In the cloud, it's 'hair on fire'. MLOps is a hot space.
For on-premises, MLOps is basically download MLFlow and Kubeflow and you think you're sorted. So it's the 'hard fact' segment.
Not on premises who are regulated and might have enterprise requirements. If you need eg role based access control you can’t use on prem MLFlow etc. So you could niche down to customers who don’t know this yet. Smaller banks, insurers etc.
Edit: we went through this. Started putzing around with open source things on prem on Openshift. Ended up on Databricks for a variety of reasons. The impact on the business to be wiring up lots of new widgets, maintaining them, training, ability to switch to new components when required. Lean team, so turn Databricks on and secure it properly, exclude PI where possible, sort out ETL and CICD etc, profit. Delegate MLOps stack innovation to the vendor and focus on our own job.
Yep, this journey is exactly the kind of thing I run into when I get prospects who want our product (observability) to be on-prem. What they actually want is assurances around data storage, retention, and controls; and a "throat to choke" to cover their asses in case something goes wrong. At least in this domain, very few people who need Observability actually need things to be on-prem as well.
Readit News
It mostly boils down to this: delight customers and iterate as fast as you can.
One thing is the product. Another thing is your messaging. Yet another thing is what goes in people's minds when they interact with your product and your messaging. Fourth is how you reason about the complex interactions between the three prior factors.
This categorization helps entrepreneurs with #4. I found it very helpful.
This is maybe the second phase after AWS found a fit and built a consumer base? Once I am in the housing market, I have a need for everything (mortgage, building contractor, construction materials, designer, hardware and accessories, upholstery, decor, etc).
My entry to AWS started with EC2 in the very early days because it of its commodity nature (any size and shape, for however long, with per-minute billing) and instant availability. The elastic nature solved scale. A lot of people didn't move to RDS until later but it was inevitable.
Everything else followed on from there, cross-sells and up-sells for reliability and convenience were always a click away for captive consumers who were already onboarded.
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The reason I used to think this is like other technically orientated founders. If I build for a market that doesn't exist then you are playing lotto. It's not even good odds, you are better off playing 0dte spx coin flip.
What you fear you build for and if all you have are unknowns then you are going to simply end up building everything lose differentiation and your potential customers even if they find you will walk
Despite classics like the SBF article that was taken down, this framework is quite good but the best thing to do as bootstrappers is to focus on generating net positive cashflow as soon as possible not running a PMF search engine which requires lot of minds and capital injection.
My partner started a business and literally from her first ad she was inundated with customers. Now it's a $10m/year bootstrapped business. I've done exactly the same thing and had 0 customers.
If you are falling into the Hard Fact / Future Vision categories it can very hard to get customers because no one is ever looking for your product.
If her idea was "when you pay me x, you get 3x back in new revenue" and your idea was a tarpit idea like "help people find what to eat tonight", it's really obvious why you failed.
if you done the same and have 0 customers that means you did something incorrectly.
it is IMPOSSIBLE to do the same thing that works and net 0 customers.
Far too many companies stick with one, failing ticket
The guys writing PMF is a lottery are jaded because they are afraid to admitting their own weak points. They failed because they ignored something. The ones with emotional intelligence and self-awareness are able to navigate and negotiate.
Founders keep fixating on pick-me startup, hoping for a cushy exit, that happens less than 0.1% of the time, the odds are as bad as wanting to go to NFL, if not WORSE. VCs and investors also have to deliver returns they can't keep bank rolling something that they don't see a market in.
It's no wonder so many fail when most people don't bother to study business strategy, entrepreneurship and marketing first.
For bootstrappers, the approach I've heard of is simply just nicheing down to find a segment of the market that is big enough to support you, but small enough to not be worth it to bigger players.
The amount of effort to sustain yourself is going to be almost the same regardless of which category you are in. Either you have a category that is popular but will attract dozens of competitors no matter how small your niche is or you have a product that requires effort to market.
These days with so many no/low-code tools getting a product into market has never been easier. And that's both a positive and negative for bootstrappers.
Funded startups can have different metrics for growth.
Thank you, as someone hoping to bootstrap myself this is makes sense. Any idea how to make the niche smaller? The broader market I'm thinking of is huge (likely billions of customers), I suppose I could charge more to narrow it down but that has other risks.
you just need to solve a problem. you need to go talk to people and help them.
if someone isn’t using your product that you’re building to solve their problem and they are complaining about said problem, it’s because nobody else has tried selling to them.
obviously over simplified but I think it’s true.
We're in the neurotech/sleeptech space, and while the majority of the market is selling "fall asleep faster", "sleep more", we're improving the efficiency of deep sleep with the health benefits.
This is a hard-fact - people are resolved to poor sleep quality, or no "real" solutions to improving deep sleep quality - yes, sleep hygiene is important, just like brushing your teeth is important, but that isn't the answer to a poor diet.
So customers are resolved to the "I'm just tired, that's the way it is" mentality or "I'll track my sleep, and now I know why I'm tired".
At the same time, they don't have the context of "there is a way to do this", which is why they were resolved to accept the status quo in the "hard-fact"
Does anyone else feel they are falling between the hard-fact and future vision?
Is anyone falling between Hair on Fire and Hard Fact? I feel this is possible too.
Not to mention revisionism.
> Customers must believe that your product represents a whole new paradigm—often with its own ecosystem. (The iPhone wasn’t just a device; its App Store was a new way of interfacing with the internet.
"Its App Store" didn't come until a few years later. It was not a part of the iPhone vision, certainly not at launch.
The iPhone wouldn't have been the iPhone without the work to create that wider context.
The better user experience that enabled Apple to give customers counted for a lot. The easy to use, free of telecom interference, App Store is a prime example that the unusual Apple/AT&T relationship allowed, even if it was not v1.0.
"The next phase of research is measuring the effect of stimulation on removal of beta-amyloids, related to Alzheimer’s prevention, concussion & TBI, and more. We’re actively speaking to researchers interested in examining the impact on insulin response for improved outcomes in people with type 2 diabetes, as well as athletic recovery and this is just the beginning."
But if you believed that this would actually have a significant effect, I feel like that'd be way up top, not an aside in a blog post. Which means you're a "Hard Fact" ("sleep is sleep") that isn't marketable, and you're reaching beyond your grasp to try to become "Future Vision."
This will become more obvious as we get closer to market and we start more directly targeting specific markets. We are currently building out our separate website which is more targeted at supporting researchers and other collaborations.
I glanced at your website, and there’s already a product on the market that does the same thing (headband using EEG techniques to provide auditory stimulation based on the same research your site points out): The Philips Smart Sleep https://www.usa.philips.com/c-e/smartsleep/deep-sleep-headba...
So in your case, I’m not sure it’s accurate to say there aren’t any “real” solutions when a major market player has already released a product in the exact space. I think it’s more likely that wearing a headband every night isn’t an attractive proposition for many. That’s an entirely different problem to solve.
Case in point, I personally cannot use wrist bands or any such accessory for sleeping as I sleep with my forehead on my wrists. Neither the wrist band nor the hand band are good options for me to use.
I wonder if there is something that can help someone who sleeps on their stomach not have to choose between crushing their nose or cramping their neck when they sleep...
iPhone was considered a future vision, but we had smartphones and even smartphones with apps previously, but at the bottom of the page, Sequoia points to the iPhone and Vision Pro as Future Vision examples.
This isn't "gentle tones to help you sleep". Directly interacting with slow-waves can increase the spectral power by 30%.
(I don't have an answer to the overlap question; I'm squarely in Hard Fact.)
Deep sleep definitely benefits from consistent sleep/wake times. Your body tries to play catch up if you break from your normal rhythm but it’s not entirely effective.
I think the parent comment might be exaggerating the futility of sleep hygiene because they have a product to sell. :) Proper sleep timing, duration, and sleep hygiene are inarguably valuable for proper sleep architecture.
Measuring only sleep duration is like measuring only how much time you spent at the gym, ignoring what exercises, weights and reps you did.
- They know about tools like mine and have compared a few
- They have had this problem for a while, decided to Google it one day, and found my Recut app
- They stumbled on it randomly via social media and say things like “where has this been all my life”
I would guess that some people from all 3 groups would describe it as Hair on Fire, but they have different levels of awareness of solutions. Maybe they just live with it as a Hard Fact, maybe they live with it because they know of solutions but don’t like them (of the flavor “I want to automate this but I don’t want to lose all creative control to AI”).
It’s tough to find good ways to get in front of the people who aren’t looking! It feels like that way lies a lot of broad/expensive advertising.
What unrelated (to your solution) place are your potential customers looking for solutions to other problems they have, for whatever reason? Or at least a segment of them? Then figure out how to be of interest based on that motivation, in a way that lets you also naturally introduce your product - directly, or maybe better, seemingly incidentally.
Just throwing out a possible approach.
Knowing everything about PMF probably moves you single digit percentage-wise toward it.
It's like being a vampire, avoiding garlic (hell, even drinking blood) doesn't make you one.
However, OpenAI is a bad example of the future vision paradigm. In fact it fits 1/6 of the characteristics they identify in this paradigm. A better example would be something like Tesla.
I would say OpenAIs backing of the GPT model family in itsself is a better example of the future paradigm than anything to do with OpenAIs founding or non profit status that sequoia discuss. Going all in on GPT gave them a big headstart (although google should have been fighting much earlier if they had listened to internal researchers).
1980s Apple, otoh, fully in the nose.
Regardless of how well I think they've executed against the vision, I think that they are a good example.
Was Duolingo targeting customers who accepted the "hard fact" that passive audio was the only way to learn a language? Was MasterClass a "future vision" because people didn't believe celebrities would spend their time teaching? Or is it that we NEED education and entertainment, so these two providers just differentiated from a crowded market.
Edit: we went through this. Started putzing around with open source things on prem on Openshift. Ended up on Databricks for a variety of reasons. The impact on the business to be wiring up lots of new widgets, maintaining them, training, ability to switch to new components when required. Lean team, so turn Databricks on and secure it properly, exclude PI where possible, sort out ETL and CICD etc, profit. Delegate MLOps stack innovation to the vendor and focus on our own job.
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