Marc Andreessen’s Original Blog Post on Product-Market Fit

This article talks about the only thing that matters is product-market fit.

5 minute read

Key Quotes

“I’ll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.”

“When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.”

“When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.”

“The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.”

“You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.”

“My contention, in fact, is that they [lots of startups] fail because they never get to product/market fit.”

“Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit—and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist. And the startup is still successful.”

Bottom Line

“Ironically, once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit.”