… that’s how the great majority of meetings I’ve got with investors in the past couple months have started with.
Not a single one of them have started asking me: Have you proofed Product / Market Fit yet? or even, How do you know, what you guys are after, is going to work?
Most people in the startup business will either give for granted that you’ve got to Product / Market Fit already (you got to have a reason to be talking to them already, don’t you?), or, what’s worst, they will tell you why, from their point of view, you will never make it, regardless of the results you’ve got.
It’s like if you saw a mother walking out of the hospital with her newborn and go ask her, how is your baby going to get to run its first marathon?!
As an entrepreneur your number one goal is to attain Product / Market Fit above anything else. Focus on a product that you can proof a handful of people will use, love and share and you will be on your way to your 1 millionth user, not before; and anybody who tell you different is just wrong.
Why?
Because it’s going to distract you. It’s going to take your mind and body away from what you should be focusing on. Which is on making a great product. One that you have tested with users in your target market and whom will come to love and preach what you are doing to others.
Once you have got that then go and focus on finding others like the ones that have proof you product works or even better, empower those early users to bring their own people over.
There is a reason Paul Graham says that startups should be ready before they go raising funds, because once you go down that road, everything else pauses until you finish (by raising the funds or by killing the company, what ever happens first).
So ask yourself, are you ready to pause your effort in order to be distracted? or are you and your users better off with you focused on your product?
Remember you don’t need to have a full fleshed product to call it P/M Fit, but at the same time be careful to be too minimal on your Minimal Viable Product. Sometimes great ideas go wrong because they are poor executed :)
So raise yourself and go back to building your product. it’s the best investment you could take before you can answer the 1 millionth user question. Because it’s going to come, no matter what, and eventually you will know how to answer it, because by this time you’ll already know how your users behave.
At the end of the day, investors are not in for building products (at least not all of them), they are in for making money, so you should own the part of the equation that fights for the product and its users. Money is just the byproduct of you excelling at that.