Каноничный способ поиска product-market fit от ко-фаундера Nex | Мобильная Азия

Каноничный способ поиска product-market fit от ко-фаундера Nextdoor. Как говорится, если твой сервер упал под нагрузкой на старте проекта – это самый лучший сигнал, что ты делаешь, что-то полезное.

I distinctly remember one day when I thought we had reached product-market fit. We only had about 10 neighborhoods using Nextdoor at the time. One of our engineers needed to upgrade the database, which required taking the service offline for about an hour. As a lean team, he decided to start the migration (and make Nextdoor unavailable) around lunchtime in the middle of the week. We thought no one would notice the downtime since we had less than a few hundred users at the time.

About 10 minutes after taking the servers offline, I started getting emails and phone calls from concerned users. What happened to Nextdoor? One user called me in a panic because she needed to contact a neighbor immediately and the directory on Nextdoor was unavailable. Another user was worried that the service was suddenly gone and he was trying to organize a neighborhood meeting that night to save a local park. We rushed back from our lunch break to get the servers back online as soon as possible. It was an embarrassing mistake to take the service down mid-day without any advance notice. But the good news was we had clearly built something that mattered in the lives of users—they noticed within minutes when the service was unavailable.

If your users are urgently calling and demanding access to your product, you have clearly built something of real value. That’s product-market fit.”