It been a while. I just read a couple of posts on the relative importance of Team, Product and Market that motivated me to write.
Here are the post. The first is from Marc Andreson (Netscape fame) and the second is in response to Marc by Paul Buchheit (Gmail fame). I think both are worth reading.
If I read Marc right he states that the market wins and the product-market fit defines success.
Marc refers to Andy’s (Benchmark) quote
Andy puts it this way:
When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
Paul reiterated this but claimed that if your product is conducive to fast frequent iteration (web products) a good market will draw out the right product.
Paul says…
For web based products at least, there’s another very powerful technique: release early and iterate. The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them.
I think they both have good points however I would frame it differently.
When I look at a startup for Tandem Entrepreneurs, I look at the market as a target, the bigger the market the higher the probability of hitting the target. And I look at the team as the archer, the better the archer the more likely that they will hit the target. The product at the start should be at best treated as a guess of where you should aim.
Now having said this I would caveat it with the fact that defining a large market is easy. Defining the right market is an art and it is hard but critical.
The market becomes the focus of the startup and any startup without a focus is hard to execute. So I agree with Marc that the market is very important but it need not be huge. It needs to be big enough and clearly defined.
Once the market is defined and the team understands that the market and not the product is the focus; then begins the job of tuning the product-market fit whiich can be done well by releasing early and often (if your product and market are conducive to this) as Paul suggests.
A thoughtful definition of the market and a good team are critical to success. But I would contend that if you have a good team that understands the importance of the market, they will in the right environment, be able to find a good market – there is no dearth of opportunity.
- Muscle Capital : Delivered - May 22, 2013
- Visiting India - February 6, 2012
- ZumoDrive expanding team in Asia - January 26, 2010
Well what makes a great team,product,or market is matter of preception.
Great product: When all companies are focusing of great product in hardware; Bill gates find a great product in software.
Great team: I agree with Jaspreet. Any venture is a venture in risk.Group of people who is commited enough to work against all odds and finish with a successful business is ‘great team’.Unfortunetly you cannot declare a team as great or otherwise untill they work together and produce results.
Great Market: Peter duckers says the purpose of any venture is to create ‘new market’.What size will make this new market great is again a subjective issue.For VCs putting milions of dollors into a venture expecting nX returns would like to keep this size flexible enough to keep nX return constant under all conditions.Focus is good but too much focus is also equally bad.
Personally I feel when we talk about ‘greatness” we try to time things.We want to introduce ‘resonance’ effect by moderating variables like team, market,product.In reality , this timing hardly works.
Satpal Parmar
Interesting post. What then makes a “great market”? Going forward, is the Indian Internet a great market?
A “team” is which works … thats it.
When a great team enters the market, they are bound to win thats what makes then great.
They may change there business plan, start a new vertical, create demand, defines new rules. IMO, early investment should be into people and not products. For,
Have a outstandingly new product idea is very rare and not only key to success. Capturing the market and starting a “sustainable profitable business” is the key to success.
– J
Finally finally
“Neccessaity is mother of invention”
Personally this stand for any team or any product or any market. Those inventions hit the market more accurately, which are evolved through neccessaity of the inventor. This is very personal subject.
Like in mobile gaming we port games for 400 handsets. Some body in my office came up with an idea. We can make a program which can port games for us(it is highly customized games because we make games in gameloft). Whole night we were discussing this idea while boozing. How to write files? How to write variables ? How to control visual, sound and internal file management using this 400 or 500 line code.
Now market, products or teams come too late in the game. It is all about problems you face in your life. You just want to solve them for yourself as well as your customers.
I think this should be basic premises of any idea.
Virat Khutal
> So I agree with Marc that the market is very important but it need not be huge.
> It needs to be big enough and clearly defined.
I’m not sure what your trying to get at. I don’t think Marc is suggesting that you need a huge market to make something special happen. I’d like to suggest a clearer interpretation.
A Great Market is more likely to be one that is ready to absorb and internalize a solution (disruptive or otherwise) from the outside. For example, the pace of technology change in social networks is blindingly fast. Here the final market are online users who have gone through several generations of change in social networks with very little regard for status quo.
The story of Munjal Shah’s startup Riya is oft-quoted in this context. Riya started out with the basic idea of visual search and face-recognition in personal photos. After repositioning itself (Like.com), Riya aimed at Retail and now shows better results.
Even the “Innovator’s Dilemma” does not require a Product to be aimed at a large market to begin with. In the cases cited in the book, the Product was aimed at a smaller sub-market which was ready for the change and needed the product.
In the later half of the article, Marc also addresses the idea that a great product might actually “create” a huge market – “Can’t great products sometimes create huge new markets?”
– Santosh