Product Marketing Fit is your #1 startup priority
Today’s advice post is by Dan Lesley, Founder of Homestar. Dan has over 20 years building, growing, and selling SaaS tech startups.
Starting my fourth company has been a wild ride. I’m knee-deep in building Homestar right now, and man, Product Marketing Fit keeps me up at night. Not in a bad way - more like that nagging feeling when you know something’s crucial but it’s still taking shape.
Running a startup means watching your bank account like a hawk. I’ve got spreadsheets tracking our burn rate that I check way too often. Between coding sprints and sales calls, I’m doing everything from fixing the office printer to writing marketing copy. Classic founder life, right?
Homestar’s my latest baby - a CRM for real estate agents. I was pretty pumped about the initial concept, but reality hit fast. We needed real estate agents to want this thing. Not just think it’s neat, but need it enough to pay for it and use it daily.
Product Marketing Fit isn’t just some startup buzzword. I learned this the hard way with my previous companies. Throwing money at growth before nailing this is basically setting cash on fire.
During early development, I practically lived in real estate offices. Had coffee with agents, shadowed their work days, watched them struggle with clunky old systems. Got an earful about what they hated about their current tools. That feedback was gold - it shaped everything from our feature set to how we talk about Homestar.
Here’s what really works for finding Product Marketing Fit:
- Listen, Don’t Just Hear: Ditch the surveys. Get face time with users. I spent weeks just watching agents work and asking “why” about everything they did.
- Iterate, Iterate, Iterate: Our first version was rough. But each update brought us closer to what agents needed, not what we thought they wanted.
- Test with Precision: We A/B tested everything. Subject lines, feature names, pricing pages. Data doesn’t lie.
- Know Your Niche: We said no to property managers and mortgage brokers early on. Focus was everything.
- Measure what Matters: Forget vanity metrics. We tracked daily active users and session length obsessively.
Finding that sweet spot feels impossible sometimes. But you know it when you see it. Suddenly customers stick around longer. They tell their friends. Support tickets shift from complaints to feature requests.
With Homestar, it clicked when agents started bringing us up at their office meetings. They weren’t just using the product - they were advocating for it. That’s when I knew we could step on the gas.
Each of my previous startups taught me something different about this process. Sometimes what worked before fails completely with a new market. You have to stay flexible, keep learning, and really know your customers.
Product Marketing Fit isn’t some checkbox you tick off. It’s more like tuning an instrument - you know when it’s right, but getting there takes patience and practice. And yeah, it’s absolutely worth the effort.