Finding PMF: Billion-dollar Barbie, The A Team, Lululemon Leggings
What does a fashion doll, Ed Sheeran and yoga have to do with finding Product-Market Fit? Turns out a lot.
If you’re unfamiliar with PMF or Product-Market Fit, here is a good primer. The concept is most often credited to entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreesen and means “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Do enough people want to pay for what I’m selling? Can I build and grow a sustainable business in this market? It’s obviously more complicated than that and there are some who want to be clever about it being a ‘journey and not a destination’ (duh, isn’t everything in life?) but those are the basics.
I’m a Barbie girl
It’s about damn time. (TBD how well that phrase ages!)
The Barbie movie became the first billion-dollar film with a sole female director over the weekend.
“Most of the movies in the billion dollar club are, predictably, male-oriented and franchise-driven. At this moment, 53 films have made more than a billion dollars. Barbie is among only nine that center female protagonists. . . . Nearly half of them are animated films made for children. Blockbusters with strong girl characters are great. But the dearth of super successful movies about grown women illustrates Hollywood's infamous sluggishness when it comes to gender parity.” npr.org
Despite the weak sauce “ ” backlash and parodic hilarity like this, women of the world have united with one voice (and their wallets) and said, along with their Twisted Sisters, “We’re not gonna take it anymore!”
—(whispering) Um, excuse me.
Yes?
—Twisted Sister is not plural.
There’s only one sister in the band?
—Well, they aren’t sisters at all.
They aren’t sisters?
—No, they are actually all men.
Of course they are.
Still, we’re not gonna take it anymore! We aren’t going to pay to watch your superhero, fast-car-driving, gunslinging, lightsaber-wielding machismo violence and gore anymore!!
Except that yes, yes we are.
I saw Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in theaters six times with my husband. Six times. He’s seen Barbie once with me. And I would never ask him to go another five times. (Btw, he would if I asked him to. He’s awesome like that.)
This is the reason one of the many subversive “jokes at men’s expense” was so funny to me.
“Barbie’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League joke comes relatively late in the movie, after Ryan Gosling’s Ken has taken the idea of patriarchy to Barbieland, brainwashing the Barbies into being subservient to the Kens and looking to rename it Kendom (or Kendom...land). When a monologue from America Ferrera’s Gloria begins cutting through and waking the Barbies up, one version, Writer Barbie (played by Alexandria Shipp), describes it as: ‘It’s like I’ve been in a dream where I was really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League.’” screenrant.com
While I giggled, my husband immediately and audibly voiced his ire. “Aw, come on!” he objected to the screen.
Other men expressed to me how Barbie was “somewhat problematic” or “put men down.” (Just imagine if I had the audacity to say anything negative about Die Hard or Shawshank Redemption.)
Having seen the film multiple times now, here’s the thing the “it puts men down” faction fails to realize: At the end, the Kens are offered a lower circuit judgeship—not a Supreme Court seat, which is what they asked for. The narrator suggests cheekily that the Kens may eventually build “as much power and influence in Barbieland as women have in the real world.” What would have been much more realistic is if first, the married Kens were given the right to own property, then to vote, then to . . . you get the point. Instead, they jumped ahead in this “flip the script” matriarchy as only men can do.
In recent memory, the only thing I couldn’t care less about men’s opinions on is the Roe v Wade reversal. Until you can say, like Barbie’s beaming final line, “I’m here to see my gynecologist,” please refrain from sharing.
Because not all products & services are made for you, men. It’s not always about you. And that’s okay. We still love and respect you.
Product-Market Fit Lesson #1:
You can’t please everyone. Focus on those who benefit most from your solution.
Moving on . . .
The A Team
Ed Sheeran is one of the most successful artists of all time. He’s sold more than 150 million records worldwide, has 14 No. 1 hits, and a net worth of over $200 million. And he’s only 32 years old.
He opened his recent Disney+ documentary, Sum of it All, with this gem:
“If you’d have gone back to my high school into my classroom and gone, ‘Who in this class is going to be in a song with 50 Cent and Eminem in 15 years, rapping with them?’ It’s so unlikely [that it would be me].
But I believe in speaking things into existence. . . . I planned my life to the nth degree. It wasn’t like I was in this lost maze of trying something. It was like, ‘No, this is what I want to do and to do it, I have to do all these gigs and write all these songs and it will happen.’ And it did.”
I love this because often successful people lean into the narrative that “I just faked it until I made it” or “I got lucky.”
Sheeran went on to share how his plans unfolded (i.e., how he found product-market fit). Here are a few insights we can apply to PMF:
Go where there’s a gap.
“I found I was just largely ignored at singer-songwriter gigs, so I would go and play jazz nights, hip-hop nights, soul nights, poetry nights.”Work harder than your competition.
“I always knew that you just have to work harder than everyone else cause there’s always going to be someone that wants it more than you. I looked at all my peers and was like, ‘Well you’re doing one show a week; I’m going to do three shows a night.’”Get scrappy with go-to-market.
Sheeran didn’t wait for a big record label to sign him. He found his distribution channels first through sbtv and then YouTube. “You have to start the fire yourself.”Believe big and then even bigger.
In 2011, “The A Team” was Sheeran’s first hit under a record deal and it launched his first tour. “When the successes started happening, that’s kind of what I started chasing. I didn’t know I could play the O2 arena, so let’s try and do Wembley. I didn’t know I could do Wembley. Let’s headline Glastonbury. And it kind of snowballed from there, really. And then before I knew it, I had played over 40 countries and sold nine million tickets. And that became 63 million albums sold worldwide.”Look forward to looking back.
After a stadium of tens of thousands of fans sang the lyrics on their own and then erupted into applause at the end of “The A Team,” the artist commented to the backstage camera, “I remember like, no one in a room listening to that. It’s crazy having this every night.”
Over the past two decades, I’ve taken several products through this product-market fit journey. It’s thrilling and frustrating and scary and rewarding and it’s not for everyone. While Peter Thiel’s Zero to One contrarian question, “What revolutionary truth do you know that no one else agrees with?” is meant to drive home the exclusivity of becoming a successful startup, it’s not that difficult to answer. Ed Sheeran’s secret was his talent + work ethic. His ‘revolutionary truth’ was that his music was meant to be heard globally. For those of us in tech, it’s the belief that [target audience] needs [my solution] to solve [the urgent and pervasive problem you’re solving]. So be the best at it.
Product-Market Fit Lesson #2:
Plan to succeed. Don’t be “in this lost maze of trying something.” Be like Ed.
Quick aside: Yes, I get the uneasy juxtaposition of Barbie as a powerful feminist manifesto with Ed Sheeran’s success launched from “The A Team,” a song about a crack cocaine-addicted sex worker.
How much did you pay for these pants?
I tried Aerial Yoga for the first time last week. I texted with the instructor, who is also my personal trainer, beforehand. She said to wear “workout pants not see through 😂 and a soft shirt helps the rubbing under the armpits! and you can bring a yoga mat!”
I wasn’t sure if the “not see through” was a general reminder or specific. Either way, I was determined not to embarrass her or myself. The last yoga pants I bought were from Wal-mart and about a decade old. I didn’t have to check them to know they were pretty threadbare.
So I got online and made my first-ever yoga pants purchase from the Land of Lululemon. The best option for the cut and fit I like was a whopping $118. I tried not to think about it too much and hit “Place Order.”
As I flip-flopped along the cobblestone path to the studio, I passed fragrant, pale yellow honeysuckle vines (not kidding). I was still mentally weighing the feeling of showing up modestly clothed in my new “coveted classic” of “buttery-soft Nulu fabric” with “added Lycra fibre for stretch and shape retention” against my husband’s TBD reaction to the price tag for such luxury. I entered class to see the 12 hanging black silks and spent the next hour sweating and fumbling with 12’ of suspended fabric and several inches of extra fabric on the bottom of my new pants.
Worth it? Yes and no. The buttery-soft is for real and felt amazing. But for the cost, I would have expected the Nordstrom-esque treatment of tailoring included. Because I am no Barbie. The flare pant boasts a half-my-height 32.5” length. Not only do I have to tack on the additional price of hemming, but also the inconvenience of extra trips to the tailor’s.
* * *
Willingness to pay is one of the hardest things to figure out in product-market fit. When I advise startups on their pricing strategy, it usually comes down to “getting creative” and iterating quickly, which means you need to understand all the relevant context before making decisions. And you have to be prepared to give all or parts of your product away for free to start.
So what’s important in determining willingness to pay? Let’s take my Lululemon purchase (not a perfect analog to software but there are things to learn here, so go with me).
A Product Manager could say, “She purchased them. She’s willing to pay.” But look deeper at my needs and behavior. I go to the gym or wear yoga pants at least five or six times a week. So I need more than one pair and, relatively speaking, I have a high amount of discretionary income to spend on technologically-advanced yoga pants. If I think $118 is expensive, especially if the tailoring service isn’t part of the purchase price, what about those who are more price sensitive? And if I never get around to having the one pair hemmed, I won’t wear them again. And then I definitely won’t be buying more. So am I actually willing to pay?
Product-Market Fit Lesson #3:
Willingness to pay is still about understanding your customers’ needs and behaviors. Dig deeper.
There you have it. Three PMF lessons learned from three random yet zeitgeisty things:
Barbie: You can’t please everyone. Focus on those who benefit most from your solution.
Ed Sheeran: Plan to succeed. Don’t be “in this lost maze of trying something.” Be like Ed.
Lululemon leggings: Willingness to pay is about understanding your customers’ needs and behaviors. Dig deeper.
* * *
I did finally tell my husband about the ridiculously priced pants. He went wide-eyed and then shrugged and suggested we go see Barbie again.
