There is a lot of talk about the idea of achieving Product-Market fit. Successful entrepreneurs such as David Cummings discuss this topic regularly on his blog.

Achieving product-market fit is one of those things where you can’t always define it, but you know when you have it.  My view is that when your company has brought on 5 new consecutive clients for the same product and for the same value proposition, then you most likely have product-market fit.

At Cooleaf, this topic is debated almost daily. We believe we are in the ballpark of product-market fit but still not there. We’ve been gaining market traction; signing up 6 new clients within the last 3 months. To be fair, we’ve been working some of these deals for some time now and they just finally came through for us recently.

So yes, we’ve gotten some nice traction recently, but our challenge is that it has not been for the same product and messaging. Some of our clients find a lot of value in our technology and use it to manage their internal employee communications and rewarding and recognizing employees. Others find value in having Cooleaf organize and manage all the logistics of an employee engagement program (team building events).

Internally, we want to focus on being a technology company and growing that side of our business. However, we’ve found that we can solve a real problem for customers by providing the event management services. For example, last week we hosted a beer brewing & tasting class for a client. It was a cool event but it was not really about beer tastings. The real purpose of the event was to bring their employees together to build relationships. This was part of the schedule we set up for the client and we contracted with a vendor to come in and run the class for the event. The HR leader loved it because their employees loved it and the HR leader did not have to do any work to set it up.

We’re learning that there is a services side to our business and we should be ok with that. As much as we want to be a pure product company, having an opportunity to build relationships with customers is valuable. We learn so much from customers and we have an opportunity to develop case studies, referrals, and get to see the value that we’re creating for them which is meaningful.

We are continuing to invest in our technology with the goal for our platform to solve a large enough problem to be considered a pain-killer for the customer. This is ultimately how we will scale the business.

There are days where we feel so frustrated that we’re not growing fast enough. The funny thing though, is that if we take a step back and think about where we were a year ago or even 6 months ago, it’s really clear that we’ve come a very long way with both our product and customers.

Finding product-market fit is way harder than I ever thought. I would suggest for other entrepreneurs to not get discouraged because anything you’re doing will take twice as long to see the results you want to achieve. This is at least what I’ve found at our company.

At Cooleaf, we are still evolving our product and positioning to find product-market fit. It’s something that I believe all startups must achieve to scale. I will plan on writing about how we’re approaching our marketing/messaging, product development, and outbound sales to achieve these goals. I know we’re not the only ones working towards these goals so I would love to hear any feedback about lessons learned that you have experienced.