EP #468 - Laurent Decrue & Boris Manhart: Have You Done Your Homework on Product-Market Fit?

Timestamps:

10:22 - Defining and testing the Ideal Customer Profile

13:11 - Does ICP vary from B2B to B2C?

20:40 - Metrics that prove you’ve hit PMF

30:29 - When is it time to start scaling?

About Laurent Decrue & Boris Manhart:

Laurent Decrue is the co-founder of the moving company MOVU and the software company Holycode, and the former CEO at Bexio. Currently he is active as CFO and co-CEO at Holycode. He holds an MBA from the University of Basel and previously worked at DeinDeal.

Boris Manhart is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Growth Unltd, a company that helps scale your business. He was previously involved with CodeCheck and Numbrs, and studied for a couple of years at the Universität Zürich.

During their chat with Silvan, they discussed how to achieve the all-coveted product-market fit. Naturally, this journey starts with defining and testing your ICP, i.e. your Ideal Customer Profile:

• You’ll create an ICP in your head based on assumptions, at the beginning. That’s normal. You might even be more or less right. But you can’t rely on your intuition alone; 

• First of all, niche down. Go for a smaller market than the one you had in mind;

• Then conduct interviews to find out if it’s the right market. This is how you can actually test all your customer development assumptions.

Once you’ve more or less figured out your ICP based on real customer data, you can start thinking about metrics. Which ones can tell you if you’re really selling your product/service to the right market? Boris and Laurent don’t like the common overreliance on figures like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) or the 1M ARR benchmark. They both prefer to use the Sean Ellis test, which consists of asking people how disappointed they’d be if they could never use your product again. But don’t get too hung up on the “40% were very disappointed” metric one sometimes sees floating around: each company is its own unique case.

It’s often considered that once PMF is reached (or, at least, once you reach it for the first of many times), that’s when you should start scaling your company. But you might want to think carefully about how to go about it: during his chat with us, Laurent shared his story of how Holycode made the mistake of hiring 2 new sales people in Switzerland and Germany to move from founder-led sales to employee-led sales, when in fact they should have hired a growth marketing team to help generate more leads — because without generating more leads, what use is having the sales people to convert them?

Check out the conversation for more valuable learnings on how to (continuously) reach PMF. 

The cover portrait was edited by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.smartportrait.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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