Achieving Product Market Fit: Let Your Users Be Your Guide

April 12, 2013

It’s the classic startup tale: a company is founded on one idea, and then pivots dramatically after market feedback. SmartBear Software founder Jason Cohen describes his company’s shift once early adopters saw the true potential of his product and led SmartBear to the honeypot (achieving product market fit).
Founded in 2003, SmartBear offers quality assurance tools that automate and facilitate code review, performance tests, and web monitoring – although that wasn’t Cohen’s initial vision. Currently serving as CEO of WP Engine, a company he co-founded after leaving SmartBear, Cohen sat down with OpenView to discuss his first company’s evolution (listen to the full, previously recorded podcast here).

The Founding

SmartBear Software’s first product was not focused on code review or quality assurance at all. It was a data mining tool for version control named Code Historian.
“My big idea,” Cohen says, “was that version control was ‘write many, read never,'” meaning that “there’s this big corpus of interesting information in there about which files are changing, when, and who’s touching them,” but nobody ever looks at that history.
Code Historian visualized that data and took developers beyond static version control so that they had more tools than simply being able to prevent two people from editing a file at the same time. Unfortunately, Cohen says, it turns out that “there probably is not that much interesting data there,” and Code Historian “wasn’t a great idea.”
Enter the users. Code Historian’s early adopters found other uses for the visualization that the product provided. “What happened was people were using these code visualization tools as part of a code review process, and I didn’t understand that at first,” Cohen says.

The Pivot

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Cohen describes the “very strange” feature requests that he began receiving as users started asking for an export tool and a way to edit the reports that Code Historian generated. For Cohen, these requests made little sense, since his product was meant to be an interactive tool with data and graphs, so exporting editable reports didn’t appear to be a useful feature. “I wasn’t thinking about code review,” he says, “so I was just confused.”
However, Cohen’s users continued to pull him and his product toward code review, as they recognized the value in it. At the time, he says, “there essentially was not any software to facilitate code review,” meaning that it was either “a terrible idea…or a big opportunity.” It turned out to be the latter.

The New Direction

Before SmartBear, software engineers were wasting significant amounts of time peer reviewing each other’s code. “The traditional Fagan-style review involves printing out code and going to meetings,” Cohen says, which, inevitably, “takes a lot of time.” Engineers needed an easier way to check each other’s work and to train new hires on the code base.
After several rounds of iterative changes, SmartBear’s historical tool transformed into a set of code review tools that solved a lot of the problems that engineers were having. Not only did SmartBear software provide an easy means for programmers to review any amount of code, but it also facilitated faster on-boarding for new engineers.

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SmartBear’s evolution speaks to the importance of getting products in front of customers as quickly as possible and iterating based on their feedback. “Most of the time, the idea you have going in is not the one that actually really works,” Cohen says, and after the first hundred or thousand customers, your product has often “morphed into something else.”
Of course, the lesson isn’t just for startup founders and doesn’t stop there.
With markets continuously fluctuating and users’ needs and expectations constantly evolving, achieving product market fit and maintaining it is a moving target. Expansion-stage companies may think they know what needs their product should address, who their strongest users are, and what new features they want to see introduced, but true eureka moments always demand user interaction.

In what ways have your early adopters helped you?

Founder

<strong>Jason Cohen</strong> is co-founder and CEO of <a href="http://wpengine.com/">WP Engine</a>. He previously founded <a href="http://smartbear.com/">Smart Bear Software</a> and co-founded <a href="http://www.itwatchdogs.com/">ITWatchdogs</a>, both of which were bootstrapped to profitability, grew to millions in revenue, and were sold. Jason is also a mentor at <a href="http://capitalfactory.com/">Capital Factory</a> and the co-host of <a href="http://answers.onstartups.com/">OnStartups Answers</a> along with Dharmesh Shah.