How To Find PMF Using The Bear Hug Method

Founders searching for product market fit should try The Bear Hug Method.

You’ve launched a product and landed some initial customers. But PMF doesn’t happen until customers are actively seeking you out. And with product market pull, you are barely keeping up with demand.

Using The Bear Hug Method will help get you there.

By bear-hugging the customer, you learn how to bring them the most value, more so than in customer discovery or during the sales process.

How to do it:

Identify an ideal customer using your product.

Bear hug them!

Give them a huge amount of attention to make sure that they are successful, even if it doesn’t make economic sense.

Do unreasonable and unscalable things to learn about their business, process, workflow, and pain points. For example:

• Spend time with them in their space or on calls
• Ask to see behind the curtain and shadow them as they work
• Offer a service that goes above and beyond and product offering

Absorb as much data as you can with this process

What to look for:

• Inefficiencies they’ve come to accept as the status quo
• Pain points
• Unaddressed needs
• Unexpected ways they are using your product

From these learnings, you may uncover:

• How and why they do things in a specific way (this will likely mirror other ideal customers)
• Ways you can better service their needs
• New problems your solution can address

Take action:

• Adjust your offering or features
• Create new use cases for your product

Here is a LAUNCH portfolio case study.

Company: Balloon is a collaboration and decision-making platform for teams and leaders.

Founder: Amanda Greenberg

Strategy: Balloon set up a customer advisory board (CAB) with their super users to meet regularly and give feedback. They set up sessions to discuss the Flights product, which is a template of open ended questions used for organizing group discussions.

Learning: Customers were enjoying the product, but wanted more guidance on how to structure questions and what best practices for Flights are.

Result: Balloon refined the Flights content to include best practices, and launched a partner program where experts can co-create Flight content. This has become a core feature of the platform.

Balloon used the CAB process to build close customer relationships, get testimonials, and referrals to other potential customers. One early CAB user was a junior member of his organization.  He stayed on the CAB after he was promoted to management and has since referred several enterprise customers to Balloon.

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LAUNCH helps builder founders hit growth and fundraising milestones. Pre-revenue? Apply to Founder University 👉 https://www.founder.university/

Approaching PMF with paying customers? Apply for funding at launch.co/apply

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