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By Dan Gebremedhin, M.D. Several studies have shown that when healthcare workers implement new forms of Health IT (Electronic Health Records and other systems) their productivity drops as they are learning to use these new systems. ( Click here to learn more about EHRs .)  In attempting to solve this problem, our company has created a robust online training platform. The platform has proven effective in returning users to full productivity faster than the industry standard. Despite this evidence, customers have been reluctant to purchase access to the platform. In this blog entry, I’ll outline the evidence for the effectiveness of our product and begin to examine whether or not there is product market fit. The Research There have been a handful of studies that have looked at productivity drop with Health IT adoption. Bhangrava et al, found that providers uniformly dropped in full productivity by 25-33% for at least one month after EHR implementation. After 3 months out, internal m...

by Colin Barry "Startups occasionally ask me to help them evaluate whether they have achieved product/market fit. It’s easy to answer: if you are asking, you’re not there yet.” – Eric Ries, “The Lean Startup” (pg 220) The Context Hypothesis-driven entrepreneurship — epitomized by Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology — has become all the rage among aspiring tech founders. It’s not hard to see why. Ries’ focus on customer discovery and iterative development addresses a dangerous problem in the two established paradigms for building software. Waterfall product development presumes that the problem and the solution are known, and we just have to build the solution in an efficient, staged manner. Agile product development admits that the solution is unknown, but still presumes that the problem is known — the “voice of the customer” (usually the product manager) will recognize useful software when she sees it. But actually, Lean Startup tells us, the problem is usually unknown, too: it...

by Josh Sandberg Is the product-market fit concept useful for entrepreneurs and managers? How can you know in the moment (rather than in retrospect) that you’ve achieved PMF? Knowing when you’ve achieved Product-Market Fit (PMF) is vital for those following the lean startup methodology: it tells you when to stop pivoting and start scaling. In a influential early post advocating the importance of PMF, Marc Andreessen claims that “You can always feel when product/market fit is [or isn't] happening”. However, several of the startups we’ve analyzed so far this semester have shown that reaching PMF is not always the lightning-bolt moment Andreessen claims: they’ve spent time stuck in a gray area where they’re having some success, but not as much as they’d hoped for. Do they continue to pivot in search of that magical state of PMF where ‘everything just works’, or accept that they’ve found a market that is ‘good enough’? I believe that two slightly more specific concepts are core to wha...

by Shavi Goel Of course, entrepreneurs want to make product which customers need/want. I would actually stretch the argument and say the deep desire and egoistic satisfaction of entrepreneurs lies in creating solutions to unmet needs/ markets. Then why is it that a large percentage of start-ups fail to create something which serves any market. Mad rush called entrepreneurship To my mind, issue at hand is very much ingrained in DNA of entrepreneurship. Any Entrepreneur has to be wildly passionate (read borderline crazy) to invest himself in the start-up based in garage. On top of it the fact that in most cases he is trying to challenge existing paradigms / business models implies there is no existing market / ready customer segment to test the product concept early on. Hence, he obviously believes strongly in his Product Market Fit (PMF) from the word ‘go’, well, in the future PMF.   Risk of Cognitive Dissonance Yes, I appreciate when Steve Blank asks to focus on early customer vali...