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Why startups should avoid product-market fit tunnel vision

Product-market fit tunnel vision
Image credit: Marcel van den Bos / Shutterstock

Building a business is a bit like driving a car. You don’t just look at the speedometer all the time – there is a ton of other stuff to focus on. It’s an analogy I often share with founders when trying to explain why having tunnel vision on product-market fit can spell disaster for their startup.

At BVR (later Intelysis Electronic Commerce Inc), my pre-sales role involved the 1996 launch of the world’s first web-based e-procurement system, done in partnership with Barclaycard and Chase Manhattan.

We got caught up in building tech and crazy product ideas but worst of all, we thought we knew our customers better than they knew themselves.

Our customers just wanted paperless catalogs, to procure online, and cut down on manpower and faster transactions. But we kept adding features until one day… nobody was quite sure what we sold anymore. We became so obsessed with finding product-market fit that we thought we knew what customers wanted....