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Comment by dgudkov | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand this. You can't skip finding product/market fit. No matter how much money you have, if you have no product/market fit you're toast. If you're not desperate to find product/market fit (as Lean startups are) because you have tons of money -- you may never find it.

To me, Lean startup is not about money. It's about building the most efficient process of finding product/market fit. Once you've found something that really works, then it's time to look for big money and scale up. In most cases, what you need in the beginning is $50K-500K which can come from savings/FFF/consulting/seed round.

Too much money in the world now. A result of the decade of near-zero interest rates.

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You can definitely skip product market fit. It takes some startups years to find true product market fit.

The price of admission of product market fit is a great product and a great team. Hard to do these things on a budget, especially as the space of "cheap" startups that can be built with a few 100k becomes more crowded.

>It takes some startups years to find true product market fit.

I can think of only 3 reasons (not mutually exclusive) why it happened:

1. They had too much money which made their PMF search process inefficient.

2. They had to educate themselves about the market from scratch. Which means that the original idea was a wrong/uneducated guess.

3. They didn't find product/market fit. The same team had to restart with another idea (possibly several times) and it took them much less time than several years to find PMF.

Sometimes a visionary founder with an instinctive understanding of the target customers can skip product market fit. Those people are rare, though, and it's not a skill that can be taught or written down in a book.

> if you have no product/market fit you're toast

Unless you create the market to fit the product. Which could be what Katzenberg, for example, is trying to do: create a new fad and cash in on it.

Microsoft spent billions propping up Xbox for years before they found market fit. You don't need market fit if you have lots of cash.

FFF = Friends, Family, and Fsomething?

I think the saying is Friends, Family, Fools.

Friends, Family, and Fucking for cash?

Don't knock it. It's helped launch many an Instagram influencer's career, I bet it's gotten a few startups off the ground as well.

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