From 0 to 1M sales (a study by students)

From 0 to 1M sales: How these students managed to overcome the hardest part – Product/Market Fit …

Success for your company heavily depends on whether people are ready to pay you to solve their problem or not.
This is called Product/Market Fit.

The #1 reason why over 40% of startups fail is because they didn‘t achieve PMF.

Here are 2 examples of how 2 students achieved PMF before starting their companies:

#1. Jennifer was good at essay writing, and one time her roommate asked her to write a paper (= problem).
Jennifer was very busy with a book review and simply couldn’t help.
The roommate was so persistent that she even offered Jennifer $20 (= ready to pay).
This gave her an idea to write papers for money.
When she had more customers than she could serve, she started to hire other writers. This is how EssayService was born.

#2. When Gilboa lost his glasses on a backpacking trip, he couldn’t afford to replace them as a grad student (= problem + ready to pay less).
He did some research and was shocked to discover that glasses were generally marked up 10 to 20 times the production cost (= opportunity to pay less).
Gilboa met his fellow classmate Neil Blumenthal, and they teamed up to launch a more affordable eyewear company.
Warby Parker has sold over 1 million pairs of glasses and raised over $200M in funding.