OK, here’s one to think on.

Product-market fit is fundamentally about customer discovery.

You get excited about an idea, build an MVP, shop that MVP to potential customers.

You listen like crazy, inevitably discovering that your first idea wasn’t (quite) right, and that your potential customers have other important pain points that a different version of your product could address.

You tweak and adjust and maybe even pivot, until you find your way to an offering that meets a big enough need profitably. Away you go.

Except…

Social entrepreneurs have signed up for a slightly different gig.

In some cases, we are here to meet an as-yet-unmet acute need with a better something. But, just as often, our job is to meet needs that aren’t well-articulated, for which the demand is not well-formed.

It’s possible that our most important job is to shape that demand, to push markets, to find things that don’t quite work (for now) and bring together different actors until it is possible—often in some creative way—to make something that’s never worked before work today.

It’s possible we’re in the market creation business.

So, the question, boiled down to its essence, is: how is discovering product-market fit different for social entrepreneurs? And is the traditional, Silicon Valley version of product-market fit just the narrowest version of demand discovery?

 

Part of the answer, of course, is that we need to discover enough demand to build a viable product in a viable market. That much is clear.

What’s more subtle and tricker is: how do social entrepreneurs engage differently in listening to (potential) customers?

Because the customers surely know what they want today.

But we are in the business of meeting today’s demand while we nurture tomorrow’s demand.

Striking that balance is no easy feat.