I’ve recently started helping a small team working on an early stage product. Before I got involved I heard troubling news: they had no product-market fit, a large deal had fallen through that was undermining core dynamics, and maybe it’s best to just build [insert latest fintech fad] instead. Once I got involved I discovered that the product had thousands of happy-path iterations, hundreds of thousands of proof points, and more traction than it could currently handle.

I did nothing but change the framing from how early products are perceived to find traction to how they actually find traction. Three observations here.

Only the visionary and the desperate: the more innovative or disruptive* your product is, the more it’s likely to find traction with early adopters. They are those who see the next paradigm before others do. Most of the time they are the ones that can’t fit in the current paradigm either because they want the new future you’re promising – the visionary – or the current paradigm is killing them – the desperate. They are never the largeco boss. Startups chasing that One Big Deal to Rule Them All aren’t chasing real traction, they’re chasing a rescue fantasy. Start with the few who love you, make them extremely successful, and watch how they become your best sales people.

Hard on the vision, easy on the details: teams often get stuck on certain modalities or early product features that aren’t core to what the product is trying to do, and that holds them back. Monetization is one example – it’s important to be paid, but the right combination of feature gating in your freemium model isn’t something you’re likely to get right on first try. Knowing where you want to go and then being flexible on other details is critical, otherwise every failed experiment feels like the product is failing. It isn’t – not as long as you have engaged happy-path users.

Product Market Fit hindsight: the way people describe PMF you’d think it feels like the Warp Drive engaging in Star Trek. It’s never that. Reaching PMF feels like a million different things breaking, customers complaining, and stuff you used to do manually not working on a daily basis. It’s an upward spiral that starts with a few users that love you, and a behavior that you encourage and build on. It’s almost never evident in the moment, and it often feels like failing forward.

*Some products still honestly deserve this adjective