Three questions before you build any product

Most startups don't fail because the product was built badly. They fail because they built something nobody actually wanted.

There's a name for getting this right. It's called product-market fit. (That just means you've built something a real group of people want and keep coming back to. The product fits what the market needs.) It sounds fancy, but it really comes down to a few simple questions you can ask before you write a single line of code.

Before I help anyone build, I ask three things. They sound easy. But most founders can't fully answer them.

• Who is it for? Not "everyone." The one person who really feels this problem. The clearer you are here, the easier everything else gets.
• What problem does it fix? Say it the way that person would say it, not the way you'd sell it. The real problem, not the feature.
• Why now? What changed that makes this worth building today?

That last one trips people up. Sometimes the honest answer is "nothing yet." And trust me, it's much better to know that before you spend three months building.

Once you can answer these, everything gets clearer. You're not trying to make something for everyone anymore. You're making one useful thing for one real group of people. That's also why I'm a big fan of starting with an MVP, the smallest version people can actually use. It lets you test your answers in the real world, fast and cheap, instead of betting months of work on a guess.

Answer the questions first. Then build a small version to test them. That's how you give yourself a real shot at fit, instead of learning the hard way after everything is already built.