Product-Market Fit for AI-Native Startups

What's inside

1. Level 1: What Product-Market Fit Is and Is NotFree
   Learn a working definition of product-market fit, and learn to tell it apart from signals that look like fit but are not: launch buzz, investor interest, pilot sign-ups and demo applause.
2. Level 2: Ideal Customer Profile and the Painful ProblemFree
   Learn to define a narrow ideal customer profile and to rank candidate problems by how frequent, costly and urgent they are, so you start with a problem people already spend time or money to solve.
3. Level 3: Discovery Interviews That Avoid False Praise
   Learn to run customer discovery interviews that ask about past behaviour and real commitments rather than opinions about your idea, so polite compliments do not mislead you.
4. Level 4: Concierge and Wizard-of-Oz Prototypes
   Learn to test demand before building a full product by delivering the result by hand (concierge) or behind a simple interface (Wizard-of-Oz), using off-the-shelf AI tools and human checking.
5. Level 5: Demo Magic, Novelty Spikes and Daily Use
   Learn why impressive AI demos and early usage spikes often fade, and how to measure whether a product has become part of a user's routine work.
6. Level 6: Wrapper Risk: When the Model Provider Ships Your Feature
   Learn to judge how exposed your product is if a foundation model provider or an incumbent accounting platform releases the same capability, and which sources of defensibility reduce that risk.
7. Level 7: Accuracy Thresholds and Cost per Task
   Learn to find the accuracy level users need before they will trust AI output in their work, and to calculate the model, infrastructure and human-review cost of each completed task.
8. Level 8: Activation and the Aha Moment
   Learn to identify the first action that shows a new user has received real value, and to shorten the path to that action.
9. Level 9: Retention Cohorts and Flattening Curves
   Learn to build retention cohorts and read whether the curve flattens at a stable level, which is the strongest behavioural sign of product-market fit.
10. Level 10: The Sean Ellis 40% Test
    Learn to run the Sean Ellis survey, which asks how users would feel if they could no longer use the product, and to read the 'very disappointed' share against the 40% benchmark.
11. Level 11: The Superhuman Engine and Usage Depth
    Learn the outline of Superhuman's product-market fit engine, which uses survey segments to guide the roadmap, and how usage-depth metrics show how much users rely on the product.
12. Level 12: Willingness to Pay and Early Pricing Experiments
    Learn to test willingness to pay through real commitments and simple pricing experiments, and to choose a pricing unit that covers your AI costs per task.
13. Level 13: Design Partners and Pilots That Convert
    Learn to set up design partner programmes and pilots with written success criteria, timelines and conversion terms, so they turn into paying customers instead of open-ended free trials.
14. Level 14: Founder-Led Sales
    Learn why founders should run the first sales themselves, and how to run a repeatable process from outreach to closed deal while recording what you learn.
15. Level 15: Positioning and Narrowing the Segment
    Learn the outline of April Dunford's positioning approach and use it to narrow your target segment to the customers who value your product most.
16. Level 16: Pivot, Persevere or Scale
    Learn to make a structured, evidence-based decision to pivot, persevere or scale, and to tell apart the types of pivot (customer, problem, solution or business model).
17. Level 17: Investor Metrics and the PMF Scorecard
    Learn which metrics investors usually ask AI startups for, and build a single PMF scorecard that brings together the course's evidence on retention, engagement, revenue and AI economics.
18. Level 18: Final Challenge: Prove Product-Market Fit Exam
    Apply every method in the course to a full case study of the AI product for small accounting firms and make a recommendation you can defend with evidence.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

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