LOOKING AT YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE THROUGH THE EYES OF YOUR CUSTOMER ??

What is product market fit?... and what does Sesame Street have to do with it?

In 1966, television producer Joan Ganz Cooney believed that a television show might be a way to help bridge the gap between infancy and preschool, giving American children with access to a television set a head start. With the backing of $8M from the Carnegie Foundation as well as Ford and the US Government, Sesame Street was the most heavily funded television show of its time. It was destined to be a success.

Brilliant, passionate entrepreneurs who are standing at the intersection of what the world wants and needs are the cornerstones of great businesses. The thing that you really need to understand here is that the best founders don’t love the product or service they create, they are obsessed with the problem that they are solving. Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen articulates this brilliantly in his Milkshake video where he summarises the ‘job’ that people hire a milkshake to do.

It was very clear what the problem the television show Sesame Street was set to address but the fundamental error that almost brought to the demise of 3 years of research and production was that they didn’t have product market fit. It was only at the 11th hour through desperate intervention that Sesame Street came to life and went onto become the household name that it is today. What 80s baby didn’t watch Sesame Street?

Anyone familiar with the show would know how it is famous for having its large puppets interact with humans. All of the research suggested that this would not work, that it would be difficult for infants to follow and would be overwhelmingly distracting at best. The show’s creators figured the best way to handle this would be to have segments of humans followed by segments of puppets. 

When it came time to view the finished product to focus groups the results were not good, they were actually so bad that the show wasn’t to go to air. Kids would sit on their seat’s edge while the puppets were on screen but the second they exited for the humans to feature they lost all interest.

While it seems perfectly logical in hindsight imagine the reception for the person who crafted the idea to integrate the humans and puppets together, they were going against all of the research that the show was built on as well as the formulas that had governed television making up until that point.

Their bravery paid off in spades, not only did the show hold the attention of the kids in the focus groups the television executives took a gamble on it and put it to air.

Christensen explains in his video that a popular fast food outlet experienced high volumes of milkshake sales in hours of trade that they wouldn’t have expected and if it wasn’t for understanding the needs of the customer they would have been blissfully unaware until this day of why. 

You see peak hour commuters would take their car through the drive through and hire a milkshake to complete the job of keeping something in their hand for a considerable time and filling them up while they continued on their commute to work. They’d tried to hire all types of other foods to complete this job but they all came up short. Donuts would taste great, but they didn’t last and crumbs went everywhere... blueberry bagels tasted great but you didn’t want to end up with cream cheese on your tie before you got to work. Milkshakes though, it didn’t matter how hard you gulped on that narrow straw they’d take their time for you to drink them, long enough for you to get bored of holding them while getting full at the same time.

Do you intimately know the ‘job’ that your market is hiring your product or service to complete? If you do, and you’re doing it well - that is product market fit.

Link to Clayton Christensen’s Milkshake Video; https://youtu.be/Gh2-oTLWJ0c

You can read more about Sesame Street’s ‘Stickiness Factor’ in Malcolm Gladwell’s book the Tipping Point.