What if ChatGPT came five years earlier: Missing the Mark of Product-Market Fit and Positioning

A Product Ahead of Its Time

Some years ago, I worked for a B2B startup that employed a brilliant data scientist who created a neural network that transformed their search product into a question-answering system. The AI craze was just kicking off, and the company saw the question-answering feature as a way to sell enterprise search. My colleague saw it as potentially negating the need for search. Rather than search SharePoint for a document explaining the policy for vacation time, just ask the computer, "Does my vacation time rollover, and what is the limit?" and get a direct answer. Why search for documents when you could search for answers?

The company's leadership made my friend go and find her own customers and run all of the professional services necessary to make it work. She was working over eighty hours per week and running herself into the ground. Most of the company's customers were still using its basic search product. Multiple people approached executive management about ways to expand this but were told, "There is barely a market yet for AI, and most of our competitors barely do it." Management gave marketing almost no resources to push the product.

What if the company positioned the product in the right market?

Yet the market for enterprise search was intensely competitive, and the company had fallen well behind other competitors such as Elastic and Coveo, let alone Amazon Web Services. A problem with mid to late-stage startups is they often fail to recognize their own innovation and pivot. This question-answering feature was ready roughly around 2016-2017. Rather than sell this as a specific tool to improve Enterprise Search, imagine this startup said, "Yes, let's ingest a bunch of data from the Internet, slap an API on it, announce Google is bordering on obsolescence, and charge people for the pro version?"?

That is more or less what OpenAI did half a decade later. Even funnier, after the release of ChatGPT, the search company's salespeople reportedly asked, "Why can't we do things like this?" Engineering answered, "We have been able to for like five years." So, the company had the product and some early customers but needed to recognize and meaningfully test the larger market. Today they have but a tiny sliver of the overall enterprise search market and different leadership.

This search company could have done better in product-market fit and positioned the product as more than a search add-in. They saw their competitors as Elastic, Coveo, and CloudSearch rather than Google. The technology was too advanced and resource-intensive for people looking for a basic search solution. There was an entire market for the technology that the company never realized.

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This article is part of a series about B2B startup marketing. Check out my previous post on product market fit, and consider following me for more. If you need a hand with product positioning, marketing, content strategy, or growth, please contact me on LinkedIn or write [email protected].?

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