Segway: a cautionary tale
Product-market fit is pretty much the only thing that matters in the early stages of a business. The Segway was the perfect example of that fact.
Let’s talk about product-market fit (PMF, not to be confused with 90s popsters EMF). It is the only thing that actually matters in the early stages of a business. If you don’t have it, every euro you spend on marketing, every hour you spend on narrative, and every hire you make in sales is simply accelerating your burn rate and bringing the inevitable wall a little closer.
I’m a regular reader of the excellent Marketing Monk newsletter, but I’m not sure a recent edition discussing the failure of the Segway got the story right. It concluded with the lines:
“The technology was never the problem. The real failure was the go-to-market strategy”
Let’s be charitable and say that is half right. Yes, the technology wasn’t the problem. But the truth is that the best go-to-market strategy in the world could not save a product that never had a chance*.
The cleverness trap
The problem with the Segway was simple, though probably painful for its creators to admit. They were in love with the cleverness of their own technology.
They were so enamored with self-balancing gyroscopes that they became completely oblivious to a brutal market reality: they were selling something that was objectively worse than a bicycle for twenty times the price.
Product-market fit is ultimately about jobs to be done. You have to ask: what does your product actually do for your target customer that isn't already being handled more efficiently elsewhere?
In the case of the Segway, it was designed to facilitate short, single-person journeys in urban environments. But as noted above there was already a notable competitor in this space. It is called the bicycle, and it used by billions of people worldwide.
Crucially, none of those billions of people appeared to be particularly dissatisfied with the incumbent product. The bicycle is cheap, requires no charging, is relatively easy to store, and offers a level of utility that the Segway could never match.
The Segway did the "job" significantly worse than the existing solution. It was heavy, expensive, and developed a social stigma that no amount of PR could wash away. It wasn't a failure of "strategy" in the sense of choosing the wrong channels or the wrong messaging; it was a failure of the product to justify its own existence in the face of the competition.
(A brief digression: electric bikes and scooters have since demonstrated that there IS potential for disruptive technology in this sector. But the first expands/improves on the existing product, and the second has a key benefit that the Segway never had: portability. It is also cheap)
Successful marketing starts with first principles
What is the lesson here for those of us scaling B2B SaaS or technology companies? It is that successful marketing must always start from first principles. If you do not truly understand who is buying your product and the specific "why" behind that purchase, you are building your entire growth engine on quicksand.
Attaining that knowledge requires a level of honesty and self-reflection that is often missing in the boardroom. Nobody likes to hear that their baby is ugly. Founders and engineers put years of their lives into these products, and it is human nature to protect that investment by blaming "marketing" or "sales execution" when the market doesn't respond.
I have seen very smart, very senior people refuse to accept what is staring them in the face. They look at a lack of traction and decide they need a better "narrative" or a "more aggressive" distribution strategy. But you cannot narrate your way out of a product that doesn't solve a core problem better than the status quo.
Solving from the close out
I am a firm believer that sales and marketing is a challenge that needs to be solved "from the close out." This means working backward from the moment a customer actually signs the contract.
If you are struggling to close deals, the first thing you should question is product-market fit. Is the friction of buying and implementing your software (for example) higher than the friction of the problem it’s supposed to solve? If it is, no ‘secret sauce’ in your LinkedIn ad campaign is going to save you.
When you solve from the close out, you force yourself to confront the reality of the transaction. You stop looking at vanity metrics like "top-of-funnel awareness" and start looking at why a rational human being would choose your solution over the alternative, even if that alternative is just doing nothing or sticking with an Excel sheet.
The three questions that matter
For any startup or scaling business, the questioning of PMF should never stop. It isn't a milestone you pass once and then forget; it's a fundamental state of being.
You must never stop asking:
What job does this product actually do?
For whom exactly does it do it?
Why is it significantly better than the alternative?
Side benefit: if you can answer those three questions with absolute clarity and honesty, a lot of your marketing content will create itself. You don't need to invent a story, because the utility of the product provides the narrative. You don't need to guess where your customers are because their "job to be done" tells you exactly where they will be looking for a solution.
If you can’t answer them, then all the clever marketing campaigns in the world won’t make a difference. You’ll just be another Segway—a marvel of engineering that nobody wanted to buy.
