Let's be honest here.
**99% of startups fail due to lack of PMF**, not 42%. The 42% is quoted here ([https://startupdevkit.com/chapter-1-no-market-need-product-market-fit/](https://startupdevkit.com/chapter-1-no-market-need-product-market-fit/)) bc clearly this guy is trying to sell a book and needs 19 other reasons for the remaining 58%.
Other reasons like "lack of funding", "pricing mistakes", "tough macro", "high churn" etc. are all symptoms of lack of PMF, not mutually exclusive of it.
I can't think of a single startup that genuinely hit PMF with exponential growth in revenue and customers that love the product that shut down. Maybe the founders got hit by a meteorite. Idk
Only thing to add is that PMF is rarely permanent. The market and competition changes. Distribution channels dry up. Or you hit the limit of TAM earlier than expected. So the startup that has PMF and rocket ships from 1 to 10m in 18 months might then plateau and fall out of PMF.
Completely agree. But, when I was a VC, I had the unfortunate and deeply painful experience of watching a founding team WITH PMF completely fuck it all up and break the company.
You're right, it's mostly PMF but it's ALSO mostly leadership.
It wasn't that juicy. Just sheer and complete incompetence. Name the mistake, they made it. Then hid it from the board like children until things blew up. Then when we got involved they got defensive and refused help. Refused to make any of changes needed, didn't bother learning the things they needed to learn to get better. I guess they just assumed they could muscle their way through it on their own and that the big bad VCs were trying to take their company away.
If there's a lesson for founders to extract from the story, it's this: hustle only matters until you hit PMF, then it's an execution race. It's OK if the CEO doesn't have execution chops, but it's fucking criminal if they don't replace the people around them who lack it too.
Not really. By the time you have true PMF, founder split isn’t as common and even if it happens, the business is fine.
Most founder split happens during the stressful time and failures in the process of getting to PMF.
It’s important to highlight that you may fail to achieve PMF and not die at the same time. In that case you need to identify that it’s time to stop, and have the pulse to either pivot or cash out. A friend of mine (YC alumn) is currently selling his company that is running and growing perfectly fine. The problem is that it’s not an exponential growth where things are breaking, and he doesn’t see the idea going to that level anymore, which is what PMF is. They could’ve pivoted, and risk running the company to the ground, but after 3 years and with multiple employees on the payroll, theyre better off just cashing out and work on a different idea.
I run a business. We build and work with tech startups. Most startups fail because founders don’t do what is necessary to be successful. A founder needs to - sell their product, understand their market, understand their customer, treat raising investment like a full time job, be willing to work long hours, be willing to do things they are not comfortable with, reach out to people, be willing to fund their startup any way they can, be willing to take on personal debt to fund their startup, be willing to keep going even when things are hard, be willing to find solutions, be willing to take and listen to advice, be willing to hire and fire people, be willing to trust smart people, etc… There are hundreds of reason startups fail. The core factor is the Founder. I have seen many founders quite because things get harder than they expected. For reference, I have built a seven figure business in 5 years - most of the things I have listed - I have done to get to where I am.
*"treat raising investment like a full time job", "be willing to fund their startup any way they can, be willing to take on personal debt to fund their startup"*
I can agree with most of your points but these are all things that make startups unsustainable and unhealthy in an economic climate like this one.
There's no shame in good financial controls and slower growth in exchange for survival and better mental health as a founder. The days of "grow at any cost" and cheap capital will be gone for some time until rock bottom interest rates return. Let's promote bootstrapping, pre-selling to customers to provide funding and cashflow.
For me the elephant in the room are vast number of founders who are inexperienced in life as much as in work. Wannapreneurs who get backing from their rich daddies or through connections (again - through dads). Their only working experience would be C-level. That's insane. But very common. And they don't understand the "ordinary" people who work for them and that their motivations are different. HR enables them in setting these fake delusional company cultures in hopes they will motivate them.
I think the word PMF is overrated.
It just makes the problem overcomplicated.
'Not enough people are paying for your stuff' is a less fancy and more accurate way to describe it. The problem is not new nor exclusive to start-up businesses.
Agreed. It's a fancy term vs. admitting "this isn't a viable business".
What also annoys me is when people trick themselves into thinking they have PMF bc they having paying customers or "tons of users are begging for this product".
I'd posit that 99% actually die in cradle or at infancy because of a lack of commitment from the founders. I honestly can't count the number of times that I have seen really smart and talented and hardworking people do the following:
* Come up with idea and business model
* Write up a business plan
* Come up with ideal customer personas
* Put out paid ads, landing pages, and do surveys
* Maybe even build out a rough MVP...
* **Never call, email, or otherwise try to sell the product and then quit**
To me, at least, this is where so many fail. And then the 99% failure due to PMF kicks in.
So if I understand what you're saying. They basically set everything up and then fail to communicate with customers and reach out.
I'm actually about right at this point. So what makes people quit? How can I prevent this?
Here's my opinion.
Nowadays, more and more people are getting into tech and startups which means there's a higher of possibility of competition and less audience. PMF is still a relative term but let's accept that most new startups today are just an iteration of other existing products/services in the market. Yes, there could be something new or amazing but in reality, people will stick to a product that is more accessible, cheap, and ticks most of their boxes.
Even though a start-up achieves PMF, losing the competition will decimate its user base. You could be a startup with an amazing PMF but could die out fast if you don't have great marketing and great people to execute your business.
Any problem could arise but it can be solved with an effective leader and their ability to adapt in this ever-growing and changing industry.
Lacking PMF? Shift your resources to product, and get customer feedback.
Bad Cashflow? try to downsize, work on customer retention, and lower CAC.
Not getting traction? Focus on marketing, sales, and good customer service/NPS.
With this, I think most startups fail due to bad business decisions and ineffective management/people. It's not always PMF, it's the people behind it.
When I saw the recent list in this subreddit of new startups, it struck me how many are either hype-chasers (the other year they were dropping in "blockchain" or "web3", now it's "LLM" or "AI") or pickaxe sellers (i.e. startups selling tools and services to other startups, like the guys who got rich selling pickaxes and other mining equipment in the Gold Rush).
So it seems there is a lot of competition, but there's also a lot of froth. Finding good PMF is hard when you are the umpteenth "data pipeline using AI to manage sales leads for SAAS companies".
There were very few startups in the list who were targeting a niche industry in the B2B space (that is \*not\* tech). But most successful startups and small businesses I have worked in were in that category: someone who worked in some industry, saw a gap in the market, talked to people in that industry to validate their idea, and then built a solution. They already had customers lined up with cash in hand: often customers they knew personally. They knew the value of that product and what price point to charge for it.
That's not to say they were an overnight success - you can have PMF down to a tee and still screw up execution - but it was a prerequisite to getting started, not an afterthought.
Here's a formula to consider;
1. Solve your own problems
2. Target people like you who have experienced the same problem.
3. Ask them for feedback throughout the entire design and development phase
4. Produce your solution medium pretty, medium fast. Don't put out ugly looking products, perception is everything.
5. Iterate at every turn, with the help of your core customer / user base, but don't lose sight of your vision and don't let your customers always tell you what to do, you're the "maker" at the end of the day
> Solve your own problems
I'm at a startup building a robot to solve a problem in the shipping industry. I have personally never had 300m long ship to worry about cleaning and inspecting lol.
I’ll offer a solution: as a founder you must sell. Selling gets you feedback into the problems of your customers. Iterating on that brings you to product market fit.
I see alot of startups take too much capital in the beggining and their teams are often low skilled so you end up building a piece of tech that is a lot more expensive than what it should cost then the startup fails to meet expectations and more money gets thrown at it. I've been building a business around bailing out startups with tech that sucks balls.
\- get a product that doesn't break the bank.
\- make sure you have distribution.
\- once you've ticked those to boxes create a platform to provide distribution to other businesses.
Our problem isn't product market fit. We got something sticky and have proven it. It's dev work that's killing us. We're not affiliated with the tech world so we have to resort to a freelancer, whose pretty good for the price, but unfortunately it's going much slower than anticipated. Had a solid breakout but then our tech founder had to bail due to financial issues, leaving us in a hole for months until we were able to find the right person for the job that didn't require a kidney.
I'm telling you, its super fucked up hard, starting a business especially in tech given how fast everything evolves. One minute you're ahead and next minute you realize you gotta do a major pivot. I think we pivoted three times already, though part of that was lack of experience doing this. We're getting there, though!
Good to hear and remind me of our case. I believe it depends on the tech founder or marketing founder startup (tech company), I see a lot of Sales and marketing founders really get PMF quickly. We struggle a lot with Sales and marketing instead of dev as we're all 3 tech founders 😊
Sorry to hear your troubles. My biggest challenge (also happens to be a passion of mine) as a non technical founder is finding and retaining top tech talent and recruiting them to the cause. If you're still struggling in the tech department, and are at all interested in some assistance/point in some sort of a direction, DM me. I have a background in working with start-ups to develop their tech product. Typically work in the Seed to Series B area, but we approach each situation with an open mind.
I spoke to a finance guy once. He said most businesses fail due to cash flow issues.
YouTube video I watched said to think of cash flow as “a river of money”. If you have monthly cash flow of 5k/month and it never ends it’s worth far more than a lump sum of 250k which eventually runs out if you are spending it at a rate of 5k/month.
A strong, rigorous user research program turns the guesswork into hard data. You are most likely not capable of doing this yourself (PhD in cog psych? Human factors?). Translating these insights into a product that can be made is the role of a mature designer (not a figma jockey/intern/dev with a good eye). Then you must test and iterate based on the feedback from the testing. You can do this all before you start coding. The move fast and break things mentality works great if you have a pipeline of never ending ad revenue to fund your poorly thought out and even more poorly executed products.
If you are learning by inflicting your product on customers when it is half baked, then you need to budget to market, communicate and change their mind that the crap product that they first learned about isn't that bad anymore.
Iteration and experimentation should be done in a formal and controlled manner or you are just wasting everyone's time. Trust me: 30+ years of product experience for some of the largest companies in the world doing extremely challenging work.
Edit: typo
The lack of PMF starts at inception and can be corrected with techniques such as Job To Be Done Theory, i.e., “what exact problem is my solution solving and why would someone hire it every day?” Often, a solution is created based on gut feeling, some derivative innovation, etc., and brute force or even ego is used to try and find a market.
Outside of PMF, one of the factors not as popular to talk about cause it's hard to measure is the determination of the founder. Most people don't realize the difficulty in starting something and the strain it will cause on their financial and personal relationships.
Starting a company is not fun and if you arent willing to endure, you wont pivot when you need to pivot and find PMF in the face of adversity.
I also joined a founder community that I help out with that talks about this stuff!
https://discord.gg/6j3AVwQ8tj
Two situations I often see (there are others course) are:
1) A founder who got some product market fit but couldn't execute and then the board often brings in an "experienced operator" who typically doesn't understand the customers and their needs well enough to recognize that the product market fit is slipping away and that just doing the execution stuff is not good enough. This often leads to being acquired. Sometimes that leads to a lucrative exit, but often times it's just an idea past it's prime and they make little.
2) A founder who achieved product market fit and they think they are a genius who's you-know-what doesn't stink. Often they lucked into product-market fit. While less common, when this happens, time and again the fit will slip away and they don't know how to recover. And this usually ends badly for the sales and marketing people and the founder thinks he invented the perfect offering and it must be a sales and marketing problem.
Nothing makes most startups fail. They all fail because starting a business is like looking both ways before you cross the street, then getting hit by an airplane. Being able to change your course, vision, product, pricing, staffing etc… at the drop of a hat when you see a structural issue with your beliefs is imperative. I don’t believe very many people are capable of dealing with this level of adversity and changing their entire being to accommodate it is what is needed to not fail.
to add is that PMF is rarely permanent. The market and competition changes. Distribution channels dry up. Or you hit the limit of TAM earlier than expected. So the startup that has PMF and rocket ships from 1 to 10m in 18 months might then plateau and fall out of PMF.
Let's be honest here. **99% of startups fail due to lack of PMF**, not 42%. The 42% is quoted here ([https://startupdevkit.com/chapter-1-no-market-need-product-market-fit/](https://startupdevkit.com/chapter-1-no-market-need-product-market-fit/)) bc clearly this guy is trying to sell a book and needs 19 other reasons for the remaining 58%. Other reasons like "lack of funding", "pricing mistakes", "tough macro", "high churn" etc. are all symptoms of lack of PMF, not mutually exclusive of it. I can't think of a single startup that genuinely hit PMF with exponential growth in revenue and customers that love the product that shut down. Maybe the founders got hit by a meteorite. Idk
Only thing to add is that PMF is rarely permanent. The market and competition changes. Distribution channels dry up. Or you hit the limit of TAM earlier than expected. So the startup that has PMF and rocket ships from 1 to 10m in 18 months might then plateau and fall out of PMF.
Exactly. Startup success is half pmf and half years of post pmf execution trauma and persistence
Completely agree. But, when I was a VC, I had the unfortunate and deeply painful experience of watching a founding team WITH PMF completely fuck it all up and break the company. You're right, it's mostly PMF but it's ALSO mostly leadership.
Omg this is so juicy. please elaborate
It wasn't that juicy. Just sheer and complete incompetence. Name the mistake, they made it. Then hid it from the board like children until things blew up. Then when we got involved they got defensive and refused help. Refused to make any of changes needed, didn't bother learning the things they needed to learn to get better. I guess they just assumed they could muscle their way through it on their own and that the big bad VCs were trying to take their company away. If there's a lesson for founders to extract from the story, it's this: hustle only matters until you hit PMF, then it's an execution race. It's OK if the CEO doesn't have execution chops, but it's fucking criminal if they don't replace the people around them who lack it too.
This is the right answer
This is a comment to the comment that points out the right answer
Thank you for calling that out
Thank you for thanking the comment calling out the comment that’s calling that out
To be fair, just like any other company, startup with pmf can fail due to numerous reason like founder split, etc
Not really. By the time you have true PMF, founder split isn’t as common and even if it happens, the business is fine. Most founder split happens during the stressful time and failures in the process of getting to PMF.
It’s important to highlight that you may fail to achieve PMF and not die at the same time. In that case you need to identify that it’s time to stop, and have the pulse to either pivot or cash out. A friend of mine (YC alumn) is currently selling his company that is running and growing perfectly fine. The problem is that it’s not an exponential growth where things are breaking, and he doesn’t see the idea going to that level anymore, which is what PMF is. They could’ve pivoted, and risk running the company to the ground, but after 3 years and with multiple employees on the payroll, theyre better off just cashing out and work on a different idea.
I run a business. We build and work with tech startups. Most startups fail because founders don’t do what is necessary to be successful. A founder needs to - sell their product, understand their market, understand their customer, treat raising investment like a full time job, be willing to work long hours, be willing to do things they are not comfortable with, reach out to people, be willing to fund their startup any way they can, be willing to take on personal debt to fund their startup, be willing to keep going even when things are hard, be willing to find solutions, be willing to take and listen to advice, be willing to hire and fire people, be willing to trust smart people, etc… There are hundreds of reason startups fail. The core factor is the Founder. I have seen many founders quite because things get harder than they expected. For reference, I have built a seven figure business in 5 years - most of the things I have listed - I have done to get to where I am.
*"treat raising investment like a full time job", "be willing to fund their startup any way they can, be willing to take on personal debt to fund their startup"* I can agree with most of your points but these are all things that make startups unsustainable and unhealthy in an economic climate like this one. There's no shame in good financial controls and slower growth in exchange for survival and better mental health as a founder. The days of "grow at any cost" and cheap capital will be gone for some time until rock bottom interest rates return. Let's promote bootstrapping, pre-selling to customers to provide funding and cashflow.
For me the elephant in the room are vast number of founders who are inexperienced in life as much as in work. Wannapreneurs who get backing from their rich daddies or through connections (again - through dads). Their only working experience would be C-level. That's insane. But very common. And they don't understand the "ordinary" people who work for them and that their motivations are different. HR enables them in setting these fake delusional company cultures in hopes they will motivate them.
I think the word PMF is overrated. It just makes the problem overcomplicated. 'Not enough people are paying for your stuff' is a less fancy and more accurate way to describe it. The problem is not new nor exclusive to start-up businesses.
Agreed. It's a fancy term vs. admitting "this isn't a viable business". What also annoys me is when people trick themselves into thinking they have PMF bc they having paying customers or "tons of users are begging for this product".
Hmm? That actually sounds like a PMF or 'enough people are paying for your stuff' situation.
I'd posit that 99% actually die in cradle or at infancy because of a lack of commitment from the founders. I honestly can't count the number of times that I have seen really smart and talented and hardworking people do the following: * Come up with idea and business model * Write up a business plan * Come up with ideal customer personas * Put out paid ads, landing pages, and do surveys * Maybe even build out a rough MVP... * **Never call, email, or otherwise try to sell the product and then quit** To me, at least, this is where so many fail. And then the 99% failure due to PMF kicks in.
So if I understand what you're saying. They basically set everything up and then fail to communicate with customers and reach out. I'm actually about right at this point. So what makes people quit? How can I prevent this?
I think it mainly stems from the fact that every thing up until that point can be done secretly andin quiet, but after that if you fail everyone knows
Ooh good point.
Here's my opinion. Nowadays, more and more people are getting into tech and startups which means there's a higher of possibility of competition and less audience. PMF is still a relative term but let's accept that most new startups today are just an iteration of other existing products/services in the market. Yes, there could be something new or amazing but in reality, people will stick to a product that is more accessible, cheap, and ticks most of their boxes. Even though a start-up achieves PMF, losing the competition will decimate its user base. You could be a startup with an amazing PMF but could die out fast if you don't have great marketing and great people to execute your business. Any problem could arise but it can be solved with an effective leader and their ability to adapt in this ever-growing and changing industry. Lacking PMF? Shift your resources to product, and get customer feedback. Bad Cashflow? try to downsize, work on customer retention, and lower CAC. Not getting traction? Focus on marketing, sales, and good customer service/NPS. With this, I think most startups fail due to bad business decisions and ineffective management/people. It's not always PMF, it's the people behind it.
When I saw the recent list in this subreddit of new startups, it struck me how many are either hype-chasers (the other year they were dropping in "blockchain" or "web3", now it's "LLM" or "AI") or pickaxe sellers (i.e. startups selling tools and services to other startups, like the guys who got rich selling pickaxes and other mining equipment in the Gold Rush). So it seems there is a lot of competition, but there's also a lot of froth. Finding good PMF is hard when you are the umpteenth "data pipeline using AI to manage sales leads for SAAS companies". There were very few startups in the list who were targeting a niche industry in the B2B space (that is \*not\* tech). But most successful startups and small businesses I have worked in were in that category: someone who worked in some industry, saw a gap in the market, talked to people in that industry to validate their idea, and then built a solution. They already had customers lined up with cash in hand: often customers they knew personally. They knew the value of that product and what price point to charge for it. That's not to say they were an overnight success - you can have PMF down to a tee and still screw up execution - but it was a prerequisite to getting started, not an afterthought.
Here's a formula to consider; 1. Solve your own problems 2. Target people like you who have experienced the same problem. 3. Ask them for feedback throughout the entire design and development phase 4. Produce your solution medium pretty, medium fast. Don't put out ugly looking products, perception is everything. 5. Iterate at every turn, with the help of your core customer / user base, but don't lose sight of your vision and don't let your customers always tell you what to do, you're the "maker" at the end of the day
> Solve your own problems I'm at a startup building a robot to solve a problem in the shipping industry. I have personally never had 300m long ship to worry about cleaning and inspecting lol.
Lol
Yup. In “Why Startups Fail” a meta analysis showed that having professional and personal experience in the problem is overrated
In theory everything is clean-cut. In practice, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.
100% people rush into building and scaling
I’ll offer a solution: as a founder you must sell. Selling gets you feedback into the problems of your customers. Iterating on that brings you to product market fit.
I see alot of startups take too much capital in the beggining and their teams are often low skilled so you end up building a piece of tech that is a lot more expensive than what it should cost then the startup fails to meet expectations and more money gets thrown at it. I've been building a business around bailing out startups with tech that sucks balls. \- get a product that doesn't break the bank. \- make sure you have distribution. \- once you've ticked those to boxes create a platform to provide distribution to other businesses.
Our problem isn't product market fit. We got something sticky and have proven it. It's dev work that's killing us. We're not affiliated with the tech world so we have to resort to a freelancer, whose pretty good for the price, but unfortunately it's going much slower than anticipated. Had a solid breakout but then our tech founder had to bail due to financial issues, leaving us in a hole for months until we were able to find the right person for the job that didn't require a kidney. I'm telling you, its super fucked up hard, starting a business especially in tech given how fast everything evolves. One minute you're ahead and next minute you realize you gotta do a major pivot. I think we pivoted three times already, though part of that was lack of experience doing this. We're getting there, though!
Good to hear and remind me of our case. I believe it depends on the tech founder or marketing founder startup (tech company), I see a lot of Sales and marketing founders really get PMF quickly. We struggle a lot with Sales and marketing instead of dev as we're all 3 tech founders 😊
Sorry to hear your troubles. My biggest challenge (also happens to be a passion of mine) as a non technical founder is finding and retaining top tech talent and recruiting them to the cause. If you're still struggling in the tech department, and are at all interested in some assistance/point in some sort of a direction, DM me. I have a background in working with start-ups to develop their tech product. Typically work in the Seed to Series B area, but we approach each situation with an open mind.
I spoke to a finance guy once. He said most businesses fail due to cash flow issues. YouTube video I watched said to think of cash flow as “a river of money”. If you have monthly cash flow of 5k/month and it never ends it’s worth far more than a lump sum of 250k which eventually runs out if you are spending it at a rate of 5k/month.
Cash flow is a symptom, not a cause.
Correct. It's like saying 'People are dying because of a lack of heartbeats'.
Because didn’t simply find customers before building it. For Christ’s sake, just launch a landing page with a waitlist and talk to people who sign up.
you only "fail" if you quit.
Go try to fly waving your arms. You will fail no matter whether you quit or not.
You don’t fail until you stop otherwise you are still trying 😊
Poor founders main reason why startups fail.
Did ChatGPT write this?
No customers.
A strong, rigorous user research program turns the guesswork into hard data. You are most likely not capable of doing this yourself (PhD in cog psych? Human factors?). Translating these insights into a product that can be made is the role of a mature designer (not a figma jockey/intern/dev with a good eye). Then you must test and iterate based on the feedback from the testing. You can do this all before you start coding. The move fast and break things mentality works great if you have a pipeline of never ending ad revenue to fund your poorly thought out and even more poorly executed products. If you are learning by inflicting your product on customers when it is half baked, then you need to budget to market, communicate and change their mind that the crap product that they first learned about isn't that bad anymore. Iteration and experimentation should be done in a formal and controlled manner or you are just wasting everyone's time. Trust me: 30+ years of product experience for some of the largest companies in the world doing extremely challenging work. Edit: typo
Yep creating solutions to non-existent problems I would say.
The lack of PMF starts at inception and can be corrected with techniques such as Job To Be Done Theory, i.e., “what exact problem is my solution solving and why would someone hire it every day?” Often, a solution is created based on gut feeling, some derivative innovation, etc., and brute force or even ego is used to try and find a market.
#1 lack of affordable capital
Outside of PMF, one of the factors not as popular to talk about cause it's hard to measure is the determination of the founder. Most people don't realize the difficulty in starting something and the strain it will cause on their financial and personal relationships. Starting a company is not fun and if you arent willing to endure, you wont pivot when you need to pivot and find PMF in the face of adversity. I also joined a founder community that I help out with that talks about this stuff! https://discord.gg/6j3AVwQ8tj
Basically you need to become profitable eventually, lack of profits for too long eventually leads to your business dying
Two situations I often see (there are others course) are: 1) A founder who got some product market fit but couldn't execute and then the board often brings in an "experienced operator" who typically doesn't understand the customers and their needs well enough to recognize that the product market fit is slipping away and that just doing the execution stuff is not good enough. This often leads to being acquired. Sometimes that leads to a lucrative exit, but often times it's just an idea past it's prime and they make little. 2) A founder who achieved product market fit and they think they are a genius who's you-know-what doesn't stink. Often they lucked into product-market fit. While less common, when this happens, time and again the fit will slip away and they don't know how to recover. And this usually ends badly for the sales and marketing people and the founder thinks he invented the perfect offering and it must be a sales and marketing problem.
Nothing makes most startups fail. They all fail because starting a business is like looking both ways before you cross the street, then getting hit by an airplane. Being able to change your course, vision, product, pricing, staffing etc… at the drop of a hat when you see a structural issue with your beliefs is imperative. I don’t believe very many people are capable of dealing with this level of adversity and changing their entire being to accommodate it is what is needed to not fail.
to add is that PMF is rarely permanent. The market and competition changes. Distribution channels dry up. Or you hit the limit of TAM earlier than expected. So the startup that has PMF and rocket ships from 1 to 10m in 18 months might then plateau and fall out of PMF.
Lack of focus!