Many startups fail not because they are working on their product wrong, but simply because they fail to identify the current needs of the market, and bring out a product that nobody has even asked for in the first place. Contrary to what some think, marketing isn’t just about promotion – it starts at the product design phase, and it’s important to have a solid marketing angle to everything your company does if you want to see it stay afloat.

Conduct Proper Market Research

The number one way to improve your product-market fit is to ensure that you conduct lots of research and actively ask people about their opinions on your products and those of competitors. Try to identify new problems and angles that have not been explored previously, or figure out a new solution to a problem that’s been around for a while. Chances are, there is still a lot that can be explored in this regard. Make sure to utilize all tools available to you – for example, the opportunity to take surveys for cash can be a very attractive prospect to many customers and can motivate them to engage you more actively. As long as you make it a point to sanitize the data you’ve collected, you should be able to see good results.

Understand Customer Concerns

Don’t try to impose your own views on the market on your customers, and try to actually understand their concerns as best as you can when designing a new product or service. Listen as best as you can when conducting market research, and store all the information you’ve gathered from it. Sometimes, you’re going to spot some relationships between things people say that might not be immediately obvious, especially if you use advanced analytical software and related tools. There is no shortage of those on the market today, and many are easily available without requiring any special access or resources. Of course, you’ll also need someone who knows how to actually make proper use of those tools as well, but that’s another point which is usually easier to cover.

Identify Patterns

On that note, try to figure out if there are certain patterns to the way people in your market segment act and think. Gathering lots of data and analyzing it through modern means is a good way to go about that, and there are various tools nowadays that can help you identify deep patterns in huge data sets, things that would normally not be that obvious. By learning from these patterns, you should be able to spot new opportunities for expanding in the right direction, and you’ll know that every feature you’re adding to your product is actually a meaningful one.

Test Everything

Last but not least, something which commonly gets overlooked is the importance of properly testing all of your solutions. There are many things that can go wrong even when applying a methodology that’s already established on the market, and you should do your best to test every solution you’re deploying and figure out how people actually respond to it. There’s nothing worse than spending significant resources on a new release, only to find out that it has a critical flaw which could have been easily avoided.

Improving your product-market fit is not something that you just do once and call it a day. It’s supposed to be an ongoing process that constantly targets new areas of your product and challenges you in different ways. That’s the only way to properly evolve and grow your business, otherwise, you’re going to be left behind your competition very quickly.