Too Much Product, Not Enough Market Fit

If you’ve hit this wall with your startup, you’re not alone

Joe Procopio
5 min readOct 6, 2022
image by freepik

I’m at this weird inflection point right now with my startup — in fact, I’ve been there for a couple months and the problem keeps festering a tiny little bit more each day.

Have you ever reached the point with your business where there are a million things you should do and none of them seem like the “right” thing to do? That’s where I am, and it’s painful, in an existential sort of way. But I’ve done this startup thing long enough to know where the problem is sourced and how it will play out.

What I’ve got is “too much product, not enough market fit.” In other words, I’ve gotten way ahead of myself on the execution of the vision, and as a result, I’ve built this very robust version of my product that’s probably six months to a year ahead of its market.

So all at once I’ve got to play catch-up: Expand that market, educate it, accommodate it, and get enough revenue out of it to confidently take the next growth step.

Have you been there? Are you there now? Good, because I’m gonna talk myself through it and maybe there’s something in here you can pull out for yourself.

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. NLG pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com & GROWERS. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More at joeprocopio.com