Contrarian Thoughts on Startups

You can work really hard, be charismatic, or be the best sales, marketing, engineer, product person but if you don't find product market fit, you are going to fail as an entrepreneur. I've met so many hard working and brilliant entrepreneurs who are working on things where there is not sufficient market pull.
Nothing else matters except product market fit. Founders are not magical people, they only need to have conviction on a thesis that there is a product for a market.
A lot of people love to bring up Steve Jobs as an example; but he is a clear illustration of the this rule. Next and Lisa spectacular failures for products that had no market. The iPhone and iPad were spectacular successes because they had product market fit.
If you take a look at the most successful companies, you will see extreme changes in executive leadership and even removals and departures of founders themselves. Unity, MongoDB, Twitter, Zynga, Cisco, Uber, Nextdoor the list keeps going.
The reason companies can survive these executive shifts is because the market pulls the product so hard that the company can't help but succeed.
Every startup founder I talk to always vents to me about their minor frustrations: sales team productivity, marketing campaigns, product roadmap slipping, hiring etc... But none of these issues matter if you don't have product market fit.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there is really only one that the founders need to worry about: product market fit. This is the black magic that only founders can do. They see gaps in an unaddressed market, and they create a shoddy, buggy, yet amazing prototype that people are desperate to use.
If the customers are desperate, they will overlook all the other issues and the company will succeed.
Adding more features to a product that has mediocre product market fit will not make people more frantic to use it.
Trying to build a product that is slightly better than the incumbent is guaranteed failure. There are so many companies trying to be analytics databases to replace Snowflake. They will not succeed unless Snowflake decides that they want to depart from that category. A good example of this is Atari deciding to leave what they were good at (arcade games) and entering the home console market. Nintendo swiped the market from them and Atari never recovered. You cannot take a category from the leader unless they decide to leave it. Xerox invented the GUI, mouse, and ethernet and had unbelievable product market fit, but decided to go into brokerages, insurance and investments and services. Soon, Sony, Apple, and Samsung rushed in to take the market.
Some categories are so big that they actually splitting into multiple categories. For example, the database market is so big that it has split into multiple categories: analytics, transactional, graph, time series, etc... Computers are so big that they have split into multiple categories: mobile, desktop, server, etc... This is a perfect opportunity to enter a growing subcategory and become the leader. Interestingly right now, the database market split into "Vector Databases" and "Embedded Analytics Databases"; of which Pinecone and DuckDB are the leaders. To say they will succeed if the vector database market grows large is to be determined. Arguably, identifying these category splits is probably 99% of the founders job.
Your early sales team is not a traditional sales team; they are actually a marketing team. They are experimenting with what works and trying to create a recipe to hit a nerve with a market. They are helping the company test if the product market fit is real. If they are successful, then you can hire a traditional sales team to scale the company.
How do you know you've found product market fit? For consumer applications, it's viral growth. For enterprise applications when "sales yield reaches a point where revenue per sales rep equals the fully loaded cost per sales rep."
Subjectively you should be able to identify that your customers would scream if your product was taken away from them. If they don't scream and can find a replacement, you don't have product market fit.