Here’s a familiar scenario: you’ve got a brilliant idea, you raise some funding or get approval to move forward, devote countless nights in development, and launch with some fanfare. Weeks, then months go by with disappointing results. You wonder what happened. Why aren’t customers flocking to your product? You can criticize your team or blame the insufficient marketing budget, but the reality is customers didn’t want your product the way you imagined they would.

In other words, your idea didn’t have a Product-Market Fit (PMF). If we dig deeper, the real culprit was that you deceived yourself, believing you had PMF based on your market research.

The value of Market Research depends on the data

To support your idea, you develop a market research report to provide insights and predict how customers will respond. Your report contains assumptions (unproven statements) and Other People’s Data (OPD) and your optimism bias leads you to misinterpret and miss PMF. Without market validation you ultimately end up with a market failure.

OPD is a concept coined by Alberto Savoia, a successful serial entrepreneur and author of the “The Right It.” He devalues OPD because it is “market data collected and composed by other people, other projects at other times, in other places with other methods and for other purposes,” and does not validate whether your idea will work. While not all OPD is terrible, a heavy reliance on it is misleading, creating a false sense of confidence. The way to counter the bias is by getting Your Own Data (YODA), another nod to Alberto.

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