Imagine you’ve built the perfect product—one that solves a real problem, with real customers eager to buy. You’ve heard the phrase Product/Market Fit (PMF) a thousand times. In Silicon Valley, Product/Market Fit is like what the Holy Grail was to Indiana Jones. It’s the sweet spot where your product’s value aligns perfectly with market demand. Everyone wants it. Investors, startup gurus, and even your uncle Phil say that if you nail Product/Market Fit, you’re golden. But let’s be real—that’s not the whole story. Not anymore. In today’s Attention Economy, where the internet is bursting with content and where people’s eyeballs are the true currency, Product/Market Fit alone is just half the story of being successful.
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The Limitations of Product/Market Fit
Let’s talk about some well-known startups that found Product/Market Fit, yet still crashed and burned. Quibi—remember that one? The mobile streaming service aimed at delivering short, high-quality shows to busy people. They had a clearly defined market, and a product that seemed to answer a need: engaging content for people on the go. They even had funding that most startups could only dream about. But what happened? Quibi never got attention. The content didn’t resonate, people didn’t talk about it, and it sank.
Juicero was another infamous example. They had an over-engineered juicer for the health-conscious market, but they never managed to grab the right attention, or at least not the right kind—instead, they became a meme, and not the kind that drives sales.
Then there’s Google Glass. It was hyped, and it had a lot of early adopters. Product/Market Fit was seemingly there, but it never quite fit into the public’s daily lives, never earned enough trust, and the content around it—which turned out to be mostly jokes about “glassholes”—sealed its fate. Having a market-ready product doesn’t always translate to real success if people don’t like, trust, or even understand what’s being offered.
Introducing Content/Market Fit
Enter Content/Market Fit. It’s the idea that alongside having a good product, you need content that grabs people’s attention, earns their trust, and, most importantly, drives action. A lot of businesses assume that if they have a great service or product, customers will come flocking. Like magic, right?
But the reality is far different. You can have the best pizza in town, but if no one knows about it, who’s buying it? The same is true online—if your product fits the market but your content doesn’t fit the online environment, you’re not getting customers, period!
The internet is driven by the Attention Economy—attention is currency, and you need content that’s designed to capture it. When you have Content/Market Fit, your content works for you, for your business, for your brand. It pulls people in, sparks curiosity, encourages shares, and drives conversions on autopilot. It’s the next level after Product/Market Fit—a perfect mesh of the message, medium, and market.
10 Signs You Have Content/Market Fit
- Instant Engagement: As soon as you publish content, people interact—likes, comments, shares, retweets. It’s not crickets; it’s a chorus.
- Immediate Conversions: Whether it’s email signups, free trial enrollments, or direct sales, your content is driving immediate action.
- Remixing Culture: Your content is picked up by others—bloggers, YouTubers, TikTokers. They’re making their own takes, remixing, and reacting.
- Traffic Consistency: You have consistent inbound traffic to your site or platforms whenever you release new content—a sign that people are actively looking forward to it.
- Trust Signals: Your audience takes your recommendations seriously. Whether you’re promoting your product or someone else’s, they follow through.
- Backlinks and Mentions: Your content earns backlinks organically, and people mention your brand or product in forums or conversations without you asking.
- Community Growth: Content drives a growing community around your brand—fans, followers, subscribers, or members who actually care.
- Brand Awareness: People recognize your brand through your content even if they haven’t bought anything yet—awareness is almost as valuable as cash in hand.
- Network Effects: Your audience grows organically because your current fans are telling their friends—whether by sharing content or talking about it.
- Sales Funnels That Work: The content is acting as a natural entry point into a conversion funnel—people are going from content to consideration to purchase without heavy push.
How to Give Yourself the Best Chance at Content/Market Fit
Finding Content/Market Fit doesn’t happen by luck. You need a strategy, and for that, you need tools like the Customer Ikigai and Simba’s Five Forces.
Customer Ikigai
Customer Ikigai is a tool for identifying what makes your customers tick—their likes, challenges, online hangouts, and views. It helps you create content that resonates. Imagine this overlap as a goldmine: between their problems, passions, places they hang out, and perceptions, you can discover content ideas that hit home.
Simba’s Five Forces
Simba’s Five Forces takes its cue from the classic business strategy framework but is adapted for the attention game. You have to analyze the threat of new content (can others easily outdo your content?), threat of different content types (maybe a podcast outperforms blogs for your audience), competition for attention (who else is in your niche, and what are they doing?), bargaining power of content creators and platforms (are you over-relying on one platform, like Instagram, where creators hold the power?), and bargaining power of internet users (people’s expectations for valuable, high-quality content are always rising).
Simba’s Content Matrix
Another powerful tool in your arsenal is Simba’s Content Matrix. Simba’s Content Matrix is a quadrant that helps you determine what is working and what isn’t when it comes to marketing on the internet using content. It categorizes content into four types: Stars (high engagement and high conversions), Evergreens (low engagement but high conversions), Catch-22s or Question Marks (high engagement but low conversions), and Zombies (low engagement and low conversions).
- Stars are the golden pieces of content that drive both engagement and action. When you have Stars, you know you’ve achieved Content/Market Fit because your content is both loved and effective.
- Evergreens may not generate a lot of buzz, but they consistently drive conversions, making them reliable.
- Catch-22s or Question Marks have high engagement but don’t lead to conversions, which means they’re entertaining but may need optimization to translate attention into results.
- Zombies are the content pieces that neither engage nor convert. Identifying these helps you understand what to drop or improve.
Using Simba’s Content Matrix helps you evaluate your content’s performance and optimize it to reach that sweet spot of high engagement and conversions, ultimately helping you achieve Content/Market Fit.
Internet Presence Optimization (IPO)
Then there’s Internet Presence Optimization (IPO). It’s like SEO on steroids—being everywhere your audience hangs out. Not just on Google, but on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, blogs, and even lesser-known channels. You need to be discoverable in every place where your audience might be, from Quora answers to podcast mentions.
Businesses with Content/Market Fit
Take HubSpot, for instance. They are a textbook case of Content/Market Fit. They built an inbound marketing empire by offering endless free content that entrepreneurs and marketers actually wanted—guides, webinars, free tools. Their blog and content funnels became the primary source of inbound leads, and this community-centric content focus set them apart in a crowded SaaS space.
Apple is another brand with Content/Market Fit—they’ve got the content machine going with announcements, keynotes, and media events that are mini-spectacles. The “captive audience” aspect cannot be ignored; when Apple announces a new product, the whole world listens—they don’t need to sell features as much as they need to tell stories about their products, which they do phenomenally.
For a startup example, look at Notion. The company rode the wave of organic content created by its users. They earned Content/Market Fit by being embraced by productivity YouTubers who created countless “how-to” videos, template walkthroughs, and productivity hacks. Notion didn’t even have to create much of their own content—their users did it for them because they loved the product so much.
Content Is the Voice of Your Product
Think of your content as the voice of your product. You may have built the perfect service, but in the age of Software 4.0, the age of bots and automation, it’s your content that gives your product a personality—a story. When customers interact with a chatbot on your website, they’re not just interacting with software; they’re interacting with what your content has made that software represent. Your content gives the voice that guides, helps, and persuades.
This “voice” becomes crucial in an era where chatbots are rapidly becoming the frontline of customer interaction. Imagine a world where every business has a bot, and the only distinguishing factor is which bot tells the most compelling story, solves problems the fastest, and resonates with customer needs.
Why Content/Market Fit is Easier for Some
For some businesses, reaching Content/Market Fit is like rolling a snowball downhill—they already have a captive audience. Take Tesla and Apple. Both have communities ready to consume and share whatever content is thrown their way—be it a tweet from Elon Musk or a 10-second teaser for a new iPhone. They don’t just have customers; they have fans, subscribers, and an army of unpaid advocates.
For businesses without such audiences, getting to Content/Market Fit involves community building. It’s about turning cold leads into warm prospects, and eventually, loyal fans who share your content just because they like you. This isn’t easy—but tools like Customer Ikigai can help you understand the overlapping interests and problems that will let you carve a unique space in people’s attention spans.
Conclusion
If Product/Market Fit is about ensuring your product solves a real problem for a real market, Content/Market Fit is about ensuring your content resonates so well that people are driven to take action. It’s about finding that perfect blend where content flows naturally into conversations, shares, and conversions. In today’s digital world, where attention is the holy grail, achieving Content/Market Fit can be the difference between a product that’s just okay and one that becomes an internet sensation.
To maximize your chances of getting there, leverage tools like Customer Ikigai to know your audience deeply, and use Simba’s Five Forces to analyze the landscape for attention competition. Master the art of IPO so you’re everywhere your audience needs you to be. Remember, it’s not enough to just have a great product anymore. In the Attention Economy, the one with the best content wins.