The Product-Market Fit Pyramid, the center is the customer’s underserved needs
Why was it like this?
In 2015 and when Dan Olson created the Product-Market Fit pyramid. Prior to this work, most people in the startup business, especially marketers defined market efforts by first defining the target customer. This is exactly how it was done before. Not to repeat all the history, but you could go back to the first computer built by IBM in 1899 to manage the census. Marketers understood the power of this data back pain. A man named David Sarnoff took advantage of this form of data to efficiently reach mass markets. in relative terms, media was cheap back then. It remains cheap even when the first paid placement search engines appeared.
Why is this new way better?
For one thing, media is not cheap. 2nd, it’s really hard to have a mass-market reach. you have no choice but to think very carefully about the audience but instead of thinking about the traditional ways of reaching people, defining people by their underserved or unmet needs creates a precise total addressable audience.
Today, technology allows you to quantify underserved needs like never before. Things like computational linguistics, language psychology, based upon the lexical hypothesis can be operated at scale with large computer systems. the amount of language being spoken and written is massive and this provides organizations to understand people and help them find the products that make life better.