Before You Get to Product Market Fit

Product Market Fit is not a destination, it is a journey

About a decade ago, I used to host food tours. This wasn’t a business, it was just a hobby that started with a bet with a friend and his food blog. He mistakenly thought he had the definitive list of best NYC Chinatown dumplings, and I had to prove him wrong.

A bit of context, I had lived in Beijing for a year. It was my first exposure to what actual Chinese food was like, and I traveled across many parts of China eating everything I could. This was when I fell in love with dumplings, whether steamed, fried, or filled with soup, and took my fondness for dumplings back home to NYC.

So back to the bet, I challenged my friend to a food throwdown. We would go to ten dumpling places, rate each dumpling, and declare a winner. We each invited some friends to come join and be witnesses. Then on the day of our dumpling challenge, instead of four or five people joining us, we had a crowd of forty, all hungry and excited to eat.

Despite the chaos of that first outing, it was so much fun we did a follow up but with soup dumplings. Then I continued on with a few more tours because other friends missed the previous tours. That was when a startup friend of mine turned me onto a Berlin based startup called Gidsy that offered a…