Product-Market Fit Lessons Learned, as Stated by Enric Gabarró
Former CEO of Picker explains mistakes made in pursuit of product-market fit.
By Tremis Skeete, for Product Coalition
No matter how large or small, companies take on ambitious pursuits to achieve product-market fit — the moment their products reach high levels of user adoption and can sustain themselves and provide profitable returns on investments (ROI).
This pursuit motivates companies to dream about breakthrough strategies. But to succeed, it’s going to take more than just dreams. It’s also about making good choices, and the choices need to be mindful of the runway and the limited amount of opportunity it provides.
The LinkedIn post you’re about to read is a testimony of sorts, and while it wasn’t given under oath — the statements provided demonstrate how product people can present themselves when mistakes have been made.
It’s about a company that seemed to have a great idea from the start, but then, as the story goes, they failed to achieve product-market fit.
It’s also about the company’s CEO reflecting on his choices, describing outcomes, owning his mistakes, and revealing lessons learned.
This post is a series of teachable moments from Enric Gabarro about a company and an app called “Picker.”
Picker was a product sharing and recommendations company based in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Enric Gabarró was the CEO, and at Picker they developed an app which gave users the ability to discover products shared by people they know.
With the Picker app, users can “pick” the best recommendations for items such as electronics, cosmetics, appliances, clothing, and more. You can ask fellow “pickers” for recommendations, and you can filter all your recommendations by category and pick other products you might find interesting. Picker raised a total of €4.1M, and market competitors included the social commerce app for entrepreneuers, Shop101, and the college social marketplace app for students, FuzeMee.
Perhaps this product idea could have been successful and maybe the market was not ready. Maybe they needed more funding in order to have more time to find that fit. In the product space, situations like this happen all the time.
What does not happen all the time, however, is a CEO stepping up and saying that they made mistakes and exhibit resilience.
Instead of letting failure consume him, Enrique’s post is evidence that he found value in the lessons learned, and according to his LinkedIn, he’s not slowing down, for he has already embarked upon his next quest for product-market fit. Kudos to Enrique for having a growth mindset.
Here’s a copy of his post about his lessons learned:
We shut down Picker a few months ago. We reached over 1M MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and over €1.5M of GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) x month. Sharing here my mistakes and lessons learned:
Affiliation models don’t work. Take rates are too low, aggregators are not trustworthy and there is no way you can pay content creators while having good margins.
🚫 1st Mistake: A model based on affiliate with an average take rate of 7% can’t work out.
60% of our GMV came from Amazon. One day they cancelled our account, blocked our access to their API and kept all the generated commissions from the previous 90 days. Over €50k.
🚫 2nd Mistake: Amazon destroyed us when we started to grow. Our revenue dropped 60% 3 months before starting to fundraise. Scaling a company when there is no clear PMF is the biggest mistake I made. We were 20 when Amazon blocked us. With so many people we couldn’t be fast nor agile.
🚫 3rd Mistake: Preparing to scale the company before a clear PMF and a sustainable business model.
Picker was an Instagram of Products, not a tool for creators. We wanted downloads, added products, sessions, content etc.
🚫 4th Mistake: Social Media VS Tool. We were competing against Instagram, TikTok, Youtube… We should have been a tool for creators instead.
I thought: “If we add this feature we will grow massively and engagement will skyrocket”. Bullshit. Less is more.
🚫 5th Mistake: Overfeaturing is not the solution. I don’t think adding more features helps find PMF. We had feed, search, discovery, video content…
We raised over 4M€. We never had more than 12M of runway. We spent too much specially on headcount. It was hard to reach the milestones.
🚫 6th Mistake: Planning. I thought investing more in headcount would accelerate our progress and help us reach PMF sooner. We decreased runway to hire more and that was a mistake.
In a marketplace you need to have the full experience, from acquisition to final purchase. Without this full experience we were something different — a content site.
🚫 7th Mistake: Shopping requires checkout. Without checkout you are something different, but not a marketplace.
While I could continue sharing insights for hours, these are the main lessons learned. I hope they’ll be helpful to other founders.
What a ride, Daniel Ramos and Conan Moriarty.
Right now I’m already working on something new.
Coming soon…
The Time to build is Now. 🏗
Special thanks to Jon Matheson and Sheila Murphy for their research and input which contributed to the development of this article.
