Beyond Product-Market Fit: How Dreamdata Flipped the Script on Traditional B2B Growth

Beyond Product-Market Fit: How Dreamdata Flipped the Script on Traditional B2B Growth

Every startup founder knows the product-market fit mantra: build what the market wants, and success will follow. But in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Dreamdata CEO Lars Grønnegaard shared a contrarian view that challenges this fundamental startup principle – sometimes, you need to find the right market for your product instead.

When Product-Market Fit Gets Lost in Translation

“Everybody tells you need to find product market fit, and all you hear is product. That’s all you hear,” Lars explains, highlighting a common misconception among product-focused founders. This tunnel vision can lead teams to endlessly iterate their product while missing other opportunities.

Lars, coming from a product background himself, knows this trap well. Coming from Trustpilot where he served as head of product, he’s seen how product-centric thinking can sometimes obscure better paths to growth.

The Market-First Alternative

Instead of exclusively adapting their product to meet market demands, Dreamdata took a different approach. “There’s a lot of things that can be done where you go the other way and you fit the market to the product,” Lars notes. This perspective shift opened up new possibilities for growth.

Learning the Hard Way

This insight didn’t come easily. Their early enterprise push illustrates the traditional product-market fit trap. “Initially, after like five customers or something, we actually landed two companies I define as enterprise. And I can say that wasn’t a good idea because at that stage, the product was not even a product, I would say it was more like a prototype and a ton of duct tape and lots of PowerPoints.”

Instead of immediately trying to adapt their early product to enterprise needs, they eventually learned to find markets where their current product could provide value.

Focus as a Growth Strategy

This market-first thinking led to a counterintuitive insight about focus. “When you think you’re focused, you’re not so narrow down,” Lars reflects. “Find a very narrow ICP when you start. And don’t mistake your initial ICP for your tam.”

Rather than trying to serve everyone who might theoretically benefit from their product, they focused on finding the specific market segment where their product already worked well. “We were kind of scared to go super narrow on the ICP and just say, look, we’re only going to go for B2B SaaS companies, 250 to 500 people that use segment.com and only target that,” Lars admits. “And I think if we’d done that, we could have moved a bit faster.”

The Hybrid Approach

Their unique approach to product and market evolution is reflected in their go-to-market strategy. “We do a lot of organic social, we also do some paid, of course, and then, yeah, we’re product people. We can sort of escape that. So we have, I wouldn’t call it product led growth, but it’s very much product assisted sales motion,” Lars explains.

This balanced approach recognizes that growth comes from finding the right mix of product capability and market fit, rather than treating them as separate challenges.

Data as Market Validation

Their free product provides valuable data about how different market segments use their solution. “We have a free product. So that means we get a lot of data from a lot of companies and we can see,” Lars notes. This data helps them identify which markets naturally align with their product’s strengths.

The Future: Automation-Market Fit

Looking ahead, Dreamdata sees automation as their next frontier. “The big picture for us is this automation angle,” Lars shares. “You’ve seen automation in B2C go to market for the last 20 years, and you’re definitely seeing it now in the B2B space as well.”

Rather than trying to force their product to fit every possible market need, they’re identifying markets ready for B2B marketing automation and building for those specific use cases.

For B2B founders, Dreamdata’s journey offers a valuable lesson: sometimes, instead of endlessly iterating your product to fit a market, the better path might be finding the right market that’s already prepared for your product’s unique approach. It’s a reminder that product-market fit isn’t always about changing your product – sometimes it’s about discovering where your product already fits.