It’s time to add some details to the lean canvas and turn it into a bigger solution-market fit narrative. This analysis and type of interview come from Reforge, with some slight tweaks on our side. Reforge calls this product-market fit, but given the content it is better to see it as a more generic solution-market fit.

There are six pillars of solution-market fit:

• Problem to solve: explain the problem in as much detail as possible. You can break down the problem into primary and secondary sets of problems. Try using the same words as the target users use to describe the problem.
• Target users: describe how the envisioned user (and the buyer if they’re separate people). Start with demographics, but focus also on psychographics and behaviors exhibited by target users. You can lay out short-term and long-term audiences if you expect it to change over time.
• Value proposition: the key part of your document, describes what the product will offer to customers and it needs to be obvious how the value prop is connected to the problem to solve.
• Competitive advantage: this is where all that business work in the previous stage comes in handy. Explain why we’ll beat competitors both in short- and long-term. The advantages might not be the same for these two different time horizons.
• Growth strategy: explain how you plan to acquire new users to make the user pool growth sustainable. Think about short-term and unscalable channels and also about long-term scalable ones. Both can serve their purpose in winning over customers and market share.
• Business model: dive deeply into the revenue side of things – define how you will charge for your services and define metrics you need to measure to be sure you’re on the right track.

There’s a simple and streamlined template from Reforge you can use to create a solution-market document. It’ll guide you and ensure you won’t miss out on any relevant data.

This narrative document is your hypothesis; you should think of it as a living organism, not something set in stone. You’ll use it to run a solution-market interview with your hypothesized customers. These interviews can take anywhere between 40-90+ minutes so be prepared to be in there for the long haul.

At its core, this interview validates the hypothesis you laid out in your narrative document. Two potential ways these interviews might go: you tick all the boxes and validate the solution-market fit, or some of the hypotheses are invalid. In the second case, you can use a secondary set of questions that can help you pivot the product.

Interview template (GDoc) and interview observations template (GSheet). You’ll need to tweak and tailor these documents to ensure they fit your specific client's needs.