How to Validate PMF Using a Landing Page

The term PMF (Product-Market Fit) has become increasingly common, and it is now being used more frequently in the commerce industry as well. If you are unfamiliar with PMF, please refer to this article (How to Incorporate PMF (Product-Market Fit) into Your Commerce Business).

In this article, as a practical guide to PMF, we introduce how to validate PMF using an LP (landing page). By reading this article, you will be able to advance your PMF validation at the lowest cost and fastest speed possible.

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Key Points of PMF

The following points are important for making progress with PMF effectively.

• Find a niche
• Don't spend too much time building pages
• Don't obsess over granular testing
• Be prepared to revisit the product itself
• Speed above all else

Find a Niche

We recommend focusing on finding a niche market and validating whether your product fits that market.

Large markets are full of strong competitors. No matter how excellent your product is, if there is a significant gap in brand recognition and authority, it becomes difficult for customers to evaluate your product fairly, making it harder to advance PMF.

Start by finding a niche market (a specific customer segment and problem), then dedicate your energy to validating whether your product is valued in that market.

Don't Spend Too Much Time Building Pages

Even when creating an LP (landing page) for PMF validation, spending too much time on the LP itself is not an efficient approach.

The most important thing to validate with PMF is whether your product's appeal resonates with the customer's problem. If that is communicated clearly, additional design or presentation beyond that is unnecessary.

LPs created for PMF are rarely used indefinitely after PMF is achieved. It is fine for them to be disposable — create and launch your LP with the minimum effort needed to validate PMF.

Don't Obsess Over Granular Testing

Driving traffic to your LP and improving it is important. However, do not spend time on minor copy tweaks.

If the key elements on your LP — such as the above-the-fold value proposition, offer content, and CTA — remain the same, refining other minor details will not significantly change results. When making improvements, focus on the primary elements that actually impact outcomes.

Be Prepared to Revisit the Product Itself

No matter how many tests you run, unfortunately there are times when nothing works at all. In those cases, you may need to reconsider the product itself.

Once a product is manufactured, it becomes difficult to revise it, so ideally you should incorporate the PMF validation process before the product is made. The approach is to pitch your planned product on a landing page, gauge whether customers would buy it, and only move into full production if the response is positive.

Even if your product already exists, conduct PMF validation before launching any large-scale promotions.

Speed Above All Else

Speed is critical in PMF. Niche markets often have a short lifespan, and if you take too long to validate, the market itself may disappear.

Also, since PMF is ultimately a validation exercise, spending unnecessary cost or time on it can leave you short on funds or time when you actually want to scale the business. Always be mindful of speed.

How to Advance PMF Using a Landing Page

Below is an example of how to advance PMF validation using a landing page.

1. Research Needs

First, to determine which market to validate PMF in, research customer needs. There are many ways to research needs, but the following methods are convenient for doing so without spending too much time or money.

• Interviews with acquaintances
• Surveys with acquaintances
• Marketplace rankings
• Search keywords
• Trends on social media
• Q&A sites
• Competitor ads and landing pages
• Media articles
• Table of contents in books

We previously introduced how to conduct customer research when you are already selling products in another article, but in the PMF phase, customer data is insufficient, so you need to proactively go out and gather it.

You don't need to cover all methods. Finding 2 to 3 niche markets where a subset of people are struggling intensely or have passionate fans is more than enough as a starting point.

2. Define Your Proposition

Once you have found a niche market, decide what product and what proposition to offer.

Even the same product can have different propositions depending on the market, and even within the same market there are multiple proposition patterns.

The following three points are key when thinking about your proposition.

• Include the product's strengths (uniqueness) in the proposition
• Turn the proposition into a clear, understandable offer
• Avoid unnecessary promotions

Include the Product's Strengths (Uniqueness) in the Proposition

Simply meeting a market need is not enough for differentiation and will not scale, so a key point of PMF is whether you can meet the market's needs using your own unique strengths. Make sure to incorporate your company's uniqueness into your proposition.

Turn the Proposition into a Clear, Understandable Offer

It is not just about clarity in the design sense — the value proposition also needs to be expressed clearly from a sales perspective.

For example, if you have a food e-commerce business and are confident in your product's taste, you might propose a low-priced trial item and validate whether the repeat purchase rate after the first purchase is high — this is the kind of PMF approach to aim for.

Obsessing over beautiful product photography on your LP is less effective than this kind of approach for advancing PMF validation quickly.

Avoid Unnecessary Promotions

Running unnecessary promotions alongside PMF — such as "30% OFF today only" — introduces noise into your results.

It becomes difficult to tell whether sales came from the promotion or whether PMF was truly achieved, so when conducting PMF validation, avoid unnecessary promotions.

3. Create the Landing Page

Once you have found a niche market and defined your proposition, create the landing page.

With Shopify, page builder apps like Gempages and Pagefly allow you to create landing pages without coding, so if coding is not your strength, we recommend making use of them.

On a landing page, if you cannot hook visitors in the above-the-fold section, the rest of the page will not be seen no matter how much effort you put into it — so make sure the above-the-fold section contains messaging that captures the interests of your niche market.

Also, long blocks of text are rarely read carefully on landing pages, so make effective use of images, graphs, tables, and illustrations to help visitors understand intuitively.

4. Validate & Improve

Once the landing page is created, drive traffic via ads and social media — but before doing so, set your target values and exit thresholds in advance.

The concepts of LTV and CAC are useful references for setting target values and exit thresholds. We previously wrote an article on LTV and CAC, so if those terms are unfamiliar, please refer to it.

Target values are set proactively by the business owner and there is no single right answer, but exit thresholds are clear. Since a business is not viable unless LTV > CAC, the values close to that relationship become your exit threshold. An LTV/CAC ratio (LTV to CAC ratio) of 3x or more is said to indicate a promising business that can scale (though reaching 3x in the PMF phase is rare).

In PMF validation, proceed based on the target values and exit thresholds set in advance. Even when you fall short of the target — and in some cases even when you fall below the exit threshold — improving the LP or traffic acquisition approach can sometimes improve results, so unless things are clearly not working, persist a little longer.

Using Google Optimize makes A/B testing on your LP easy. We introduced how to use Google Optimize in a separate article, so please refer to it.

Also, using recording and heatmap tools like Clarity or Hotjar makes it easier to identify areas for improvement, so give them a try. We introduced how to use Hotjar in a separate article. The same usage applies to Clarity, so Clarity users are welcome to refer to it as well.

Thorough Execution of Growth Operations Using StoreHero

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By leveraging the growth platform StoreHero, we help merchants achieve continuous growth through finely tuned operations — covering advertising, store optimization, CRM, and inventory management — that are difficult to achieve through manual management, as well as through the large-scale implementation of growth initiatives.

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Summary

We have introduced how to advance PMF validation using a landing page.

How thoroughly you should conduct PMF validation depends on the growth rate your business demands, but building sales purely through advertising and promotion costs without ever achieving PMF will not lead to sustained growth — so even when you are in a hurry to grow, you need to incorporate PMF thinking into how you structure your growth initiatives.

For merchants who have been building sales without ever going through a PMF process, there is no need to completely stop all current promotions — but we recommend allocating some of your resources to PMF validation and giving it a try. In many cases, this will ultimately help accelerate your business growth.