For many founders, the excitement begins with the product. A new technology, an innovative idea, or a solution that feels obvious. The team starts building, refining features, and preparing a launch. But one of the hardest lessons in entrepreneurship is that a great product is not enough.
The following article is based on a QSTP Sprint session on Product Market Fit, focused on defining target customers, validating problems, and identifying real signals of market pull. The session was led by Dr. Mohamed Aburawi, a surgeon turned venture builder who joined QSTP earlier this year as a Strategy and Impact Advisor, to work with founders on venture development. Trained in medicine in the United States, he went on to found Speetar, a healthcare platform that grew to serve more than 14 million users.
He opened by asking the room who was a first-time founder, who was still bootstrapping, and who already had paying customers. He was candid about his own path, a doctor rather than a trained businessperson, who built his first company in Libya before exiting it. What he wanted founders to take away was not the exit, but the idea of proximity to the problem, the closeness that gives a founder an edge no credential can replace.
The Market Does Not Care About Your Product
This was the hardest truth of the session. Founders often walk into rooms like QSTP performing confidence, talking up their product and traction, while quietly carrying doubt about whether it is working. That performance gets in the way of the real job, which is not to build a product. Building has become easier than ever, to the point where anyone can prototype something within a weekend. What is harder is asking the questions that reveal a truth about the world that other people missed. Every simple idea that later looks like genius, from renting out a spare room to sharing a car ride to work, was not really an invention. It was a truth that already existed, waiting for someone to notice it.
The opportunity is almost always in the questions, not the answers. Why are people struggling with this problem? How are they solving it today? Why are the current solutions not good enough? Who experiences this pain most often, and who would pay for something better? Those questions are what move a founder from building on assumptions to building on evidence.
Customer Need Comes Before Everything Else
A framework popularized by the venture firm NFX, the ladder of proof, lays out the sequence investors look for as a company matures, from customer need at the base up through growth and competitive advantage. Founders often skip straight to what sounds impressive, a strong team, a well-known advisor, early momentum. But none of that matters if the foundation, an actual need, is missing. Product market fit means solving that need. Struggling with it usually means the problem has not actually been solved, no matter how good the product looks on paper.
Treating Customers Like Patients
Dr. Aburawi encouraged founders to think of customers the way a doctor thinks of patients, in terms of symptoms and pain. He shared what he called a clinical intake test, a short set of questions to run every problem through before assuming a product is the right fix.
Is the problem recurring, or a one-time issue? How frequent is it? Does it carry a real cost, in money, time, or lost opportunity? What is the customer doing to cope with it now? And critically, is the conversation happening with the person who has authority to pay for a solution?
That last question points to an important distinction between the end user and the economic buyer. In sectors like education and healthcare, the person using a product is often not the person paying for it. Students use a service, but parents or institutions pay. Patients take medication, but insurance companies decide what gets covered. Convincing the end user without convincing the buyer means demand has not actually been proven in a way that generates revenue.
Say It Without the Jargon
The most hands-on part of the session was an exercise: write one sentence describing your first customer, the specific problem they face, their current workaround, and what it costs them.
Specificity was the running theme. Vague language like helping companies or supporting students was pushed back on every time. A stronger version names the exact customer type, the exact workaround they rely on, and ideally a real number attached to the cost. Founders also had to describe their product without buzzwords like AI, forcing them to explain the actual value instead of a trendy label. Narrowing focus this much feels uncomfortable for founders chasing a bigger addressable market, but no major company started broad. The job, in the beginning, is to solve one specific problem for one specific customer, precisely enough that the need is undeniable.
Why Now
The final piece of the intake test was urgency. A problem might exist for years without being painful enough to act on. What changes that is often external: a shift in the market, new competition, new regulation, or new technology that makes an old workaround untenable. A customer who cannot ignore the problem any longer makes a far stronger case than one simply pointing to something that has always existed.
Product market fit is not a milestone that arrives once and stays. It is the ongoing discipline of asking sharper questions, staying close to the problem, and resisting the urge to build before that need is proven. The market rewards founders who found a truth everyone else walked past, not the ones with the most polished decks.
Want to build on that foundation? Learn more about QSTP Incubation program.
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