Finding product-market fit is like making jam

‘The Jam’ is a useful metaphor when building a compelling product that people love.

6 min readFeb 9, 2022

“Product-market fit is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. Product/market fit has been identified as a first step to building a successful venture in which the company meets early adopters, gathers feedback and gauges interest in its product.” Wikipedia

We co-founded Kalda, the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mental wellbeing app. We started Kalda because understanding your gender and sexuality is the most important journey of your life. It’s not always easy to navigate in this heteronormative world. Kalda provides affordable, digitized therapy.

When we began developing Kalda, the search for product market fit began. We have conducted user research with over 500 people. We conducted surveys, interviews, workshops and more. We’ve also created lots of prototypes, to understand how people react to features.

Each time someone interacts with Kalda, each time someone returns to the app, we know we are getting closer to what I call ‘the Jam’.

A purple background with the word ‘Preserves’ written over and over again, in rows. Like a row of jam jars. — A purple background with the word ‘Preserves’ written over and over again, in rows.

Jam preserves fresh fruit for distribution at scale

People have been making jam since the early 1700s, to preserve fruit. Digital products have been around for a lot less time, so we can learn a lot from jam-makers.

Since the birth of the internet we have been learning to deliver experiences which were previously offline, digitally. The experience of listening to music has evolved from live music, to vinyl, tape and now online streaming.

There was a time before the invention of fridges, freezers and jam. Farmers grew a lot of strawberries, but people could only eat them when they were near a field, in the right season. A lot of strawberries went rotten and wasted. Jam was invented so that strawberries could be preserved in jars and sold to the masses all year around. The jam jar is like the smartphone. It allows experiences to be delivered at scale, simultaneously anywhere in the world.

More than simply preserving strawberries, jam became a whole new product. A different experience to eating the fresh strawberry, and a delicious one nonetheless. This is similar to mental health apps: it’s different to in-person one-on-one therapy, but it can greatly improve mental wellbeing for millions of people.

A purple background with the word ‘spreads’ written spread out across the image. Like the word had been spread like jam.

Jam spreads

When a digital product is successful, it naturally spreads. People talk about it, recommend it to their friends. Using it can even become a badge of honor, like happened with Clubhouse during lockdown in 2020. Clubhouse is an audio platform that generated hype through an exclusive invitation system. Similarly, Monzo banking app spreads because people enjoy using it, and they want their friends to use it too, so that splitting bills becomes easier.

When you make a strawberry jam or a marmalade of the right consistency, it also spreads well on toast. Thus, the metaphor of jam helps us to keep in mind what we’re trying to achieve with our product. When Kalda successfully supports someone in their gender and sexuality journey, they can’t wait to share that with other people in their lives, so that they can experience it too.

Jam is sticky

A good jam is full bodied and brings sustenance to those who eat it. But it also has a sugary taste that makes you crave it and brings you back to open that jar.

Good digital products have something core that they do, but they also need quick fun ways to interact. In the absence of fun, quick interactions, users won’t get to the core part of the product.

A good example of this is Duolingo. The user learns a language, and spends a long time learning verbs, pronunciation, doing quizzes. They use badges, quizzes, streaks as a way of bringing users back for quick interactions each day. Before you know it, you can say a whole sentence in a foreign language.

When eating jam on toast the jam entices you, the bread nourishes you. We need the stickiness of the jam to make us eat the healthier, more sustaining brown bread.

Supporting a person’s mental health is about habits, about the day-to-day. Regular community interaction, checking in with your mental health, taking mindful moments. Identifying what self care is for you is how you improve and sustain your mental health. Kalda supports you in doing those things. Each day you get a brief joy from things like affirmations and mindfulness, over time this becomes a positive habit. This means you’re ready to do that deeper self discovery work in your gender and sexuality. The quick daily interactions are the jam, deeper self discovery is the brown bread.

Fun ways of interacting are important for repeated use, consistency and therefore better outcomes. This is one way that digital mental health products can provide something that therapy cannot. Digital products are in the jam jar in your pocket, sometimes you’re doing the work without it feeling like work.

Jam-making is a slow process

Jam starts off with a large saucepan, a lot of fruit, sugar and water. It’s a slow, gradual process of reducing it down to the thick, satisfying stuff that you put in the jar.

With digital products we start with a rough hypothesis of what users want and need, and we simmer down and test those hypotheses. This process leaves us with the best and most useful features. At Kalda, it’s only by this test and learn process that we produce what our users truly want and need.

Not everyone likes marmalade

Not everyone likes marmalade, but some people absolutely love marmalade. Paddington bear was obsessed with marmalade. He carried it with him everywhere he went, and ate it by the jar full. He became a connoisseur of marmalade. A marmalade company could be confident that he was their customer. They could keep improving their product for Paddington and the other marmalade lovers. It would be a mistake to make the product taste less like marmalade, in order to appeal to the strawberry jam fanatics, who never eat marmalade.

At Kalda we focus on a specific user group, to seek out the people who can benefit most from our support. We listen to them and concentrate on their needs, rather than designing Kalda with everyone in mind, and therefore serving noone.

Jam is made from quality, fresh ingredients

There is body and weight to jam. You cannot hide a rotten peach or plum in a jam. It has to be made of good stuff.

An example of a highly successful product that demonstrates this is Spotify. Spotify could have all the functionality in the world, but if the actual music on Spotify was bad, no-one would use it. Fast playback, easy to make playlists are great. But the real value of Spotify is the quality and variety of the music.

A digital product with low quality content is like an expensive glass jar with jam that’s made of rotten fruit. At Kalda we work with LGBTQIA+ therapists to create high quality content, crafted by people who are experts in their fields.

In conclusion

Making jam that is spreadable, delicious and sticky is difficult to do. It requires experience and practice. It requires trial and error. We must stay humble in our pursuit for sweet jam! If we borrow wisdom from the best jam-makers we’ll make jam that people love.

I’ve found books and talks such as Rob Fitzpatrick’s book The Mom Test invaluable in this quest to find product-market fit. Jed Rose, who was a product manager at Microsoft and later Airwallex talks about the rocky road searching for product-market fit and has been a brilliant mentor to follow.

For us at Kalda, sweet jam is a product that users enjoy that improves their mental health.

References

Thanks to Pan Demetriou at Unrest for the blog feedback. Unrest is an accelerator programme fuelling the fire of entrepreneurs challenging the status quo.