Product market fit, a term popularized by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz in the mid-2000's, is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand. Typically, a startup’s first step is to prove that it has a strong product market fit. However, a new term has popped up in the industry that’s proving to be just as important as a startup’s product market fit: language/market fit.

Matt Lerner recently published an article about language/market fit — the point of which is to establish that a startup needs to find the narrative to tell its story that will resonate with its target audience. According to Matt Lerner, startups should strive to achieve both product/market fit and language/market fit.

Let’s dive into how Anyword’s AI technology can help startup founders to perfect their market/language fit:  

Why finding the right language/market fit is essential for startup founders.

Startups work to tackle three different problems: 

Product market fit: Finding the product that satisfies a strong market demand. For example, WeWork found strong demand for short-term office or desk space with flexibility and a high standard of amenities.

What’s the larger vision that’s bigger than the short-term product market fit? In the case of WeWork, they aspire to be a community, which helps members not only with work, but also with other aspects of their lives.

Language/market fit: Finding the right narrative to tell its story. Let’s take another example from WeWork: “Take a break from WFH, when you need it. Access a workspace near you and pay by the day or the month. Click to see how.” In this message, WeWork addresses a pain for their customers (repetitive working from home) and also emphasizes a feature of the service (flexibility.)

Sometimes all three are similar. However, it's more common that startup founders have to solve all three of these problems separately by interviewing stakeholders, customers, employees, and investors. 

How to find the perfect language fit more effectively with Anyword.

There are two different ways Anyword can help. First, using Anyword can open up the range of ideas you have about your value proposition, the benefits of your product, and your target audiences (and their pain points.)

Let’s look at an example of what Anyword can generate for WeWork. The input, in this case, is the WeWork homepage. The output is a generated ad copy for Facebook. 

The pain points addressed by Anyword are:

• Running a small business
• Finding free space
• Setting up meetings
• Getting everything done by yourself

Anyword generates several variations to explore a very wide range of pains, benefits, and features.

Secondly, once you have a general idea of your value proposition, Anyword can fine-tune that message for your audience. So, instead of running an A/B test for five variations, you can use Anyword’s predictive score to sort your variations. This score isn’t perfect. But based on past performance of millions of messages for millions of products with billions of people, it's able to predict the winners with 76% accuracy.

Startup founders have a strong idea of who their audience is, but they just don’t have the time or resources to come up with dozens of angles and pain points. Nor do they have the time to test them out. With Anyword, however, founders can explore all of these options and test them in half the time.

A look into the data and technology behind Anyword’s ability to find the right language/market fit.

We’ve seen a lot of improvements in Natural Language Processing over the last four years. From these improvements, sophisticated models can now understand words, not only grammatically, but also in how they belong together. For example, let’s say a model shows you that the phrase “I love it” performed better than the phrase “This is great.” Instead of inferring that the word “love” is better than the word “great,” the model infers that in some cases, the phrase “I love it” can be more impactful for certain audiences and products. It can also understand that sometimes it’s the emotion, rather than the word itself, that’s driving the performance.

Anyword has a lot of data that powers this high level of analysis and has a lot of experience with world class customers that we’ve been able to learn from.

Language processes and learning: What are the next steps?

The exciting part in all of this is to design a system that can allow people to be creative and be more efficient at the same time. Right now, we’re trying to understand where humans end and where AI starts. What’s the role of the marketer and the copywriter and what’s the role of the AI? For instance, what we’re doing now is breaking down the different components of each marketing message that was generated (by the marketer or by the AI) and allowing the marketer and copywriter to control what they want to emphasize. For example, they can focus on a benefit or on a target persona and ask the AI to generate messages that fit that criteria.

Going forward, this lets the user generate ideas that fit their strategy, what they want to say, and their positioning. A creative marketer in combination with Anyword will break a glass ceiling of creativity and performance.

Anyword’s main advantage for startup founders looking to find their language/market fit.

You can know the space really well and have great intuition about what will work and what won’t work. However, if you are doing it manually, without AI, there’s no way you can encompass all of the different ideas, the breadth of what you can take to the market, and test them. Anyword’s AI copy can give you direction and more ideas.

If you find yourself struggling with fine-tuning the message of your company’s market fit, now is the time to give Anyword a try. Use Anyword’s Language Model to craft the perfect messages for your audience. Whether it’s AI-generated ad copy or landing page optimization, Anyword fits all of your marketing needs. Sign up for our 7-day free trial and see how it works!