GTM Fit: Design Your App to Sell Itself

Shipping to stores gets your app available. This skill is about making it sellable — before release (design the product so it is easy to buy) and after release (build the organic presence that generates demand the stores alone won't).

Two source frameworks, one shared data flow: product built → made sellable → presence → conversion.

1. Product-company gap + SLIP + MVS — strategy layer (Chris Gardner, Underscore VC — Harvard Innovation Labs). Read references/product-company-gap.md for the full treatment.
2. Organic presence system — tactical layer for indie devs and small teams (Héctor de León, hdeleon.net). Read references/organic-presence.md for the full treatment.

The Product-Company Gap

Product-market fit is one step, not the destination. Most products with PMF still fail to become companies because nothing about them was designed for distribution. Two facts to internalize early:

• Your expenses will flip. Early on, ~all spend is engineering. At maturity, benchmark SaaS spend is 40% sales & marketing / 20% R&D (the 40/20/20 rule). If your plan has no answer for "who sells this and how", the plan is half a plan.
• A great product is not enough. YouTube pre-Google had the best product on the internet and no economic model. The iPhone's decisive innovation wasn't the touchscreen — it was the App Store + in-app purchases: a go-to-market architecture.

Before Release: Design for GTM Fit

Minimum Viable Segment (MVS)