A Purchase Order Is Not Product-Market Fit

Not sure the gap you fill is big enough to build on? Start here.

A purchase order feels like proof of demand, and that feeling has ended more food brands than any competitor ever has.

Here is how it usually goes. A retailer writes a check for a product no shopper actually wants, and Jordan Buckner lived it. He sold into Whole Foods with, in his own words, zero consumers actually buying the product. The buyer said yes, the first PO landed, and the money showed up before a single person reached for it on the shelf.

So the company did the natural thing and chased the next retailer, then the next investor check. And the whole time, the one number that mattered was quietly falling apart.

Our repeat rate from customers was not keeping up. People were still buying, but our product did not have product market fit, meaning there's not enough demand to sustain the growth of the business. — Jordan Buckner, CEO of Foodbevy

A first PO means a buyer believed the pitch, but a reorder is the only thing that proves a customer actually wants it.

The pill, the headache, and the gap

So how big does demand have to be? Big enough to close a real gap.

There is a book called Gap Selling that nails it. Picture a splitting headache and a pill that fixes it. Worth ten bucks, maybe twenty, easy yes. Now the pill costs a thousand dollars, so are you still buying? Probably not. Now a doctor finds a rare brain cancer, two months to live unless you take that same pill, so what is it worth now? A million? Two? Would you go into debt for it?

The pill never changed, only the size of the gap did.

The gap has to be big enough, and if you can help people see that gap, they decide for themselves. — Michael Maher, Host of The Longer Game

Let people get there on their own

You can argue with a founder, or you can lay out the options and let them say the math out loud. Honestly, the second one works better every time.

That is how Cartology coaches clients. Reserve inventory for Amazon and capture the revenue, or send it somewhere else and maybe miss it, so which one are you feeling? Then the truth says itself: two million bars to break even, every retailer saying no, that is a big gap, and maybe not one worth closing.

If the gap is small, no ad budget on earth will manufacture demand that was never there.

The one number that does not lie

So before the next raise, before the next shelf, watch the repeat rate. Validate the gap on Amazon or direct to consumer first, where reorders and reviews tell you the truth fast. And if the gap turns out to be small, change the product, the price, or the position, instead of spending into a problem the market already answered.

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You can buy distribution and you can win shelf space, but neither one makes a customer come back. Solve a gap big enough that people would actually miss the product if it disappeared, and demand stops being the thing you chase.