PMF Program vs. 0 to 1 Product Development Workshop
Both are built for early-stage founders. One is a single, intensive day. The other is an ongoing program that runs for months. Here's how to tell which one you actually need.
Not sure? Let's talk →The Quick Answer
One question. Do you have users you can watch? If nobody is using anything yet, buy the 0 to 1 Workshop: a single day that turns an idea into a named customer, a quantified value proposition, and a plan to test the assumptions that would sink you. If you have a live product and traction that comes and goes, buy the PMF Program, because settling that question takes months of measured iteration rather than one good day.
When to Choose Each
- You have an idea (or a few) but nothing validated yet
- You want a single, intensive session - not a multi-month commitment
- You need to leave with a concrete value proposition and a plan to test your biggest assumptions
- You and your co-founders want to align in one room, in one day
- You already have an early product or MVP live with users
- You need ongoing support - not a one-off session - to systematically reach PMF
- You want to run PMF Surveys, structured experiments, and track signal over time
- You're past the idea stage and into the "are we actually onto something" stage
Which Stage Are You Actually At?
Founders tend to place themselves one stage ahead of where they are. These are checkable.
- You can describe the product but not the customer
- Your target segment is a category, not a group you could reach this week
- You and your co-founders give different answers about who it is for
- You have never written down what would have to be true for this to work
- You are about to start building
- You have launched, some users love it, others churn in week one, and you cannot say why
- You run experiments and none of them builds on the last one
- You have never measured product-market fit, only felt it
- Investors want you to scale and your retention curve disagrees
- The backlog grows while who it is for stays unconfirmed
What Actually Differs
One is a decision. The other is a campaign.
The workshop is one full day, up to eight hours, for up to six people, with a short product brief filled in beforehand so the day runs on your product rather than a case study. The PMF Program is three to six months of weekly sessions on a monthly retainer, with three months as the minimum before anything meaningful shifts.
Map the bet, or run it
The day covers beachhead market, customer persona, the full lifecycle use case from problem to specification, a quantified value proposition, riskiest assumptions mapped across desirability, viability and feasibility, and the scope of a minimum viable business product. The program runs that work continuously: at least five customer interviews a cycle, demand tests with landing pages, ads and fake doors, value tests with Wizard of Oz, A/B/n and usability sessions, then launch, holdback and beta pilot.
Artifacts, or a tracked number
The workshop is judged on what you leave the room with: a persona, a quantified value proposition, an assumption map, test cards and an MVBP flow you can act on next week. The program is judged on a measurement. The PMF Survey is run repeatedly as a quantitative read, alongside retention, engagement and interview signal, and reviewed at each PMF Review as you move from problem-solution fit toward product-market fit and then scale readiness.
Where the Day Ends and the Program Starts
FOUND is a Swiss recruitment platform. Two founders, both veteran recruitment executives, a strong idea, and a blank page.
Narrow until it is almost uncomfortable
The first move was picking a beachhead: experienced product leaders with three to five years of leadership experience, roughly five hundred professionals in Zurich. Small enough to actually reach, dominate and learn from. That is what the workshop produces, and it is a decision you can make in a room in a day.
Fifty interviews and a WhatsApp MVP
Then the part that takes months. More than fifty story-based interviews, which found the real pain: opaque salary ranges, multi-month hiring cycles, and no visible growth path. A demand campaign on LinkedIn to test pull rather than opinion. A no-code MVP, manual work stitched to automated WhatsApp flows, simulating the matchmaking without anyone building a platform. Then more than thirty experiments on targeting and funnels.
Under six months to problem-solution fit
A thousand active B2C users and sixty B2B customers in the first year, and product-market fit inside the first thirty months. The company also kept the discovery framework, which is what it still uses to decide what to build. The day gets you the bet. The program is what it takes to settle it. The full FOUND case study has the sequence.
Where Founders Get This Wrong
One of these two mistakes is far more common, and it is the expensive one.