Finding product market fit in a Welsh farmhouse
4 min read
Product market fit, Product strategy, Ventures, Decision making, Startups
An opportunity to move to rural Wales became a real-world reminder that fit matters more than enthusiasm. The right audience, place, timing, and price changes everything.
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A friend I hadn’t spoken to in nearly 20 years got in touch recently.
Years ago, he left city life behind and bought an old farmhouse in Wales, plus around 16 acres of mixed land, including woodland and a stretch of river with a healthy head of trout and salmon.
Because of the health needs of an elderly relative, the family will soon be relocating overseas. They see it as a long-term move, and they’re thinking carefully about what happens to the place.
He asked whether my family would consider taking it on. He knows we’ve talked for years about alternative lifestyles. He also knows we love the countryside, outdoor time, and being in the woods with the kids. He was clear about the trade-off too: the upside is huge, but so is the responsibility. Managing land, woodland, and a property like that is real work.
My wife and I talked about it a lot. We were tempted, and nervous at the same time.
Would we find community? How much time would maintenance take? Could we juggle multiple businesses while running a young startup? Would the kids feel the positives outweighed the negatives?
As we thought it through, a simpler truth emerged. We weren’t the best match for the opportunity.
Two close friends of ours moved to Wales a few years back. They’re serial entrepreneurs who’ve built and sold outdoor businesses, they’ve run smallholdings before, they’re used to juggling multiple projects, and they’ve been looking for somewhere to settle for the long run. They also live for the Welsh mountains.
So I connected them. It turned out my entrepreneur friend lived and worked about four miles away from the farmhouse.
It felt like a much more natural fit.
Sitting with it afterwards, I realised it’s a pretty clean analogy for product market fit.
We could have tried to make it work. But there was a better match out there.
Products and ventures need to find the right audience, in the right place, at the right time, for the right price. When you’re forcing a round peg into a square hole, the struggle is usually the signal.
I’ll probably always wonder what it would have been like. But I also know we made the right call, and we can still visit.