Product/Market Fit Is Hard — Here’s One Way to Make It Easier

How advisory boards can bridge the gap between your build and your buyers

There’s a reason “product/market fit” gets quoted so often in startup playbooks — and still causes so much confusion. It’s one of the most crucial inflection points in a company’s journey, but also one of the most misunderstood and poorly navigated.

For founders building in B2B markets, the challenge is even steeper. You’re not just building a product. You’re trying to win trust, access, and budget from organizations that are slow-moving, opaque, and hard to reach.

That’s why one of the most underused tools in early-stage B2B startups is a strategic advisory board — one that includes people with real insight into the customer side.

Let’s unpack how this works — and why it matters.

The Real Problem Behind “Missing” Product/Market Fit

Most teams don’t miss product/market fit because they build a bad product. They miss it because they:

• Build based on intuition, not verified needs

• Struggle to access real decision-makers

• Underestimate organizational inertia inside their target customer base

• Don’t know how buyers inside enterprises actually prioritize and evaluate solutions

Even when a startup is deeply technical, visionary, and fast-moving, not having the right conversations with the right people means you’re optimizing for the wrong things.

External Market Insight — Without the Guesswork

A well-formed advisory board can help solve this in a highly practical way. Specifically, bringing in a mix of:

• Market experts who’ve sold to or worked inside your target vertical

• Operators or executives from customer-type organizations (ideally not current clients, but adjacent)

• People who know how decisions get made — technically, politically, and financially

This kind of advisory board becomes a structured way to:

• Pressure-test your assumptions before you commit resources

• Understand procurement and integration blockers early

• Get clarity on what features signal real value vs. internal noise

• Learn how your buyers frame “urgent vs. nice-to-have” internally

• Help you build credibility and language that resonates in the enterprise

Done right, this insight doesn’t just help you build a better product — it helps you sell and position it faster, too.

A Two-Way Win: Why Customers Want to Be in the Room

What’s often overlooked is that advisory boards don’t just help startups. They’re valuable for the corporate-side participants, too.

For enterprise reps — whether they’re innovation leads, department heads, or functional experts — joining an advisory board gives them:

• A front-row seat to emerging tech and new ways of solving old problems

• Influence over how solutions are shaped, before they’re launched

• Exposure to startups they might want to work with, invest in, or champion internally

• A way to stay close to the edge of their industry without leaving their role

In fast-moving or transforming industries, this kind of involvement isn’t just interesting — it’s strategic. And when positioned well, it’s not hard to get great people to say yes.

Making It Real: What a Product/Market-Fit-Focused Advisory Board Looks Like

For early-stage B2B startups, a focused advisory board could include:

• A product-oriented startup operator who’s sold into similar companies before

• A former buyer or evaluator from the type of company you’re targeting

• A domain expert who brings credibility when you speak to industry audiences

• A senior leader who understands change management inside large orgs

• Someone with a current network in the buying centers you’re trying to reach

This group doesn’t have to be large — 3 to 5 people is plenty. What matters is that they’re structured, active, and aligned. They should meet regularly, be compensated fairly (equity or cash), and be treated as strategic partners — not passive advisors.

Build What Matters — Faster

Startups win when they get closer to their customers than their competitors do. Not just in sales calls or usability testing — but in how they think, plan, prioritize, and ship.

Advisory boards that include external market insight and real buyer perspective are one of the most direct ways to close the gap between what you’re building and what the market actually wants.

In B2B, where product/market fit often comes down to trust, timing, and internal traction — that edge can make all the difference.

At OPERATORS, we help startups build structured, high-impact advisory boards with exactly this in mind. Whether you’re pre-product or post-Series A, we’ll help you connect with experts and enterprise voices who can accelerate validation and unlock the hard-to-reach.

Let us help you build the board that gets you to product/market fit — faster, and with fewer wrong turns.