Solved: Product-Market Fit Problems in Oslo (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I've had a look at your situation in Oslo, and it's a story I've heard countless times. Business owners get stuck trying to 'find' product-market fit, burning through cash and time with very little to show for it. It's a frustrating place to be.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts based on my experience. The truth is, you're probably looking at this problem from the wrong angle. Product-market fit isn't something you discover under a rock; it's something you build, methodically, by testing what the market actually wants. And the fastest way to get real, unfiltered feedback from the market isn't through more surveys or feature-building, it's by making them an offer and seeing if they'll take it.

So let's talk about how you can stop guessing and start getting some real answers.

Let's stop talking about 'finding' Product-Market Fit...

The whole concept of "finding product-market fit" is a bit of a myth. It sounds like this magical state that, once you achieve it, makes customers rain from the sky. The reality is far more practical and, frankly, more controllable.

Product-market fit is simply the moment when you have a specific offer that solves a painful problem for a specific audience, communicated with a message that resonates so strongly they feel compelled to act. Your problem isn't that you haven't "found" it. The problem is that one of those three pillars – Audience, Offer, or Message – is wrong. And you're wasting resources because you're guessing which one it is, or trying to fix it in a vacuum.

The good news is you can stop guessing. Paid advertising, when used correctly, isn't just for scaling a successful business. It's the most powerful tool available for diagnosing a struggling one. It's a direct line to the market that gives you real, hard data on what works and what doesn't, fast. Every click, every conversion (or lack thereof) is a vote from the market. Your job is to set up the right ballots to get the answers you need.

We need to understand your customer's nightmare, not their postcode...

So where do we start? With the audience. But not in the way most marketing people think. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Businesses in Oslo with 10-50 employees" or "Women aged 25-40 who like yoga" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one.

To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

For a B2B service, the nightmare isn't 'needing better IT support'; it's 'the entire sales team being unable to work for 4 hours on the last day of the quarter because the server went down.' For a consumer product, the nightmare isn't 'wanting a new skincare product'; it's 'feeling a surge of anxiety before a big presentation because of a sudden acne breakout'.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find these people. You can find the niche podcasts they listen to, the industry newsletters they actually open, the software they already pay for, the influencers they follow. This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single penny on ads. This is the difference between shouting into a crowd and whispering in the right person's ear.

I'd bet your offer needs fixing, not your product...

Once you know whose nightmare you're solving, you need to make them an offer. And this is the number one reason campaigns fail. It’s almost never the ad creative or the button colour. It’s the offer. Founders are often so in love with their product that they forget the prospect doesn't care about it yet. They only care about their own problem.

So, you need to delete the "Request a Demo" button from your mind. It is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor begging for their time. It's asking for marriage on the first date.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

• If you're a SaaS company: The gold standard is a free trial (no card details) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. I’ve seen this work wonders for our clients. We helped one B2B software client achieve 1,535 trials with this approach, and another secured 5,082 software trials. The product does the selling for you.
• If you're a service business: You are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that provides instant value. A marketing agency could offer a free, automated SEO audit. A financial consultant could offer a 'Cash Flow Projection' template. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free.
• If you sell physical products: This could be a free sample, a detailed buyer's guide, or an entry-level product that's so good it builds trust for a larger purchase later. I remember one of our subscription box clients that saw a 1000% return on ad spend just by getting the initial offer right.

A weak offer makes your advertising expensive. A strong, low-friction offer makes it cheap. It's that simple. We need to find your version of this before we scale anything.

You'll need to know this number before you spend a single krone...

Before you even think about setting a budget, you need to answer a critical question: "How high a Cost Per Lead (CPL) can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer isn't a guess; it's a calculation. It lies in a metric called Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Too many businesses focus on getting the 'cheapest' leads possible, which often just means getting the worst quality leads. You need to know what a good customer is actually worth to your business over their entire relationship with you. Knowing this number changes everything. It turns advertising from a cost centre into a predictable growth engine.

Here’s the basic maths. You'll need three pieces of information:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold).
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate.

Let's run an example. Say your service costs 5,000 kr per month (ARPA), your gross margin is 80%, and you lose 4% of your customers each month (Churn). Your LTV would be (5,000 kr * 0.80) / 0.04 = 100,000 kr.

Now you have the truth. With a 100,000 kr LTV, a healthy 3:1 LTV:CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio means you can afford to spend up to 33,333 kr to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to 3,333 kr per qualified lead. Suddenly, a 2,500 kr lead from a highly-targeted ad doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain.

This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. Use the calculator below to get a rough idea of your own LTV.

You probably should use ads to learn, not to sell (yet)...

Now you have the core components: a hypothesis about your customer's pain, a low-friction offer, and a target acquisition cost. It's time to go to the lab. And your lab is Google Ads and Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads. You are not trying to get thousands of customers right away. You are trying to get data. You are running an experiment to prove or disprove your hypotheses.

This is where so many go wrong. They set their campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness". This is a critical mistake. When you do this, you are telling the algorithm: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." And the algorithm, being very good at its job, finds the users who are least likely to click, engage, or buy anything. Because their attention is cheap. You are actively paying to reach non-customers.

Instead, from day one, you must set your campaign objective to Conversions (e.g., Leads, Signups, Purchases). This tells the algorithm: "I don't care about cheap impressions. Find me the people within my target audience who are most likely to take this specific action." Even with a small budget, you are training the algorithm to find buyers, not just viewers. Awareness is a byproduct of sales, not the other way around.

Your initial campaigns should be structured as tests:

• Test Your Audience: On Meta, create seperate ad sets targeting different 'pain point' audiences. One for people interested in competitor software, another for people in 'SaaS Growth Hacks' groups, another for followers of a specific industry influencer. See which one delivers the cheapest conversions.
• Test Your Message: Within each ad set, run 2-3 different ads. One using the "Problem-Agitate-Solve" framework. Another using the "Before-After-Bridge" framework. The data (your Click-Through Rate and Conversion Rate) will tell you which message truly hits a nerve.
• Test Your Offer: If you can, point different ads to different landing pages. One offering a free trial, another offering a free audit tool. See which one converts better. This is the ultimate test of what the market actually values.

Run these tests with a small, controlled budget. After a week or two, you won't just have spent money. You'll have bought invaluable data. You'll know which audience is most responsive, which message resonates, and which offer works. You'll have replaced guesswork with evidence. That is the foundation of real product-market fit.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in. It's a fundamental shift from "building a product and hoping it sells" to "using the market to build a business". It's methodical, it's data-driven, and it works. I've seen it work for dozens of clients, from a medical job matching SaaS company where we reduced their cost per user from £100 down to £7, to an e-commerce store selling cleaning products that generated a 633% return on their ad spend.

To make it more actionable, here’s a summary of the framework I’d recommend you follow. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

Following this process turns marketing from a guessing game into a science. It's how you stop wasting resources and start building a predictable path to growth. It's how you build, rather than find, your product-market fit.

Executing this properly requires expertise, a methodical approach, and a lot of time spent in the data. It's not just about setting up the ads; it's about interpreting the results correctly and knowing what to test next. This is where working with a specialist can make a significant difference, helping you get to the right answers much faster and more cost-effectively than going it alone.

If you’d like to have a chat about how we could apply this framework specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can review your current strategy and give you some concrete advice. It might be exactly what you need to get unstuck.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh