As a founder, how often have you said to yourself:
“We need to find product-market fit.”
Fair enough.
But often, that isn’t really the problem.
The harder problem is figuring out what exactly needs to fit what.
A product can fail to find traction for very different reasons:
- The product is technically possible, but nobody really needs it.
- People need it, but not enough to pay for it.
- People will pay, but the economics don’t work.
- There is demand, but the founder has no particular advantage in serving it.
These are very different problems.
Yet founders often respond to all of them in the same way:
Build more.
Add features.
Change the UI.
Try another channel.
Run more ads.
And then wonder why nothing moves.
I think of PMF less as a destination and more as the intersection of four things:
Can we build it?
Does someone genuinely need it?
Will they pay for it?
And why are we particularly well placed to solve it?
If those four aren’t reasonably aligned, more execution can actually make things worse.
You end up getting very good at building something that shouldn’t exist.
Before asking “How do we get PMF?”
Ask:
“What exactly are we trying to make fit?”
That’s usually the more useful question.
A practical PMF workbook, if you need one. The PMF Primer