How should product-market fit be measured?

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

The real sign of early product market fit is demand so far beyond expectation that you have no time in your day for anything but satisfying customers — keeping servers up, fielding inbound.

People use or demand the product far more than you could have fathomed, which crowds out everything else.

Scope: describes initial glimmers of fit, not full fit

8:13 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023

If customers aren't ripping a new product out of your hands, that is your signal to stop investing — product-market fit is unmistakable when you hit it, and sunk cost is the main thing keeping teams in denial

Large prior investment creates sunk cost fallacy; having experienced PMF multiple times at Segment and its absence too, the difference is unambiguous once you've exhausted creative go-to-market ideas

Scope: only after you've genuinely tried and exhausted creative ways to take it to market

39:18 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio

Sanjit Biswas · Dec 8, 2023

Product market fit should not be forced; the real signal is when a user spontaneously pulls a colleague over to show them the product

That reaction shows the product is a true solution to a big problem, and companies pay to have their problems solved

0:00 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara

Sanjit Biswas · Dec 8, 2023

Product market fit cannot be forced; you find it by putting several ideas in front of customers and listening for an unmistakable 'wow' reaction, then doubling down there

Polite nodding is noise; when a customer stops you mid-demo, asks to see it again, or pulls a colleague in from the hallway, you've hit a true solution to a big problem

Scope: described as the beginnings of a product, not a robust one; validated across two companies and many products

15:03 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara

Aman Narang · Aug 21, 2024

Customer engagement signal is a better indicator than whether an idea sounds like a '10x idea'

Their QR-code ordering idea sounded novel but restaurateurs told them to go away; rebuilding a point of sale sounded unexciting but owners would sit with them for hours because they hated their existing systems

12:55 20VC: Five Lessons Scaling Toast to $14BN Market Cap | The Biggest Mistakes Founders Make in Fundraising, Hiring and Selling with Aman Narang, CEO @ Toast

Peter Rahal · Aug 8, 2025

RXBAR had immediate product-market fit within the CrossFit gym market, and that result was safely extrapolable to gyms nationwide

Two cartons (24 bars) dropped at a Chicago CrossFit gym sold out in two hours, and there was no reason a CrossFit gym in Wisconsin or Indianapolis would behave differently

Scope: scoped to the market defined by CrossFit gyms

9:23 20VC: The $BN Greenoaks Backed Protein Bar | Hitting $100M Revenues in David's First Year: Lessons & Mistakes | $0 to $600M: The Untold RXBAR Story | Product-Market-Fit, Pricing, Branding: What Every Founder Gets Wrong Today with Peter Rahal

David George · Dec 15, 2025

Market pull is the single thing to look for — the fastest-growing AI companies grew because of tremendous customer pull, not because they poured money into hiring sales reps

Markets with extreme pull are the best places to build a company; growth bought with sales spend is a different and worse thing

33:16 20VC: a16z's David George on How $BN Funds Can 5×, Do Margins & Revenue Matter in AI & the Most Controversial Bet at a16z

Amjad Masad · Apr 25, 2026

Real product-market fit is the product being pulled out of your hands faster than you can supply it, and founders routinely deceive themselves that a few customers constitutes it

He experienced multiple false positives at Replit; understanding the true signal earlier would have made him search for it faster and harder

Scope: applies to venture-scale ambitions, not lifestyle or small businesses

42:41 20Product: Replit CEO on Why Coding Models Are Plateauing | Why the SaaS Apocalypse is Justified: Will Incumbents Be Replaced? | Why IDEs Are Dead and Do PMs Survive the Next 3-5 Years with Amjad Masad

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

Companies can move in and out of product-market fit as their market and regulatory environment change

Eaze had PMF in the medical-only cannabis market, but California's 2018 adult-use legalization changed both the market and the delivery model, pushing them in and out of fit

Scope: drawn from the cannabis market where regulation shifted rapidly

5:46 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Harry Stebbings · Jun 5, 2020

Product-market fit is transient rather than a permanent status that is achieved once and kept

Contrasts with the common founder assumption that PMF is a block status you attain

7:03 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

The biggest misconception about product-market fit is that once you have it it's yours for good; it is a metric that rises and falls as your product and market change.

PMF behaves like any other metric rather than being a static achievement.

21:59 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

David Frankel · Oct 14, 2024

Product-market fit must be maintained continuously rather than being an early-stage milestone, and companies that lose it or never had it get abandoned by their own boards

The market walks away from you at every stage, including post-IPO, once growth isn't maintained

Scope: applies at late stage and post-IPO as well as early

36:10 20VC: Investing Lessons from FC Seeding Uber, Airtable and Coupang | Why Pro Rata is the Original Sin in VC | Why Liquidity Has Died in 2024 | Why LPs are Pissed with VCs | The Hard Truth About Seed Fund Economics with David Frankel @ Founder Collective

Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

After finding product-market fit, founders should double down 10x harder rather than easing off, because product-market fit is momentum that can be lost at any moment

Once you lose momentum the boulder rolls back down the hill and you have to push it up again; keeping daily pressure on shipping preserves it

Scope: acknowledges it is somewhat a fear mindset

14:47 20VC: How We Got Fred Wilson, Benchmark and Index to Invest $94M | Why Robinhood's Strategy is Wrong | Why 1-1s are BS and What Every Founder Gets Wrong About Equity | Why Taste Beats AI But How AI Kills Org Charts with Paul Erlanger, CEO @ fomo

Harry Stebbings · Jan 6, 2025

Product market fit is not a single state but a series of stages — like chapters in a book — and a company must keep winning the next chapter

44:22 20VC: How To Do a 10x Seed Fund in 2025 | Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups an Founders | Lessons from Losing Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest & Investing Lessons from Charlie Munger with Mike Maples @ Floodgate

Harry Stebbings · Jan 6, 2025

Proving the founding insight isn't sufficient — a company then has to scale into enterprise and prove itself again at each subsequent stage

59:52 20VC: How To Do a 10x Seed Fund in 2025 | Three Frameworks to Evaluate Startups an Founders | Lessons from Losing Billions Missing Airbnb and Pinterest & Investing Lessons from Charlie Munger with Mike Maples @ Floodgate

Harry Stebbings · Jan 15, 2025

Product market fit is not a one-time achievement but an ever-moving target that must be re-won with each new customer segment

PMF with creators does not transfer to SMBs or enterprise

10:23 20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025

Product-market fit is a gradual process rather than a single moment, and after it the job doesn't get easier — it shifts from discovery and building to operationalizing and scaling

There was never a day where they lacked PMF and then had it; the problems just changed

15:59 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

Adam Mosseri · Jul 24, 2023

Threads' 100M signups are a weak signal of success because getting people to try something is far easier than getting them to keep using it; what matters is iteration speed over the long run

Sign-up numbers only measure willingness to try, not sustained use over months or years

Scope: about the first eight days of Threads

0:00 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G

Adam Mosseri · Jul 24, 2023

Threads' staggering launch numbers are only sign-ups and shouldn't be mistaken for success; what matters is how quickly the team iterates to make the experience compelling enough for long-run retention

It's far easier to get people to try something than to build something people want to keep using a month or a year later

Scope: said eight days after launch; he was personally more excited about Threads than anything in a while while recognizing it as a big risk

32:37 20VC: Instagram CEO, Adam Mosseri on Threads: The Journey from 0-100M Users; What Worked, What Didn't and the Plans Ahead | Instagram: Biggest Mistakes, Successes, Misconceptions, TikTok Competition & The Future of Social Media; Interest Graph or Friend G

Miles Grimshaw · Sep 18, 2023 · hedged

Much of today's explosive AI adoption is 'high fructose corn syrup' — off-the-charts signup metrics that don't reflect enduring need, which misleads data-first, checklist-driven investors

The wow moment of first using ChatGPT or imagery models drives astounding signup rates that look amazing on a metrics-first paradigm but may not indicate long-term solutions

Scope: TBD whether these go to zero; situation specific; great teams will reinvent or pivot

64:53 20VC: Benchmark General Partner, Miles Grimshaw on The Five Pillars of Venture Capital, Why Data Can Be a Trap When Early-Stage Investing, Investing Lessons from Missing Figma and Plaid & The New Business Model for AI & Why Co-Pilot is an Incumbent Strate

Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

Users will not tell you honestly that they dislike your product to your face, so you must run value tests — willingness to pay, non-binding letter of intent, committing time, or staking reputation — to see if they are serious

People won't tell you your baby is ugly to your face; they say 'what a cute baby' while never intending to use it, so you need a costly signal instead of stated intent

24:02 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest

Sanjit Biswas · Dec 8, 2023

If customers aren't paying for it, it isn't important; revenue growth in B2B should be read as impact and problem-solving growth rather than dollars for their own sake

Companies pay to have their problems solved, so payment is the signal that you are solving real problems for real customers

Scope: framed within B2B

15:55 20VC: $18BN Market Cap and $1BN in ARR in 8 Years; Samsara | How to Find Product Market Fit Reliably | How to Create a Multi-Product Company | The Pros and Cons of Serial Entrepreneurship with Sanjit Biswas, Founder & CEO @ Samsara

Jesse Zhang · Sep 19, 2025

In the early days execution is what reveals the right market — good customer discovery, especially probing willingness to pay, separates real markets from fake ones

Their AI use-case conversations kept ending at ~$100/month budgets, while CX buyers with hundreds of support agents would justify six figures immediately, which is how they identified the real market

Scope: applies to the early days

9:17 20VC: Why 90% of Founders Build Startups Wrong | Why AI Growth Rates are Sustainable & Remote Work is BS and the AI Talent War | Competing with Brett Taylor and Sierra: Who Wins the Customer Service War with Jesse Zhang, Decagon

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

The cohort retention curve is the number one metric to look at when building a new product, and what you want to see is the curve going flat

A flattening curve tells you the same set of individual users keep coming back after the people it isn't for have churned out

Scope: specific to building a new product

20:37 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Sarah Tavel · May 6, 2024

Depth of usage and continued engagement are the cohort signals that indicate real product-market fit in very young AI companies

Cohorts are usually too young to be conclusive so you are taking a leap, but depth and continued engagement hint at the Sean Ellis test of how disappointed users would be if the product disappeared

Scope: cohorts are often too young to be conclusive

22:06 20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Are Foundation Models Commoditising | Why Frontier Models Will Be Closed Source | Why the Value is in the Application Layer | The Future of AI is "Selling the Work" Not the Tools

Alex Schultz · Sep 5, 2025

Setting a north star is critical even pre-product-market-fit, but retention should be the only metric a consumer or SaaS company tracks at that stage

Product market fit just means people keep using the product; anything more complicated is unnecessary that early

Scope: consumer and SaaS; pre-product-market-fit stage

6:19 20Growth: Meta CMO Alex Schultz on How All Founders Have to Change Their Marketing Playbook in a World of AI | Is AI Plateauing, What it Means if China Wins the AI Race and Why Zuck is a Generational Leader

Kevin Ryan · Apr 10, 2024

Rising download and adoption curves were sufficient grounds for conviction in MongoDB even with no revenue for three years

Downloads were a straight line up and to the right worldwide, and the market thesis held — Oracle was too expensive and a non-relational database was a good idea

Scope: they were still nervous because a company can run out of money

27:34 20VC: Are the Best CEOs the Best Fundraisers, Are the Best Founders Insiders or Outsiders to a Problem, Why Ownership Should Not Be a Focus in VC & The Biggest Lessons Scaling MongoDB to $26BN Market Cap with Kevin Ryan, Founder @ AlleyCorp

Mamoon Hamid · Oct 21, 2024

Deep engagement metrics on a small user base are a valid signal to invest well before revenue scales

At Figma the user count was small and revenue only a few hundred thousand, but DAU/MAU and L28 showed designers were in the product fifteen to eighteen days a month — effectively every workday

32:30 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws

Nikhil Basu Trivedi · Sep 6, 2023

Early product-market-fit signals need not be revenue at all; high usage frequency, repeat usage, retention on a tiny base, word-of-mouth growth, and 'couldn't live without this' customer anecdotes all count

Canva had no monetization at the time and still showed clear signals that people loved the product

20:08 20VC: Why Small Funds Outperform Large Funds & AUM is a Vanity Metric | Why 99% of Investments in AI Startups Will Go To Zero | Being a "Traction First" VC & Investing Lessons from Investing in Canva and Missing Figma with Nikhil Basu-Trivedi

Mike Hudack · Sep 13, 2024

A product is only good if people actually use it and get value in ways that can't be lied about — time spent, moving money, talking to friends; without that it is valueless and 'if you build it they will come' is false

Usage is the objective measure that brings science to the art of product; without people getting value you may as well not have built it

Scope: distribution is still required

20:46 20Product: What Facebook, Monzo and Deliveroo Do and Do Not Do To Build Great Products | How to Structure Product Teams For Success | Is Simple Always Better in Product and The Art vs Science of Product Design with Mike Hudack

Vickie Peng · Apr 17, 2024

Pre-product-market-fit companies should pick a single metric representing customer happiness, and it should be a specific action taken inside the product rather than NPS.

Each time the user takes that action it's effectively them pressing a button saying 'I love this product / I'm using this product' — an API call, a dashboard created — whereas NPS doesn't capture that.

Scope: applies pre-product-market fit

0:00 20Product: Sequoia's Product-Market Fit Framework | Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product | Metrics 101, Good vs Great Product Strategy and more with Vickie Peng, Product Partner @ Sequoia Capital

Guillaume Moubeche · Dec 13, 2024

A company should define one activation metric that reveals whether users see the product's value (for lemlist, whether a signup launched a prospecting campaign), and a very low activation rate justifies redesigning the product flow from scratch even at the cost of severe short-term churn.

The original flow required creating templates and lists separately before combining them into a campaign, which users didn't understand; rebuilding it as a linear A-to-Z flow took activation from 10% to about 45%

Scope: based on lemlist's own redesign

17:01 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

The right definition of product-market fit is Sean Ellis's: at least 40% of users say they would be very disappointed if they could no longer use the product

It is the definition Rahul used at Superhuman and gives a concrete measurable threshold

7:26 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Teams should be maniacal about establishing a customer-love metric such as the Sean Ellis score before discussing significant scaling

At 70-75 million customers you can make any dead cat bounce and make any launched product look great for a year, which tells you nothing; only genuine love makes a product explode on its own

Scope: Sean Ellis score or NPS among several possible mechanisms

25:55 20Product: Nubank's CPO on Why Product is 90% Science and 10% Art, Why Execution is Overrated and Strategic Clarity is Under-Appreciated, Why You Should Never Fall in Love With Your Own Ideas & Nubank's Biggest Product Challenges Scaling to 80M Users

Harry Stebbings · Jun 5, 2020 · hedged

From an investor's perspective, having a product-market fit score on slide two of every pitch deck would be an ideal end vision

As an investor it would help him in terms of judgment so much.

Scope: framed as his personal end vision as an investor

20:30 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

PMF should become the next NPS as a standard metric, but oriented toward product success rather than the customer service and operations focus NPS has.

Scope: stated as the company's ambition/dream

20:42 20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Rather than churn alone, the right picture comes from combining share of customers with a primary banking relationship, intensity of engagement ratios (DAU/MAU, MAU/total customers), and customer love metrics

Growth in customer count says little unless customers treat you as their primary relationship, a challenge Nubank's board pushed hard on

Scope: engagement-intensity approach borrowed from Facebook and other social networks

31:40 20Product: Nubank's CPO on Why Product is 90% Science and 10% Art, Why Execution is Overrated and Strategic Clarity is Under-Appreciated, Why You Should Never Fall in Love With Your Own Ideas & Nubank's Biggest Product Challenges Scaling to 80M Users

Winston Weinberg · Jan 19, 2026

Multi-product DAU/MAU is the real proof that you've built something integral to an industry — Harvey's 74% among users of four or more product lines is Slack-level, but the share of users on four-plus products is still very low

Slack sat around 80% DAU/MAU; hitting that ratio across the whole base is what demonstrates the product is core to a lawyer's day

Scope: four-plus-product usage is doubling every quarter from a low base

69:05 20VC: How Model Performance is Plateauing | Two Key Rules for Effective Deal-Making | Company Building Lessons from Keith Rabois, Brian Halligan and Pat Grady | Why Enterprise AI Adoption is Years Off with Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg

Sanjit Biswas · Dec 8, 2023 · hedged

The biggest product market fit mistake stems from the fundraising process: founders need to show investors they've achieved it, which makes them less honest with themselves about whether the product is genuinely being pulled by the market

If you only had to feel it rather than announce it, you'd be more honest; real pull is unmistakable — customers call you the next day asking to place an order

16:34 Fundraising pressure corrupts honest assessment

Raman Malik · Nov 15, 2024

You should derive 'milestone metrics' by looking back at what 30- and 60-day retained users did differently in their first sessions; for Perplexity, getting a user to three queries in the first session indicates a high likelihood of retention.

Three queries is enough time in product for the user to understand Perplexity's value, and it's what retained users do.

15:16 Derive milestone metric from retained users early session behavior

Ed Sim · Oct 27, 2023

Category creation takes a long time, and investors should judge such companies on product love and pipeline rather than early revenue speed

Snyk took two and a half to three years to reach its first million of ARR and was painfully slow, but product love and a building pipeline were the signs it was working

37:28 Judge category creating companies on product love and pipeline not early revenue speed

Adam Mosseri · Jul 24, 2023

There is no good read on Threads' retention yet because signups so far are mostly early adopters, who use products differently from average users.

Not enough time has passed and the current cohort is unrepresentative.

52:35 Early adopter cohorts distort retention reads until time passes

Chandra Narayanan · Mar 13, 2024

Product-market fit, scaling product-market fit, unit economics, and scaling unit economics are four distinct stages, and reaching one does not guarantee reaching the next

A free product's fit can evaporate the moment you charge the same as a competitor — users may only have been there for the free price

30:32 Pmf scaling pmf unit economics and scaling unit economics are four distinct sequential stages

Harry Stebbings · Mar 13, 2024

Product-market fit has many chapters — moving from PLG to mid-market to enterprise requires regaining product-market fit in each customer segment

Each customer segment is a different market, so fit must be re-earned at every tangent

31:27 Product market fit must be re earned separately for each customer segment such as plg mid market enterprise

Harry Stebbings · Aug 3, 2022

Raw user count growth is not a sign of product-market fit; engagement measures like sessions per day or tasks created are the real signal of product love

Top-line user growth doesn't reflect what users actually do in the product, which is what signifies product love

5:52 Engagement behaviors not raw user growth signal product love

Kulveer Taggar · May 31, 2019 · hedged

A startup has only two states — pre and post product market fit — and pre-PMF the only thing you should be doing is trying to get it; testing whether you have it can be quick, likely no more than a month

Once he had product market fit at Zeus, everything changed

20:04 Binary pre post pmf testable within a month

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

The right time to start measuring product-market fit is now, regardless of what stage the company is at

Growing companies never know when their market will shift out from under them, and early-stage companies need PMF as the North Star metric that tells them how close they are to the growth stage

8:33 Measure continuously from day one regardless of stage

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

The PMF survey should be sent to all users right after they have been able to see the value of the product — after first purchase for a marketplace, a couple of weeks in for SaaS or consumer

Users need to have experienced the product's value for the answer to be meaningful

10:27 Survey timed to first value experience

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

The PMF survey cycle should be run continuously after product-market fit is reached, and can be extended into 'feature market fit' — A/B testing each released feature against its effect on the PMF score so only features that move the needle ship.

The framework keeps prioritising projects post-PMF, and comparing feature releases against PMF score shows how each one changes customer perception of the product.

17:25 Continuous cycle extended to per feature market fit

Daniel Erickson · Jun 5, 2020

Qualitative PMF surveying scales beyond small user counts because keyword and theme extraction removes the need to read every response and lets you see sentiment shifts across segments at a bird's-eye view.

Layered data analysis tools pull out keywords and themes and visualise them.

18:14 Qualitative theme extraction scales the measurement

Jason Lemkin · Nov 30, 2022

Competing against free open source is hard for founders but easier for investors: early explosive traction against a world-class free open source product is probably the best available signal, because it proves the product is 10x better in some sliver of use case and such traction cannot be bought with marketing dollars.

If the alternative is free and world class, no amount of marketing spend produces traction — so traction means the product must be magical for at least one segment.

19:27 Traction against a free world class open source alternative is the strongest pmf signal

Guy Podjarny · May 24, 2023

Product-user fit and product-buyer fit are distinct things that can arrive at very different times, so founders should reason in value propositions: who you provide value to, whether there are enough of them, and whether they would pay.

At Snyk they hit fit with developers quickly, but fit with the buyer was a separate and later problem.

35:16 Product user fit and product buyer fit are distinct milestones reached at different times

Cem Sertoglu · Nov 20, 2024

The biggest impediment to scaling from seed to Series A is assuming product-market fit prematurely and being tempted into hyperscale mode too early.

20:31 Premature belief in pmf triggers harmful hyperscale mode

Kieran Flanagan · Aug 10, 2022

The right North Star metric is retention pre-product-market-fit and revenue post-product-market-fit

Pre-PMF you are looking for a cohort of users who use the product meaningfully; post-PMF revenue is the composite of acquisition, upgrade and retention all working

10:53 North star metric should be retention pre pmf and revenue post pmf

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

The 'how upset would you be if this product disappeared' test measures the strength of product-market fit but is not a growth metric, because you can have product-market fit with six customers and still have no business

PMF strength says nothing about scale or how much customers pay

16:48 Sean ellis style pmf survey measures fit strength not scale so its not a growth metric

Craig Courtemanche · Dec 4, 2023

The signal that it was time to raise institutional capital and step on the accelerator was that the business finally generated enough revenue to cover payroll without chasing checks — evidence of product-market fit

For thirteen years his cofounder went to the mailbox daily to see if checks had arrived to make payroll; when that stopped, they knew they had turned a corner and only needed capital to take the idea to market

15:47 Self sustaining payroll coverage signals pmf and time to raise

Hugo Barra · Nov 9, 2022

Product market fit in hardware means earning a physical place in someone's life repeatedly, and the right measure is cost per use — a product costing 10 cents per use has PMF, one costing $10 per use does not

A physical product occupies space and has to be chosen by the customer every day, so frequency of use against purchase price reveals whether it earned its place

35:11 Cost per use measures pmf for physical products

Mati Staniszewski · Sep 8, 2025

ElevenLabs had no product-market fit while working on dubbing in 2022; the product-market signal only began once they shifted to narration and voiceovers

the standard definition doesn't capture whether value persists, which is the thing that actually matters

20:15 Value persistence not usage defines real pmf

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Large successful tech companies predictably start launching unloved products once founders step back, professional product teams take over, and the CEO/CFO demand that new launches be big immediately

The incentive becomes making early launches look large before they are genuinely loved, which milks the existing brand and hit products rather than adding value

28:09 Founder departure and professional pm teams produce launches optimized for size not love

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Product leaders and PMs should personally call about ten customers using the product, with an engineering lead listening, rather than delegating it to the customer experience team

There is no other way to get a visceral sense of whether there is real enthusiasm or people are just being polite — and human beings are polite by nature, which is bad for product managers

29:49 Personally calling customers reveals genuine love better than delegating to support

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Low churn can reflect customers being trapped rather than committed, so it isn't automatically evidence of love

Being trapped with a company is different from being in a committed relationship

31:29 Low churn can reflect being trapped not genuine love so isnt proof of pmf

Jag Duggal · Mar 29, 2023

Intensity of app engagement is a leading indicator of customer love for Nubank, even though in concept a customer could barely use the app and still love the product

They have proven the correlation to themselves within the context of their strategy, so they track both but ultimately care about love

33:50 Engagement intensity is a leading indicator of love though love could exist without heavy usage

Jake Saper · Mar 10, 2025

The diligence signal for real market pull is users saying they'd quit or pay out of pocket if their employer stopped buying the product

Those phrases show the product has changed someone's day-to-day life

21:03 Willingness to personally pay or quit is the diligence signal of real pull

Harry Stebbings · May 11, 2026

True product-market fit is unmistakable — if you have it, you know, so the question of whether you have it is self-answering

Real product-market fit is unwavering

64:49 Pmf is self evident and needs no measurement