What It Feels Like When You’ve Found Product-Market Fit

This article has great quotes from successful founders on what it felt like when they knew they had achieved product-market fit

15 minute read (easily scrollable to find the quotes form each company)

Key Quotes

“1. Market “pull” comes in many forms

• An inflection in organic growth

• Customers asking to pay for the product before you ask

• Users flip from being excited about what you have to mad about what you don’t have

• Customers complaining when your site goes down

• People using the product even when it’s broken”

“2. About half of these companies found PMF immediately after launch, but half spent months or years iterating to get there:

• Netflix: 18 months

• Segment: 1.5 years

• Airbnb: 2 years

• PagerDuty: 2 years

• Superhuman: 3 years

• Amplitude: 4 years”

“3. The intensity of the pull is a factor of the fit (how good your product is at solving the user’s problem) AND initial market size (is it niche or broad). “

“Dropbox, Netflix, and Tinder were 10x better products within a huge market —> sudden and broad pull.”

“Instacart, Superhuman, and Substack were 10x better products but for a narrow set of initial customers —> steady and compounding pull.”

Bottom Line

“Of these three milestones though, the most likely to kill your business is the first: not building something people want.”

“how do you know when you’ve built something people want? Below you’ll find stories from twenty-five companies — many of which have never been shared before — revealing the moment they realized they had something special.”