The Product-Market Fit Scale

iwantproductmarketfit.substack.com

23 points·walterbell··4 comments

The issue is that it is not linear. The customer needs change, you understand that you are talking to the wrong people, etc. It takes way longer than you think.

The general advice I can give is that if you think you got PMF, and you cant get a consistent high volume pipeline of customers with high conversion rate, you did not in fact get to PMF.

By the time really get to PMF you are probably managing 10-100s of people and have no time to think about PMF.

I'm the author of this scale. This is the biggest misinterpretation, and perhaps a design flaw.

For me, these are signals that signify a certain level of evidence for PM fit. This is by no means a roadmap from left to right. I think finding the right customers is a very hard trial and error process. But the signal of happy customer from a paid pilot is very clear. Hope this clarifies.

It’s incredible to me how hard it has been to define product-market-fit. I’m still not exactly sure why this is.

With that being said, I think my favorite definition currently is: when your biggest problem becomes scaling up the business to meet your growing demand rather than trying to get customers.

I always found it very simple to define: when a product has a market (i.e. a group of potential customers) that is willing to pay for it enough (cumulatively) to support a growing business.

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