Thie article is very wrong - it is absolutely not true that PMF is random.
The article says that PMF is random to find. I think this is a perspective that a lot of founders may agree with. You don't know what the market will actually buy, and many times PMF is found that is counter-intuitive. Rarely it does happen that an idea takes off as expected.
It is an incremental process though. It's not like it's just happening, it's something you work towards to. The response may be random, but what you put in is not.
I’d have to agree that it’s random to find. The entire time I was exploring PMF it felt like coin flips. I couldn’t help but wonder if the feedback I was getting is just a string of tails or something actually converging to .5. I think getting expert advice makes it a little less biased in the outcome. Still, it feels very much random. I feel sorry for the people who spend years trying the PMF lottery. It’s hard to know when to quit an idea for so many reasons, financially, emotionally, etc.
Author here. I said "random _to find_". But thank you for giving me an incredibly classic top HN comment :)