This essay was first written for a video presentation at in5 Tech during GITEX Expand North Star 2025, aimed at early-stage and first-time founders.
Intro
The true reality of the technology world is that most of our attempts fail. Whether a startup, a product, a feature, or a new vaccine, we should face this reality that failure is what happens the most. For startups, numbers vary from 50% to 90%, but this never changes the hard truth: we are in front of extreme "uncertainty" and complexity. What I'm going to talk about today is how to navigate through this massive uncertainty in the startup world; I'm going to talk about Product/Market Fit.
Instagram started as Burbn, a location-based check-in app with photo-sharing features, similar to Foursquare. After months of lukewarm reception, founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger noticed users were only engaging with one feature: photo sharing with filters. Instead of adding more features to Burbn, they stripped everything else away and rebuilt around just photo sharing. Two months after launching the simplified Instagram, they had one million users.
Build something people want
By a rough definition, a startup is an attempt to generate highly growing revenue from an innovative idea to be able to scale it into a sustainable company, usually using new technologies and with limited money in the pocket. This implies going through significant uncertainty and complexity by most often entering an existing market with numerous competitors, existing alternatives, and a tremendous number of players, while your cash is limited. By this I don’t deny that it’s possible to create a new market, but the process is often creating something that fits initially into an existing market, yet having less functionality, while as time goes on, it turns out that you are serving your customers very differently than the other giants in the market.
Product/Market Fit (PMF) happens when a major segment of customers in that market finds your now turned-into-a-product idea noticeably more valuable than the existing solutions, they’re coming back to your product, and they are ready to pay for it before you run out of cash. As a sidenote I need to explain why I used “are ready to pay” and not “paying”, as the first and the hardest challenge a founding team should solve is getting to Product/Market Fit (PMF) and then, you can start thinking about how you can monetize your potential customers as a much easier challenge. On the other hand, you should definitely test if they are ready to pay something for your product as it’s the best litmus test to see if they have found your product really valuable.
When you get to Product/Market Fit (PMF), it means that you have built something people really want, you can start scaling your team and doubling down on your spending to accelerate your revenue growth. Here is when you can start thinking about bootstrapping your startup or get funded as you can clearly show you have solved the most challenging part of founding a startup. Investors will be willing to meet and fund you as it’s vivid that you’re now a much less risky investment for them.
From that moment in time, your job as a founder is to go from one Product/Market Fit (PMF) to another and refining your previous fit, either expanding your addressable market or deepening your value proposition to the existing customers with a more enriched product and hence, accelerating your growth or traction.
Slack
Slack wasn't originally a communication tool. It started as an internal tool used by Stewart Butterfield's gaming company while building a game called Glitch. When Glitch failed, they noticed their internal communication tool was the one thing that worked perfectly. Other companies started asking to use it. They measured early signals: teams that tried Slack had 93% daily active usage after their first week. That retention signal told them they had something special.
How to Get Product/Market Fit (PMF)
Marc Andreessen of a16z popularized the PMF idea 18 years ago with Rachleff's Law of Startup Success:
"The #1 company-killer is lack of market.
And:
- When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
- When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
- When a great team meets a great market, something special happens."
And he then introduces “Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success:
"The only thing that matters is getting to Product/Market Fit (PMF)."
This is vital to mention as it states it the best way how important targeting a great market in terms of the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product is. Having the best team and a great product never matters if you don’t have a great market ahead of you. If in your journey you understand your market is not sizable enough, pivoting is the thing you immediately need to do. The reality is that with a just enough competent team, a great market with real demand pulls the product out of your startup.
An over-simplistic yet helpful linear depiction of a startup journey is starting from an idea, getting through rapid prototyping and experimentation, launching endless iterations, getting traction, monetization, and growth, which the first four steps is the journey to get to the initial Product/Market Fit (PMF).
So what you just need to do from now is talking to your customers regularly, iterating, experimenting, and prototyping, building, launching probably tens of times, testing with your customers, measuring your Product/Market Fit (PMF), and going back to the first step, the process we product people usually call Continuous Discovery and Continuous Delivery.
This is how you can navigate through an uncertain market. Starting a startup is like navigating a dark hall with just a match. You can only see one step ahead, but each step builds your understanding until you find the light switch that illuminates everything. That switch is product-market fit.
The reality here is that the journey to Product/Market Fit (PMF) is never easy, involves chance, randomness, and serendipity, and it actually takes time. You can expect it to take from 6 months to 3 years depending on the complexity of the problem at hand. Therefore, your grit as a founder is key here as you need to keep your team and yourself motivated until you get there. The other key point here is that you need to keep your burn low to increase your runway before getting to Product/Market Fit (PMF).
Now, let me be more specific about how to navigate this journey. Your primary goal should be to optimize for learning, not for building the perfect product. What should you launch? A Minimum Valuable Prototype (MVP) as Marty Cagan wisely advises - something small that delivers genuine value, not just a collection of features.
The key is to listen to their problems, not their solutions. Your customers will often tell you what they think the solution should be, but your job is to find the hidden need underneath their requests. Try to understand what job they are going to hire you to do. This is why I never rely solely on traditional market research - as Steve Jobs famously said, customers often don't know what they want until you show them a better way.
Iterate on everything: your product, your target customer, your messaging, your assumptions. This iterative process should be supported by practical tools like customer interviews and user/UX testing. These aren't just nice-to-have activities; they are your essential navigation instruments in this uncertain journey.
Remember, as Marc Andreessen also warns us, "Most startups die before even reaching Product/Market Fit (PMF)." This sobering reality should motivate you to move fast, learn quickly, and stay focused on the fundamentals rather than getting distracted by peripheral concerns.
Sarehal
When I started my second startup, Sarehel, I had an ambitious vision: build a holistic wellness app that improves mental health, nutrition, and physical activity all in one place. It sounded comprehensive and valuable.
Our early prototypes failed dramatically. We quickly discovered that targeting all three wellness areas simultaneously overwhelmed our customers. They didn't know where to start, what to prioritize, or how to make progress. We were trying to solve too many problems at once.
So we pivoted. We narrowed our focus to nutrition and diet plans, building a wellness habit tracker that delivered personalized meal plans with light support for mental health and physical activity habits. This gave users clear, early wins without the confusion.
The transformation was remarkable. Over nine months of staying deeply involved with our customers – listening, iterating, and responding to their feedback – we grew to nearly 10,000 engaged users. The challenge then became maintaining our quality of service while scaling, but we had found our market.
Focus beats features every time. When you try to solve everything for everyone, you end up solving nothing for anyone. Start narrow, nail the core value proposition, and expand only after you've mastered your initial market. Your customers will guide you to product-market fit if you listen closely and stay personally involved in their experience.
How I Know When I've Achieved It
You'll feel it before you can measure it. Marc Andreessen described it perfectly: "The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can."
But feelings aren't enough for investors or your own clarity. Here are the metrics that matter:
- The Sean Ellis Test - Survey your active users with one question: "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?" If more than 40% answer "very disappointed," you've achieved PMF.
- Retention curves that flatten - Your monthly cohort retention stops declining after the initial drop-off and stabilizes. This means people are finding lasting value.
- Viral Coefficient Above 1 - Each customer brings in more customers.
Superhuman
Superhuman, a premium email client recently acquired by Atlassian, started with a low product-market fit score. CEO Rahul Vohra surveyed users using the Sean Ellis test, where only 22% were 'very disappointed' if the product disappeared - well below the 40% PMF threshold.
Instead of guessing, they used this feedback to focus on their most valuable users, improving speed and user experience through focused iteration.
Within nine months, their PMF score jumped to 58%, with users calling the product indispensable.
This shows that product-market fit is a measurable and improvable discipline, not just luck.
What happens after Product/Market Fit (PMF)
Reaching PMF isn't the finish line - it's the starting line for building a real company. Now you can start thinking about scale, but carefully.
Your job becomes maintaining and expanding your PMF. You'll need to iterate to keep your fit as markets evolve, competitors emerge, and customer needs change. Many companies lose their PMF by taking it for granted.
You can now start optimizing for growth metrics - conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value. Before PMF, these metrics are distractions. After PMF, they're your growth engine.
This is when you should consider raising funding, scaling your team, and building the infrastructure for growth. Investors will actually want to meet with you now because you've de-risked the biggest question: do people want this?
Product/Market Fit Dos and Don'ts
Do's
- Do Find a sizable market - This means more than just counting potential customers. You need a market that's growing, has budget to spend, and feels genuine pain around the problem you're solving. A market of 1,000 people with desperate need is often better than 1 million people with mild interest.
- Do build a team that can build and iterate quickly - Speed of learning is your competitive advantage. Build processes that let you ship, measure, and learn in days or weeks, not months. This means both technical capability and decision-making agility.
- Do things that don't scale - In the early days, manual customer support, hand-holding users through setup, and personal outreach teach you things automated systems never will. These unscalable activities often reveal your path to PMF.
- Do ignore everything if it distracts you from chasing Product/Market Fit (PMF) - It's tempting to work on "scalable problems" or optimize conversion funnels, but these don't matter until people fundamentally want your product. You have enough time to address scalability, monetization, scaling the team, and so on after Product/Market Fit (PMF).
Don'ts
- Don't overthink it. Just do it - Analysis paralysis kills more startups than wrong decisions. Make hypotheses, test them quickly, and move forward with what you learn.
- Don't scale your team before Product/Market Fit (PMF) - More people mean more coordination overhead, slower decision-making, and higher burn rate. You need agility more than capacity in the pre-PMF phase.
- Don't focus on metrics that are not measuring Product/Market Fit (PMF) before Product/Market Fit (PMF) like signups or conversion rate - These vanity metrics can make you feel good while distracting from the real question: are you building something people truly value?
Final words
Product/Market Fit is your navigation system through the uncertainty that defines startup life. It's not a destination - it's a capability you develop and maintain.
The journey is rarely linear. You'll have false starts, wrong turns, and moments when you question everything. That's normal. The founders who succeed aren't the ones who avoid these challenges - they're the ones who systematically work through them.
The match is in your hand. The dark hall is ahead. Start walking, keep learning, and trust the process.
Thank you.
Sources
- https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LNQxT9LvM0
- INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love - Marty Cagan (2017)
- https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/