Product-market fit (PMF)
Product-market fit is the point where a specific group of people needs your product enough that they keep using it, pay for it and tell others, without you pushing each one.
Worked example (made-up numbers)
Two founders, each with 100 users after three months.
- The first has 100 users spread across many kinds of people. Each week a few new ones arrive from launches and posts; most try it once. Eight pay.
- The second has 100 users, 60 of them freelance bookkeepers. The bookkeepers use it every week, 25 of them pay, and most new signups say a colleague told them.
The second founder is much closer to product-market fit, with the same number of users. Fit is about one group needing it, not about the total.
The signs
- People come back without being reminded. Retention flattens instead of falling to zero.
- People pay, and keep paying. Churn among one type of customer is low.
- People arrive on their own. Referrals, direct visits and searches for your name grow while your posting stays the same.
- People complain when it breaks. Silence during an outage is a bad sign.
- A clear “who”. You can describe the users who love it in one sentence.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a number of signups, a launch-day ranking, or praise from people who don’t use it. Those measure attention. Fit shows in behaviour over months: using, paying, staying, recommending.
Why it matters when you’re starting out
Before fit, the job is learning: finding the group that needs it and shaping the product for them. After fit, the job is growth: finding more of that group. Spending on growth before fit mostly buys signups who leave.
Most founders don’t find it in one step. They notice that one group behaves differently from everyone else, and narrow down.
How to look for it
- Split your users by who they are (job, company size, use case) and by where they came from.
- For each group, look at the numbers above: coming back, paying, staying, arriving on their own.
- The group that stands out is your market. Write for them, go where they are, and build what they ask for.
In Nordva Launch
Launch puts the numbers from step 2 next to each other: where each visitor and signup came from, which of them paid (with Stripe connected, read-only, every plan), monthly churn, and what each person asked for in feedback. On Indie, contacts put all of it on one record per person, so the group that stands out is easier to see.