Despite hundreds of thousands of users, Hera's founder doesn't believe they have product-market fit. Their true benchmark is when a user can create a complete one-minute product video in under 30 minutes. This focus on a core, high-value workflow supersedes vanity metrics like user growth.

Product-market fit isn't just growth; it's an extreme market pull where customers buy your product despite its imperfections. The ultimate signal is when deals close quickly and repeatedly, with users happily ignoring missing features because the core value proposition is so urgent and compelling.

For Ethic, the feeling of true product-market fit wasn't just hitting metrics, but the moment they helped an advisor win a major new client. The founder realized this success was a replicable playbook that could be repeated, creating a flywheel for growth. The metrics then followed this initial breakthrough.

After a buggy POC, the founder presented the economic buyer with a simple slide: a timeline showing every issue raised and how quickly it was fixed, often in days. This demonstration of extreme responsiveness and partnership outweighed the product's imperfections and built the trust needed to close the deal.

Sales are a vanity metric for product-market fit. The real test is having ~25 customers who have successfully implemented your product and achieved the specific ROI promised during the sales process. If you don't have this, you have a product problem, not a go-to-market problem.

Initially building a tool for ML teams, they discovered the true pain point was creating AI-powered workflows for business users. This insight came from observing how first customers struggled with the infrastructure *around* their tool, not the tool itself.