Many marketing failures aren't the marketer's fault, but a result of joining a company that lacks true product-market fit. Marketers excel at scaling demand for something with proven value, not creating demand for a vague idea. It's crucial to verify PMF before accepting a role.
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Large companies often identify an opportunity, create a solution based on an unproven assumption, and ship it without validating market demand. This leads to costly failures when the product doesn't solve a real user need, wasting millions of dollars and significant time.
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.
The 'never give up' mantra is misleading. Successful founders readily abandon failed products and even entire startups. Their unwavering persistence is not tied to a specific idea, but to the meta-goal of finding product-market fit itself, no matter how many attempts it takes.
Unlike info products, you can't just "sprinkle marketing" on a SaaS product post-build. SaaS requires solving a real pain point to prevent churn. Great marketing for a product nobody wants simply accelerates its demise by exposing its lack of product-market fit more quickly.
When a startup finally uncovers true customer demand, their existing product, built on assumptions, is often the wrong shape. The most common pattern is for these startups to burn down their initial codebase and rebuild from scratch to perfectly fit the newly discovered demand.
Technical founders often create a perfect solution to a real problem but still fail. That's because problem-solution fit is useless without product-market fit. An elegant solution that isn't plugged into the market—with the right GTM, pricing, and messaging—solves nothing in practice. It's unheard and unseen.
PMF isn't a fixed state achieved once. It's a continuous process that must be re-evaluated at every stage of growth—from $1M to $1B. A company might have PMF for one scale but not for the next, requiring a constant evolution of strategy and product.
Product-market fit can be accidental. Even companies with millions in ARR may not initially understand *why* customers buy. They must retroactively apply frameworks to uncover the true demand drivers, which is critical for future growth, replication in new segments, and avoiding wrong turns.
According to Gamma's CEO, if your product doesn't have strong organic word-of-mouth growth, you have not achieved true product-market fit. Any effort to scale sales, marketing, or team size before this is a waste of time and money.
Founders often believe their product is flawed when facing rejection. However, if they're only speaking to 1-2 potential customers a week, the core issue isn't product-market fit. The real problem is an insufficient number of conversations to validate or disprove any hypothesis. You haven't earned the right to have a PMF crisis yet.