Everyone talks about it, few can explain it

“Product-market fit” is Silicon Valley’s favourite buzz-phrase.

Investors demand it, founders chase it, and LinkedIn gurus proclaim they’ve cracked it. Yet the truth is simple: until you’ve lived both with and without product-market fit (PMF), the words are hollow.

PMF isn’t a metric on a dashboard or a line in a pitch deck - it’s a visceral shift you feel in every corner of the company.

What PMF really means

At its core, PMF is proof that real people desperately want what you’re selling and will gladly keep paying for it. When PMF clicks, customers pull the product out of your hands; they’re impatient for the next release, they forgive your bugs, and they recommend you in corridors you’ve never walked down.

Conversely, without PMF you can stack the deck with Steve Jobs as CEO, Steve Ballmer as CMO, and the twenty best sales reps in North America, and you’ll still fail. Genius can’t compensate for a market that shrugs.

Life on either side of the line

Without PMF

- Every unit of effort feels like pushing a boulder uphill.

- Endless tweaking of decks, demos, and discounts with little to show.

- Growth is a slog; morale stalls.

With PMF

- The same effort gets amplified - doors open, deals close.

- Customers chase you; inbound pings light up Slack overnight.

- Growth feels inevitable; culture lifts.

Most startups get trapped in a muddy middle ground where the market’s message is, “We kind of like it - but not enough.” That lukewarm reaction is dangerous. You need fervour, not faint praise.

How to get product-market fit

1. Start with a pain worth killing
   Too many founders start with a clever solution and go hunting for a problem. Flip it. Seek a problem so painful that people are already paying to patch it - badly and expensively. Think painkillers, not vitamins. Your ideal early customer is bleeding + budget-holding + decision-making.
2. Build for intensity, not elegance
   A beautiful product nobody needs is still useless. Ship the fastest route to relief, then iterate. If customers aren’t complaining that the MVP is broken - as they keep swiping their card - your problem might not be painful enough.
3. Sell it the way the market wants to buy
   PMF isn’t solely in the code; it’s in the go-to-market. At CloudNC our early self-serve trials of our CAM Assist solution flopped, but a sales-led model ignited demand. Same product, different packaging - radically different results.
4. Watch for the tell-tale signals
   
   • Sales cycle collapses (ours shrank to ~10 days).
   • Customers tolerate bugs because the underlying value dwarfs the friction (a personal example - Motion’s early AI calendar.)
   • Internal chatter explodes: support tickets, Slack mentions, feature requests - all good problems.

When to scale

You’ll know. Hiring a salesperson, turning on paid ads, or doubling cloud spend suddenly feels low-risk rather than reckless. The engine’s purring; you’re just pouring in more fuel.

The takeaway

Product-market fit isn’t a checkbox - it’s the moment the market shouts “Yes!” louder than your marketing ever could. Until you reach that point, nothing else matters. Once you do, almost everything gets easier. So find the pain, relieve it decisively, and watch your company take flight.

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Theo Saville is the co-founder and CEO of CloudNC.

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