How important is Product-Market Fit?

The Illusion of PMF: Why Product-Market Fit Isn’t the Goal - Customer Success Is

Product-Market Fit, or PMF, has become a kind of mythic milestone in startup culture. Founders chase it. Investors demand it. Blog posts dissect it. It’s often spoken about as a finish line—the moment you know you've made something people want.

But here's the truth: PMF is not a checkbox. It’s not a score on a dashboard. It’s not even the right thing to chase.

PMF is a side effect, not a destination.

And chasing the appearance of PMF can be dangerously misleading.

PMF: A Flawed Metric When Taken at Face Value

Many early-stage teams define PMF based on a few commonly accepted signals:

• Retention metrics
• Positive NPS scores
• User interviews with glowing feedback
• Low churn or stable cohorts

These are all helpful indicators, but they don’t guarantee product-market fit. Why?

Because users can like your product and still not care enough to come back.
Because retention can plateau while the business never takes off.
Because nobody churning doesn't mean you’re growing.

You can have all the right metrics and still not have traction.

What PMF Actually Means

Product-market fit happens when you’ve solved a real, recurring, and painful problem for a specific group of people—so well that they tell others, come back unprompted, and adapt their workflows around your product.

PMF isn’t about what people say. It’s about what they do:

• They integrate your product into their daily routine.
• They refer others without being asked.
• They build things on top of your platform.
• They depend on it, and would notice if it disappeared.

That kind of attachment doesn’t happen because you asked for feedback—it happens because you nailed the problem in a way that’s hard to replace.

The Real Goal: Customer Success at the Core

Instead of chasing PMF, what if you chased customer success?

• Did the customer achieve the outcome they wanted?
• Did your product create meaningful value in their life or business?
• Did their product or initiative succeed because you were in the stack?

If you’re a platform, did the companies building on you thrive?
If you’re a tool, did your users accomplish what they came for faster, better, or cheaper?

These are the questions that matter more than PMF surveys or NPS charts. Because when your customers win, they stay. They spread the word. They grow—and take you with them.

Why This Shift in Focus Matters

Too often, startups exhaust themselves trying to “hit” PMF—as if it’s a one-time milestone that unlocks hypergrowth. But that’s not how it works.

PMF is not a single moment.
It’s a continuum—fragile, evolving, and dependent on both customer needs and your ability to keep solving them well.

In fast-moving markets, what felt like PMF last year might no longer resonate. That’s why the focus must be ongoing: keep solving better, keep learning faster, and keep aligning your product with the evolving success of your customers.

What to Watch Instead of PMF

If you’re building, here are signals that matter more:

• Customer Outcomes: Are they succeeding because of you?
• Time-to-Value: How fast can new users see meaningful results?
• Expansion and Word of Mouth: Are users organically inviting others or using more?
• Emotional Stickiness: Would users feel the absence of your product?

These signals point to something deeper than momentary fit. They reflect embeddedness, which is a stronger signal of market alignment than any retention curve.

Don’t Chase the Label—Chase the Impact

The idea of product-market fit is helpful—as a lens, not as a target. It reminds us that value is not in the product alone, but in how the market receives and uses it.

But chasing PMF for the sake of saying you’ve “achieved” it is a trap. What matters is the success of the people you serve.

Because when your users win, your product wins.
And when that happens repeatedly, PMF will find you.

Brand-Building Is Like Strength Training. It Needs Consistency, Not Just Campaigns.

Much of marketing success doesn’t come from the cleverness of a single campaign, but from the consistency of your presence in the minds of your audience.

At its core, marketing is about creating and reinforcing mental associations—building memory structures that influence future decisions. But here lies the paradox: memory-building is a slow, cumulative process, while the world of marketing is increasingly pressured by short-term expectations.

The ROI Illusion

Marketing is often expected to deliver instant ROI. Campaigns are launched with the hope of immediate leads, immediate conversions, immediate proof that "it worked."

But this mindset clashes with how human memory—and by extension, brand consideration—actually works.

Brands Grow Like Muscles, Not Spreadsheets

Think of brand-building like going to the gym.

You don’t get measurably stronger or lighter with every single workout. You don’t return from one session knowing exactly which exercise combination yielded the most gains. Progress happens slowly, sometimes invisibly. Weeks go by with no visible changes, and then one day, a breakthrough.

Marketing works the same way. You can’t always attribute a lift in brand consideration to a single email, ad, or touchpoint. Instead, it’s the cumulative effect of repeated, consistent messaging over time that strengthens a brand's position in people’s minds.

Repetition Isn’t Redundancy—It’s Reinforcement

Memories fade. Just like muscles, they atrophy without use.

Stop showing up in the market, and people forget. Stop running ads, and your mental availability weakens. This is why consistency matters more than momentary brilliance. Effective brand marketing isn’t about perfectly timed messaging combinations—it’s about being memorable, again and again, across time and context.

It’s not the number of sets you did today that matters most—it’s the fact that you keep showing up.

Mental Availability Is the Real Goal

What we’re really doing in marketing is building mental availability—the likelihood that a brand comes to mind in a buying situation. The more people who remember your brand, in more situations, with more relevant associations, the higher the chance of conversion.

Mental availability isn’t built overnight. It’s built over time.

So when we ask, “Did it work yet?” we often ask the wrong question. The better question might be:

“Did we reinforce the right associations?”
“Did we show up consistently?”
“Are we still present in people’s minds?”

Because in the long run, the brands that win aren’t the ones with the flashiest launch. They’re the ones that kept showing up—deliberately, memorably, repeatedly.