What Startups Get Wrong About Product Market Fit

Founders hear about product market fit from the beginning. It is framed as the holy grail of early stage success. You are told to chase it before scaling, before investing in growth, before anything else.

But for something that gets repeated so often, product market fit is rarely understood well.

It is not a moment in time. It is not a single milestone. And it is not something you stumble into without intentionality.

Product market fit is not about how many features you ship, how many signups you get, or even how passionate you are about your problem space. I have worked with early stage teams who had users and revenue but were still missing the mark entirely on what their product really was and who it was for.

The reality is, product market fit is hard because it requires clarity on multiple fronts. You need to know your market. You need to know how to describe your value in a way that sticks. And you need your customers to reflect that clarity back to you.

Here is what I look for when evaluating whether a company is actually approaching product market fit—and what I often see being misunderstood along the way.

Your Customers Should Be Able to Say It Back to You

One of the strongest signals of product market fit is when your customers can explain what your product does and why it helps them.

Not in your words. In theirs.

When customers have internalized your product’s value, they start sharing it in meetings. They tell their colleagues. They bring it up unprompted. They use their own language, but you can clearly hear that it maps back to your core value proposition.

If the only people who can explain what your product does are on your internal team, you are not there yet.

I am not just looking for testimonials. I am looking for signal that your users understand the why behind what you built. That they see the product as essential to solving a problem they care about—and they can communicate that clearly to someone else.

You Should Be Able to Describe Your Product in One Sentence

The second signal is on your side.

If you cannot describe what your product does in one sentence, you are not ready to scale.

That sentence does not have to be clever. It does not need to sound like a tagline. But it should be specific, confident, and rooted in what your product actually delivers.

When I ask a founder, “What does your product do?” and the answer begins with a five minute explanation of the market, the ecosystem, the vision, and the roadmap, I already know the answer. You are still working on it.

Product market fit is not about solving a vague problem for a broad audience. It is about solving a specific problem for a specific group of people who feel the pain clearly enough to act on it.

If your articulation of the product is complicated, your sales cycle will be too.

You Should Know Exactly Who You Are Building For

This one is always underestimated. Product market fit is as much about the market as it is about the product.

You cannot have product market fit without clarity on your audience.

If your target customer changes every time you run a new campaign, or if you are regularly testing messaging across wildly different personas, then the product might not be the issue—the positioning might be.

When product market fit is in sight, you are not just finding people who might benefit. You are seeing clear patterns of pull. You are noticing the same types of companies, roles, or use cases come up over and over again. And you are able to refine your story, your website, and your funnel around that consistency.

The messaging gets sharper because the signals are stronger.

And that leads to the most important point:

Product Market Fit Shows Up in the Way People Talk About You

It is not about your metrics alone. It is about language.

When you are close to product market fit, there is alignment between what you say about your product and what the market says in return.

You are not overexplaining.
You are not compensating for weak traction with heavier pitches.
You are not guessing at who to target next.

Instead, your customers are helping you refine your message. Your sales calls are getting shorter. Your positioning feels more like confirmation than persuasion.

That is the difference.