Finding Product-Market Fit: Signs, Signals, and Traps

Retention Cohorts Flatten

Before PMF, you're pushing product on users. You're convincing, demonstrating, explaining why they need it. After PMF, users are pulling. They're asking for more features, referring others, complaining when it's down. The energy reverses.

Not marketing-driven growth. Not sales-driven growth. Users who find you on their own and stick around. If you turn off paid acquisition and growth continues, you might have something.

Early users churning is normal. What matters is whether cohorts stabilize. If users who stay past week 2 are still active at month 6, the product is solving a real, recurring need.

False Signal: Engagement Without Value

Early adopters will tolerate anything. They're excited by novelty, forgiving of bugs, willing to invest effort in understanding your product. Their enthusiasm doesn't mean the mainstream market will follow. They're not representative.

Landing a few big contracts feels like validation. But are they paying because the product genuinely solves their problem, or because you have a good relationship? Would others buy without your sales effort? One is PMF; the other is sales success.

Users might engage because you've made something addictive, not useful. Gamification, notifications, social features—these drive usage without necessarily indicating value. Ask: would users pay if they had to? Would they miss it if it disappeared?

Test Willingness to Pay

Happy users will tell you what you want to hear. Churned users will tell you the truth. Why did they leave? What were they trying to accomplish? What would bring them back? This is where real insight lives.

Among your users, some think your product is nice-to-have. Others would be genuinely upset if it disappeared. Find the "upset" group and understand what makes them different. That's your beachhead market.

Free usage proves interest. Payment proves value. If users won't pay—even a small amount—for something, that's a signal. Price sensitivity reveals how much the problem actually matters to them.

The Takeaway

Product-market fit isn't a binary event—it's a gradient. You can have strong fit in a niche and no fit in adjacent markets. You can have fit today and lose it as markets shift.

The search never really ends. But knowing what real signal looks like helps you find it faster.