Product-Market Fit

Product-Market Fit (PMF) is a state when the product is really needed by the market. The sign is simple: people come back and recommend on their own, without being pushed by marketing. Advertising money accelerates growth rather than creating it from scratch.

Before PMF, pouring budget into performance is an expensive mistake. CPL can be great, leads come, but they don’t buy again and don’t recommend – because the product doesn’t solve the pain. In such cases, I tell the client directly: first 50–100 sales and custdev on them, then marketing to scale.

PMF is checked not by the “hospital average”, but by cohorts and retention: whether the client remains after 1–3 months. If retention drops to zero, this is not a marketing problem, it’s a product problem. The marketer here will most honestly save the client money if he says it out loud.