Every startup dreams of one thing: product-market fit. Sure, they probably have a few ‘teeth falling out’ anxiety dreams along the way (especially when a product is launching) but ultimately we’re all chasing customers who love the product. And when you nail product-market fit? The feeling is electric. Customers stick around, they tell others about your app, and growth, while not effortless, is certainly easier.
There’s a certain buzz to product-market fit (PMF), the kind you see in apps that have clearly nailed it: Strava, Calm, TikTok.
But what is product-market fit? And how do you go from a vague, dreamy concept to actually knowing whether you the right ‘fit’ or not?
That’s exactly what we’re diving into today. Consider this your one-stop guide to everything product-market fit for subscription apps:
- What is product-market fit, and why do you need it?
- Where does it fit into an app’s growth lifecycle? (Hint: not just at the start)
- How do you measure and validate whether you have product-market fit?
- How do you achieve product-market fit?
- What comes after finding it?
Without PMF, efforts in marketing, user acquisition, and other growth strategies are far less effective — and can even lead to unsustainable scaling. We’ll wrap up by exploring how to balance growth with product-market fit, so you’re focusing on the right priorities at the right time.
What is product-market fit?
The less romanticized definition of product-market fit is simple: it’s when your app’s value proposition aligns with the needs or desires of a well-defined target market, creating a product that satisfies strong demand. In other words, you’ve found your gap in the market, and subscribers not only buy in, but they stick around.
Why should I care about product-market fit?
I’d go so far as to say that every major profitable subscription app either has or has had product-market fit. It’s crucial for growth, especially in crowded markets where standing out is harder than ever. PMF is often the first real indicator of long-term potential, validating that people actually need, or want, what you’re building.
Still skeptical? Consider this: if you’re looking to fundraise rather than bootstrap, investors are more likely to back a startup with clear PMF. It shows you can retain users — and in a subscription model, that signals strong growth potential.
Even if raising capital — which is increasingly difficult — isn’t your goal, you want to ensure you’re onto something before sinking all your hard-earned money into an app. A PMF-focused approach forces you to understand your audience from day one and build something they genuinely can’t live without.
Eric Duffet, a school teacher turned app developer, illustrates the risks of skipping PMF. His first app, essentially “meditation for golf”, took five years of development, content creation, and outreach to over 300 instructors. Yet he discovered (too late) that golfers simply didn’t want it. His second app, Shot Pattern, took a different approach: he shared the concept online, discussed it on Twitter, and watched trialists — and even professional golfers — interact in real time. Those interactions were his signal: he was on the right track.
Too often, apps try to skip this phase, chasing growth too early. Eric’s story is a warning: without product-market fit, there’s no meaningful or sustainable growth.
Where does PMF fit into an app’s growth lifecycle?
You should always be thinking about product-market fit on some level, but it’s most important on specific occasions:
- In early stages of app development
- When market shifts occur
- When consumer needs change, or you need to expand audience
In early stages of app development
For early-stage apps, your first growth goal should be finding product-market fit. That’s your priority before getting caught up in optimizing user acquisition, pricing, A/B tests, or other ‘growth hacks’. Those tactics might give small boosts, but they won’t truly move the needle if you haven’t nailed PMF.
It’s important to clarify: focusing on PMF doesn’t mean piling on features. Rosie Hoggmascall put it perfectly in one of her Growth Dives newsletters: the best products do one thing extremely well. Early-stage startups need to figure out what that one thing is and double down on it.
Take Ladder, the workout app. Their focus is simple: help busy people work out efficiently and track progress, without the hassle of planning. They continually refine that core experience, instead of endlessly adding features.
Another example is TalkingParents. While now a multi-feature app, it started with a single goal: helping divorced parents coordinate and care for their children without conflict. Expansion only came later, once the core problem (and feature) was optimal.
What matters less is polish or design perfection. In an interview with Vince Mayfield, CEO of TalkingParents, Jacob Eiting, RevenueCat CEO, highlighted that product-market fit is demonstrated when your product grows despite problems like technical debt or lack of monetization.
TL;DR: early on, double down on PMF by focusing on what makes your app different. Prioritize value over perfection, and resist the temptation to chase features.
When market shifts occur
Later-stage apps might think they’re in the clear, with product-market fit achieved and growth mode engaged. But PMF is fickle. It can shift as competitors emerge or external factors change. Matt Ronge, CEO of Astropad, experienced this firsthand: when Apple launched Sidecar — a built-in Mac-to-iPad display — Astropad’s original PMF (helping users connect their Mac and iPad as a second screen to draw) vanished overnight. They had to pivot from basic mirroring to offering a pro workflow for power users, something Apple didn’t provide, essentially creating a niche for themselves.
At the time of writing, many apps face a similar challenge, but the competitor culprit is AI. AI has fueled a surge of new competitors and made users rely on LLMs for tasks like personalized workout plans, recipe recommendations, or, in my case, analyzing photos of my garden to learn how to prune plants.
Duolingo provides another example. As more people turn to AI to create language-learning plans and practice, AI-powered language apps have exploded. In response, Duolingo is continuously testing and exploring ways to integrate AI into their platform, adjusting their offerings to stay competitive.
Just like Astropad, apps now need to go back to the drawing board to identify what AI can’t solve. For example, I’d pay for an app that helps me map my garden, schedule tasks based on weather, or links to a backyard camera to monitor plant health. But simply identifying a plant and telling me how to prune it? That’s no longer enough.
When consumer needs change, or you need to expand your audience
Even if it’s not due to a competitor, customers’ wants and needs evolve over time. When that happens, it’s time to go back to basics and ask:
- How can you ensure your product still adds value for your current audience?
- Do you need to shift focus to a different audience?
Even if your product-market fit is strong, you’ll likely want to expand to new audiences, whether to reach broader demographics or explore alternative niches. Expanding to new geographies also requires re-evaluating PMF, since each market has slightly different needs.
Take Ladder — their initial audience came through their first fitness coaches who joined the app. Users were deeply connected to them, willing to pay more for one-on-one guidance and the chance to meet their heroes. Ladder quickly reached $1 million ARR, but then struggled to scale further.
After talking to countless users, both active and churned, and conducting pricing research using the Van Westendorp model, they realized that offering a lower price without the expensive one-on-one coaching could help them reach the next growth stage. They needed to widen their audience to regular fitness enthusiasts — who weren’t drawn in by specific coaches, and thus weren’t willing to pay $60/month.
This is a classic example of avoiding the growth trap: being willing to expand beyond your niche, even if it means removing beloved features or revisiting pricing, to reach a broader audience.
So, my advice? Initially, focus on finding PMF with your niche, then look at how to expand that audience to continue scaling, while staying specific enough in how you solve a problem that you maintain unique PMF.
How do you measure and validate whether you have product-market fit?
Brutal truth: if you’re asking, “Do we have product-market fit?” then you probably don’t. That doesn’t mean you aren’t on your way; it just means you need to figure out how far off you are.
It’s also not a binary state: you don’t just ‘have’ it or not.
In early-stage startups, it’s common to see some level of PMF, but with too broad an audience. The users who join love the product, yet the company struggles to explain its value clearly up front.
So how do you measure it more concretely?
1. The classic PMF test
The classic PMF test, developed by Sean Ellis, is to ask your customers:
How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use the product/service?
- Very disappointed
- Somewhat disappointed
- Not disappointed
- I no longer use the app
The rule of thumb is that if 40% of your customers answer ‘very disappointed,’ you have PMF. You follow up that question with “Could you explain your answer?”
Now, who do you ask: trialists? Downloads? Existing subscribers?
I always recommend starting with your users’ main aha! moment and using that as your cut-off point. For example, if it usually takes seven days for someone to really understand and love your app, focus on users from day seven onward.
It’s a delicate balance: if you only ask users who’ve been on your app for two months, you might be fooling yourself into thinking you have product-market fit. Ask too early, like before the aha! moment, and you risk painting a negative picture.
My number one tip: ask additional questions or combine survey findings with other data, like onboarding metrics. With enough responses (you’ll need at least a few hundred), you can narrow down where PMF exists — e.g. maybe it’s only with older users, or users who use your app for a very specific reason.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS) and word-of-mouth
There are several signals to gauge how close (or far) you are from product-market fit. One key indicator is a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. Asking users whether they would recommend your app can reveal a lot about whether you’ve found your fit.
Ladder found that when they combined the classic PMF question with NPS, subscribers who said they’d be “somewhat disappointed” if they lost the app had much lower NPS than those who said they’d be “very disappointed.” The two metrics correlated strongly. Ladder then used insights from the “very disappointed” group to guide focus, while learning from the “somewhat disappointed” group where there was room for improvement.
With NPS, you can also segment responses to understand why users do or don’t promote your app. Tracking word-of-mouth acquisition is another powerful PMF signal: if 15%+ of your new users come through referrals, that’s a strong indicator that your app resonates with its audience.
3. Review rate and overall rating
I find review rate (how quickly your app is reviewed by users after download or prompting a review) and overall ratings to be a good indicator of how close you are to finding PMF. You can initially boost your review rate by timing it close to your aha! moment or prompting users to leave a review after interacting with key features
However, if, after all that optimization, you’re still seeing a much slower ratings-to-downloads ratio compared to competitors — commonly referred to as DPR, which measures the number of downloads needed to get one new rating — it may indicate lower PMF, especially when coupled with a low average rating.
4. Engagement and retention metrics
Finally, engagement and retention data are another helpful indicator of PMF:
- Are subscribers using your app frequently?
- Are they renewing?
I recommend benchmarking performance against your category with subscription metrics like month-one renewals and annual renewal rates. For engagement, it’s important to consider your specific use case. I’ve spoken to apps that found their best subscribers — those who loved the app and used it for years — didn’t necessarily use it as frequently as other users. This highlights the need to understand the use case you solve best, then ensure you measure the right frequency of use.
In Martin Siniawski’s Sub Club episode, he notes that focusing initially on monthly subscribers rather than optimizing for annual subscriptions can help you learn faster and force you to demonstrate real, repeatable value. It also allows you to interview churned customers earlier, uncovering why they didn’t retain and what caused them to churn.
5. Willingness to pay
Technically, willingness to pay is separate from product–market fit, however some apps intentionally start with a hard paywall to validate whether users are willing to pay and to attract higher-quality subscribers. Think of it as testing product-market fit in a very bold way!
A low willingness to pay may suggest you haven’t yet nailed your value proposition — we’ve seen this with the Ladder example, where its pricing wasn’t initially right for a broader audience, and identifying the optimal price point was key to scaling. But keep in mind there are many ways to validate willingness to pay before building your app.
Signals you’ve found product-market fit
Although PMF has several tangible metrics, it’s rarely black and white.
Identifying product-market fit means looking at a combination of signals that suggest you’re on the right track:
- Users come back on their own, not just when prompted
- People stick around month after month, even if there are bugs
- Users tell others about your app
- They’re eager to share feedback and input
- People are willing to pay, not just use it for free or heavily discounted
- Your retention curve flattens relatively quickly (e.g. after 4–8 weeks)
- Users reach their aha! moment without excessive guidance
How do you achieve product-market fit?
Often the very metrics you track to identify PMF will reveal what’s driving product-market fit, so if you’ve done NPS surveys or looked at reviews, you’re already halfway there.
Developing a deep understanding of why those signals matter helps you better define the problem you’re solving and connect every improvement you make to your app and user experience back to that core insight.
Andres Barreto recommends the following framework for improving product-market fit:
- Discover pain through user research
- Create experiments to observe customer behavior
- Kill ideas or experiments that don’t work
Early validation is so important in getting to product-market fit, and Andres’s framework helps you do this by focusing on really understanding and testing your assumptions in the beginning. Let’s break it down.
1. Discovering pain through user research
Product-market fit starts with finding problem-solution fit. You need to identify the problem you can solve better than anyone else.
Take Photoroom as an example. When they first started, they hyper-focused on one pain point — a single job-to-be-done: removing backgrounds from photos, and doing that better than any other solution out there. What didn’t they do? Try to be easier than Photoshop at everything. That would’ve been focusing on a solution, not a problem (aka, a big mistake).
From there, they identified patterns in their users’ challenges and expanded thoughtfully by building a suite of tools for easy, on-the-go photo editing.
With this, there are two essential considerations:
The first is how big the problem is. We’re looking for must-solve, major pain points, not nice-to-haves. The second is how big the audience is. The basic maths works as follows:
- Size of target audience (TAM — total addressable market): don’t confuse everyone who has the problem with your potential market; only the desperate-to-solve segment counts as your true audience
- % you think you can obtain (SAM — serviceable available market): this depends on how competitive your market is, but you can start by modeling scenarios between 2% and 15%
- Average revenue per subscriber (ARPU): Estimate what you expect to earn per paying user
This is a useful way to estimate your potential early on and gauge how quickly you’ll need to expand your market focus. For example, I worked with a niche app in a smaller country that wasn’t charging much. A quick calculation showed that while they still had room to grow locally, they would eventually need to adjust pricing for sustainability and plan to expand internationally.
3. Create experiments to observe your customers’ behavior
Once you’ve identified the problem, the next step is to experiment, learning both how to solve it best and how to communicate your solution so it truly resonates. The goal is to learn fast and fail fast, validating as much as possible without building full features.
I once spoke with an app that had spent two years building and still wasn’t sure if their main, expensive feature was something people would actually pay for. Tools like prototypes and painted door tests can help reduce this risk and accelerate learning.
This also explains why it’s hard to say how long the PMF phase will last. It depends how quickly you can develop a deep understanding of the right problem and audience, and how many misses it takes before finding the solution and approach that truly works.
3. Kill ideas or experiments that did not work
In this phase, it’s crucial not to be afraid to ‘kill your darlings’. Some ideas and solutions simply won’t work or resonate, and there’s always a lot of pivoting early on.
This approach is particularly effective when you’re still building your product. But sometimes your app is already live, with a wide audience and some subscribers retaining, while others aren’t. In that case, you may not need to change the product itself; rather, you need to better understand who your audience is. Remember, product-market fit requires a match from both sides.
During this challenging phase, it’s easy to get distracted. One major distraction is fundraising and the belief that more capital will solve PMF. But raises come with pressure, which can lead to endless feature building or heavy investment in paid acquisition, only to see high churn.
Another distraction is chasing short-term growth hacks. These may produce temporary spikes, but they won’t fix fundamental product issues.
Next, we’ll dive into how to balance growth with achieving true product-market fit.
How can early-stage apps balance product-market fit with growth?
The most common risk when seeking PMF is focusing on growth too early.
This often comes from investor pressure or a few early wins that get you overly excited (we’ve all been there). You rush into paid ads, burn through your run rate, and watch users churn, then panic to acquire more. Eric Seufert refers to this as the growth trap. Growth becomes like running on a treadmill with the speed constantly increasing: you might keep up at first, but eventually, you fall flat as you lose more customers than you gain.
Before scaling, you need a basic level of retention and product-market fit. Even if it’s just with a niche audience or a minimum viable product, this ensures that as you grow, you can learn, optimize, and improve your product.
Once you’ve established that foundation, growth isn’t your sole focus. Instead, you can follow Seufert’s solution to the growth trap: the growth sandwich (sounds way more fun than falling off a treadmill). The growth sandwich layers paid marketing and product optimization to balance expanding your audience beyond your initial niche, while refining the product for them.
The flip side is the ‘one more feature’ trap. It’s like planning a treadmill workout but spending 30 minutes fetching your water bottle, headphones, and changing outfit — your intentions are there, but you never actually start. If you get stuck endlessly optimizing for a tiny niche, you miss growth. You need a sufficiently large cohort to truly learn what works and what doesn’t.
What comes after product-market fit?
So you’ve nailed product-market fit. What happens then?
Product-model fit
The funny thing is, having product-market fit doesn’t automatically mean people will pay for your product. So the next step is to build a monetization model around your product that matches usage and that audience.
This is also known as product-model fit, and it’s more than just your pricing strategy. It is about improving your business model. It includes your packaging, your funnel (web-to-app vs. in-app), trial vs. no-trial, freemium vs. premium only. The process typically starts with product-market fit and retention, then moves into product-model fit.
Pricing, packaging, and funnel decisions are hard to finalize before PMF. For example, Ladder initially had a high proportion of monthly subscribers. Once they achieved a second phase of product-market fit with a broader audience, they optimized their model and converted more customers to annual subscriptions.
Product/market-channel fit
Once your retention metrics are strong and you’ve optimized monetization, the next focus is product/market-channel fit. By this point, you’ve likely tested several channels but struggled to find one with a good enough payback period to scale.
Optimizing for PMF and monetization helps by increasing the LTV of your subscribers, but you still need to identify which channels can drive profitable growth.
As Gessica Bicego (CMO of Paired and former Head of Growth at Blinkist) has seen firsthand, channel fit is real and highly app-specific. For Paired, a relationship app, social media became the ideal growth engine, driving rapid scale. For Blinkist, a learning app with a different audience and use case, TikTok never became a repeatable growth channel. After months of testing, Taboola and Outbrain emerged as key acquisition drivers.
Her advice: carefully weigh time-to-impact, resource requirements, and creative demands when deciding which channels to test.
Product-market fit: the ongoing journey
Product-market fit isn’t just something you find at the start of your journey — you need to continually revisit it as your market, competitors, and audience evolve. It’s what makes all your other growth efforts effective, and helps you avoid scaling a leaky bucket or falling into the growth trap.
For early-stage apps, this means focusing on deeply understanding your audience, solving one problem exceptionally well, and validating that people truly value and retain your product.
For later-stage apps, it means staying alert to market shifts — whether from new competitors, AI changing user behavior, or expansion into new audiences — and being willing to return to the fundamentals when needed.
Once you’ve achieved product-market fit, you can layer on product-model fit and product/market-channel fit, building growth and monetization on a solid foundation. Without PMF, every feature, ad, and experiment is just noise. Focus on creating something people can’t imagine losing, and the growth will follow.