5 Signs You’ve Achieved Product Market Fit

Product market fit, also known as PMF, is one of the most discussed topics in the startup ecosystem across the world and it remains the driving force behind the success of every product or service.

Table of Contents

1. User Engagement and Customer Dependency
2. Increase in Referrals and Word of Mouth
3. Less Expensive User Acquisition
4. Team Expansion
5. Revenue Growth and Renewal

As an entrepreneur looking to scale your products and services. It is of utmost importance that you achieve Product Market Fit before you welcome investments and consider expansion for your business. Product market fit is also described as the “Nirvana” stage for a product, a borrowed term from the Buddhist ideology which means a stage of blessedness and bliss.

Achieving product-market fit early remains the most important goal for every startup owner, especially in the technology space. According to Andreessen Horowitz, who coined the term in 2007, he defined product-market fit as “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market” which simply means; if your product is solving a problem for the right people in the right space then you’ve achieved product-market fit.

There are no standard frameworks for achieving product-market fit as it varies from industries to markets across the startup ecosystem. However, there are some indicators that tell an entrepreneur they’ve achieved product-market fit. The indicators cut across qualitative and quantitative metrics which will be discussed at length in this article.

1. User Engagement and Customer Dependency

If your metrics indicate that customers are spending more than usual using your products and exploring extra features, it simply means that users are dependent on your product to solve a particular problem and would like to engage more with it.

On the other side, if at any slight downtime you get a series of emails or calls from your customers to escalate the issue also indicates that users are heavily dependent on your product to do their business. This also shows that there is a huge potential…