Anish

The best definition of Product-Market Fit for startups I ever heard came from @eshear when i worked for him at Twitch. Most founders think they have PMF, but they don’t. Not yet at least. Think of your startup like pushing a boulder on a steep mountain: Stage 1: The Sisyphus Phase You’re at the bottom, pushing uphill. It takes Herculean effort just to move an inch. The second you stop pushing (marketing, pushing new features), the boulder rolls back to zero. No momentum. Stage 2: The Plateau You’ve pushed it onto a flat ledge. If you stop pushing, it doesn’t roll back completely, but it doesn’t move forward either much. This is where most founders get stuck. In general, you get stuck here here without great retention and marketing you can repeat. They think this is PMF. It isn't. Stage 3: The Tipping Point Suddenly, the boulder starts moving without you. You see signups from a random user post that went viral. You can’t pinpoint where 200 new users came from. You get emails out of no where of serious customers that wants to buy your service. The market is finally pulling the product out of you. Stage 4: The Avalanche The charts go vertical. You have made it to the other side. Retention is so high that growth just happens. Stability breaks because you’re scaling faster than you can code and build systems in your company. You have unlimited capital and crisis to manage. You need to hire and fast. Every few weeks, something happens where you thought the company was done. The Reality Check: Only a tiny % of founders ever feel Stage 4. Even then, a hundred things can still kill you and some might say it's even harder to scale than to start, but at least you aren't pushing the boulder uphill anymore, it has real forward motion now. Not being alone helps A LOT with phase 1 and 2. I personally only hit true PMF twice: @CurseForge and Gamepedia. With CurseVoice, we fell into the Stage 2 trap. We reached 5M MAU, but the retention just wasn't there. We couldn't outgrow Discord because we were still "pushing the boulder" while they were riding the avalanche.