Product-market fit (PMF) describes the moment a startup stops pushing its product on an indifferent market and instead finds a market pulling the product out of its hands. Before PMF, growth is a struggle — the team has to convince, discount, and chase every user. After PMF, growth becomes noticeably easier: usage sticks, word-of-mouth kicks in, and the hardest problem shifts from “will anyone want this” to “how do we keep up with demand.”

PMF is famously hard to define with one number, but founders and investors look for practical signs: customers get upset if the product goes down, retention curves flatten out instead of decaying to zero, and a large share of new users arrive through referrals rather than paid marketing. Marc Andreessen’s original description — that you can always feel when product-market fit is not happening — is still widely quoted because PMF is something a founder senses in daily usage data before it shows up cleanly in a slide deck.

PMF is not permanent. A product can have it, lose it as the market shifts, and need to find it again — which is one reason mature companies still watch retention and organic growth numbers closely, not just revenue.

🇵🇭 Philippine Example

Kumu's founders have described noticing their real signal for product-market fit not from download numbers, but from watching a tiny group of early, mostly-abandoned users obsessively return to one specific feature — livestreaming — which the team then leaned into fully. That signal eventually scaled into Kumu becoming one of the most-used social and livestreaming apps in the Philippines.

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