The most detrimental marketing mistake is simple but profound: starting with a product nobody wants or needs. For years, marketers have been conditioned to accept this flawed reality, investing time and money into a product they hoped would resonate with an audience, often with disastrous results. In the old way of thinking, the goal was to “go to market with the product you have, not the one you want.” Yet, as history has shown, this approach can lead to wasted resources, failed strategies, and unnecessary financial losses.
Make stuff people want.
—Paul Graham
The Flaw in Traditional Marketing Thinking
Traditional marketing has operated on a fixed set of principles for decades, largely based on a simple but misguided assumption: if a company builds a product, the marketing team’s job is to convince the world to buy it. This approach relies heavily on pushing a product into the market and hoping it will succeed. However, this method overlooks a fundamental truth that can make or break a business: success in the marketplace doesn’t come simply from having a product but from having the right product that the market wants.
Traditional marketing emphasizes a one-size-fits-all approach. A business would create a product, build its brand, and launch it with a mix of advertising, public relations, and distribution efforts. The expectation was that the market would eventually catch on. The idea behind this model was simple: the more resources you throw at a product, the more likely it is to succeed. Marketers used ads, discounts, and strategic partnerships to push their products into the hands of consumers, often without paying enough attention to whether the product addressed the needs and desires of the people it was supposed to serve.
This approach typically had a high level of risk built into it. Marketers would launch campaigns and push products they believed were good, but in the real world, consumers often disagreed. If the product didn’t meet customer needs or wasn’t in demand, companies were forced to rely on more aggressive marketing tactics to generate sales, often with limited or diminishing returns. In the worst-case scenarios, businesses poured millions into marketing and distribution only to find that their products were not resonating with consumers, leading to expensive failures.
Moreover, marketers were largely passive in this process. They were not involved in shaping the product from the beginning. They often worked with a “finished” product and tried to sell it rather than influencing the product development to align with real customer needs. Traditional marketing operates within the confines of the product without considering the possibility of changing or iterating the product to fit the market better. The product was essentially viewed as a static entity that could only be marketed more aggressively to generate sales.
This is where growth hacking—the radical departure from traditional marketing—offers a new way of thinking. Growth hackers understand that products are not set in stone. Instead of spending resources pushing an underwhelming product, growth hackers approach marketing with a flexible mindset. They view the product as something malleable—capable of evolving and adapting until it fits the market’s needs perfectly. This insight fundamentally changes the role of marketing from simply promoting a product to actively shaping it into something consumers will truly want.
By focusing on iteration, testing, and refinement, growth hackers embrace the idea that the right product will drive its success. This concept of Product Market Fit (PMF) means that marketers, far from being passive observers, must be actively involved in the product development, ensuring that the product evolves to meet market demands. Rather than trying to convince the market to accept an imperfect product, growth hackers work with the product to ensure it delivers undeniable value to the target audience. This shift in thinking challenges the traditional marketing mentality and sets the stage for a more efficient, results-driven approach.
The Power of Product Market Fit (PMF)
Product Market Fit is the cornerstone of any successful business, and it’s what distinguishes companies that grow rapidly from those that struggle to survive. At its core, Product Market Fit (PMF) occurs when a company’s product perfectly aligns with its target market’s needs and desires. This means the product not only meets the functional needs of its users but also creates an emotional connection that makes it indispensable to them. Achieving PMF is the ultimate goal for any startup or business because it provides the foundation for sustainable growth and customer loyalty.
The idea of PMF is simple but powerful: a product will succeed when it meets a clear, compelling need for a specific group of people. However, reaching this point requires more than just a great idea. Understanding the target market, continuously refining the product, and iterating based on feedback takes significant effort. It is an ongoing process of discovery and adjustment until a product resonates deeply with its audience.
Take Airbnb’s story, for example. The company started as a modest attempt by its founders to provide affordable lodging during a design conference in San Francisco. They used air mattresses to turn their loft into a bed-and-breakfast for conference attendees. Initially, this concept was a hit because it provided an alternative to expensive hotel rooms, but it wasn’t a scalable business model. However, the founders didn’t stop there—they used this initial feedback to pivot. They rebranded the company and refined their offering, focusing on travelers seeking an alternative to traditional hotel accommodations. This wasn’t just a minor tweak but a fundamental shift in the business model.
Through continuous iterations, Airbnb’s founders honed their product into something that genuinely matched the needs of a wider audience—those looking for unique, flexible lodging options that offered more character and cost savings than standard hotels. They understood that the product wasn’t perfect initially, but they eventually achieved PMF by responding to market feedback and refining their offering. The product evolved from a niche offering to a global platform that appeals to millions of users worldwide, from backpackers to business travelers.
Airbnb illustrates that Product Market Fit is rarely a “one-and-done” achievement. It takes a deep understanding of the target customers and a willingness to adapt. The product must be continuously adjusted and refined to align with customer preferences, pain points, and behaviors. What began as a simple, makeshift bed-and-breakfast concept gradually morphed into a comprehensive travel platform offering everything from rooms to entire homes, castles, boats, and even private islands. It wasn’t just about creating a product but about responding to market demand and evolving the offering to meet those demands.
Product Market Fit also represents a shift from a mindset of “building it and hoping they will come” to “building it and iterating based on feedback until it works.” In traditional marketing, businesses often launch a product and then push it with marketing campaigns. However, growth hacking focuses on the product itself, ensuring it is aligned with the market’s needs before even considering mass marketing efforts. This approach leads to more sustainable growth because the product is the catalyst for success, not just the marketing efforts behind it.
Once PMF is achieved, the company can scale quickly, knowing its product already resonates with the market. This is where marketing becomes truly effective—it’s no longer about trying to convince people to buy something that isn’t right for them. Instead, marketing becomes a tool to amplify the success of a product that customers already love. The product sells itself, and marketing efforts merely fuel that existing demand.
In summary, PMF is a powerful concept because it aligns the product with the market, leading to rapid growth. It requires constant refinement, feedback, and iteration. Once companies achieve PMF, they unlock the potential for long-term success. Getting there is far more important than simply launching a product. Once PMF is achieved, companies can shift their focus to scaling, knowing they have a product that resonates deeply with the market.
Lessons from Other Brands
The stories of successful startups like Airbnb and Instagram offer invaluable lessons on the importance of Product Market Fit (PMF). These companies didn’t hit the ground running with fully formed, polished products. Instead, they continuously tested, iterated, and refined their offerings until they found the perfect market fit, propelling them to success. Their stories highlight the iterative nature of achieving PMF and exemplify how businesses can learn from their early mistakes, adapt, and ultimately build products that resonate deeply with their audience.
Let’s start with Airbnb. In 2007, the company’s founders launched Airbedandbreakfast.com, a platform that allowed conference-goers to rent air mattresses and get breakfast at the founders’ San Francisco loft. While this was an innovative way to solve a problem—affordable accommodations during a high-demand event—it wasn’t yet a scalable business. It appealed to a niche market but wasn’t a solution that could attract a mass audience. The founders, however, didn’t abandon their idea at this point. Instead, they made the critical decision to pivot. They redefined their product to cater to travelers seeking alternatives to expensive hotel rooms. The shift from a “couch-surfing” type model to offering various types of lodging (rooms, apartments, houses) was a direct response to market feedback. Airbnb gradually became a disruptive force in the global travel industry by continuously adjusting the product based on user needs and feedback.
What Airbnb teaches us is that no idea is perfect at the outset. The path to PMF often involves multiple iterations. The initial idea may not be the one that works, but through constant testing and refinement, businesses can find a product that meets a real need in the market. In Airbnb’s case, they didn’t just double down on a concept that wasn’t working; they embraced feedback and changed their approach accordingly, ultimately resulting in a billion-dollar valuation.
Similarly, Instagram’s success was built on the same principles of iteration and adaptation. The app started as a location-based social network called Burbn, which included features like checking in at places, posting photos, and sharing status updates. The idea behind Burbn was compelling—connecting people around their locations—but the app wasn’t attracting the widespread adoption the founders had hoped for. The turning point came when the team analyzed user behavior and noticed that people were flocking to the photo-sharing feature, ignoring the location check-ins and other features. The founders realized the key to their product’s success was simplifying the concept and focusing solely on photos and filters. In an agile, growth-hacker-like move, Instagram was born. This pivot was not a simple tweak but a significant shift in the product’s core value proposition.
Instagram’s founders didn’t cling to the original concept that wasn’t working; instead, they had the agility to shift their focus toward what their users were truly engaging with. This adaptability allowed them to scale rapidly and attract millions of users in a very short time. Within just 18 months, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion.
Both companies—Airbnb and Instagram—demonstrate that success comes from understanding user behavior, responding to feedback, and being willing to pivot. The lesson here is clear: businesses must remain flexible in the face of early challenges and continuously evolve their product until they align with the market’s needs. It’s not about sticking with a failed idea out of stubbornness or pride; it’s about learning from users, gathering feedback, and adjusting the product until it perfectly fits the target audience. This commitment to iterating until PMF is reached makes these companies so successful. For any entrepreneur or marketer, this approach is essential. It emphasizes the need to stay close to the customer, observe their reactions, and be ready to pivot quickly when necessary.
Marketers Must Be Part of the Process
In traditional marketing, there has often been a clear division between product development and marketing. The product team builds the product, and the marketing team promotes it once it’s ready. The marketing team’s primary job is to push a finished product to the market through advertising, PR, and other channels. However, this traditional division is no longer effective in the age of growth hacking and Product Market Fit (PMF). Today, successful marketers must be involved in the product development from the beginning—helping shape the product, not just promoting it after the fact.
Marketers have unique insights into the target audience, consumer behavior, and market trends. These insights are crucial in ensuring that the product being developed is something that people want and need. Marketers can ensure that the product aligns with customer expectations by collaborating closely with product development teams. Their input can guide the design process, influence features, and even help prioritize which aspects of the product should be tested first. The goal is to create a product that looks good on paper and delivers real value to the target audience.
One of the best examples of this approach comes from Amazon. The company has a unique policy: the product manager must write a press release before developing any new product. The press release outlines the product’s unique selling proposition, target audience, and why it matters. This exercise forces the product team to articulate the product’s value clearly before any work begins. It ensures everyone is aligned on the product’s core purpose and target market before investing time and resources in development.
This approach also ensures that the marketing team is involved early in the product development process, which helps to avoid the pitfalls of traditional marketing. Instead of waiting for a product to be finished and pushing it to the market, marketers can actively shape the product’s features, messaging, and positioning from the start. By collaborating with product teams, marketers can ensure that the product is built with the end-user in mind, greatly increasing the chances of achieving Product Market Fit.
At companies like Amazon, marketers aren’t just there to sell a finished product; they help guide the product’s development, ensuring it meets customer needs and expectations. This approach ensures that marketing is not just an afterthought but an integral part of the product development process. As products evolve and shift to meet the market’s demands, marketers play a crucial role in gathering feedback, testing assumptions, and adjusting the product to ensure it aligns with customer preferences.
The concept of marketers being involved in the product development process is a shift away from the traditional, siloed approach. It recognizes that successful marketing is not just about advertising a product but ensuring it resonates with customers. Marketers must engage with the product, influence its evolution, and contribute to the iterative process of achieving PMF. They must stay close to the customer, gather feedback, and act quickly. This collaborative approach improves the product and ensures the marketing efforts are more effective once the product is ready for launch.
In today’s market, marketers who initially shape the product have a significant advantage. They can ensure that the product is innovative and aligned with customer needs, reducing the risk of product failure. The key takeaway is clear: marketers must be part of the process from the beginning, contributing valuable insights that help shape the product and ensure its success in the market.
Achieving Product Market Fit
Achieving Product Market Fit (PMF) is not just a milestone in a product’s lifecycle—it’s the turning point where everything clicks into place. PMF signifies the alignment between the product and the market’s needs and marks when a business can expect sustained growth. Getting to PMF, however, is rarely quick or easy; it requires continuous iteration, feedback, and refinement to find that sweet spot where the product resonates so strongly with users that it practically sells itself.
The first step toward achieving PMF is developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is a basic version of the product that offers just enough functionality to meet the needs of early adopters. These early users are crucial because they provide the first feedback on the product’s core features. With an MVP, companies can test the market and gather data without committing to a fully developed product. This approach minimizes risk, allowing the product team to validate assumptions before investing heavily in development.
However, achieving PMF is not just about getting the MVP out there. It’s about listening to the users interacting with it, analyzing their feedback, and using it to improve the product. This is where the concept of “iterating quickly” comes into play. As feedback pours in, it should be actively incorporated into the development process, allowing the product to evolve in real-time. This iterative process may involve changes in product features, design, pricing, or market positioning. For instance, if users consistently highlight a particular feature as useful or problematic, it should be enhanced or removed to make the product better suited to user needs.
The iteration process is a continuous loop of test, learn, and adjust. At each stage, the team refines the product based on real-world feedback. The goal is to gradually build a product that offers true value to users—a product they’re willing to pay for, share with others, and rely on regularly. This is where PMF begins to emerge: as users show increasing satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty, the product starts to find its fit in the market.
Moreover, PMF isn’t a singular moment of achievement that can be checked off a to-do list. Companies must continue to monitor and adapt the product as their customer base grows and market conditions change. PMF is a dynamic state that requires ongoing attention. Even after a product hits PMF, it’s essential to keep refining it to ensure it continues to meet customer expectations and outpace competitors. This is especially true as markets evolve, customer preferences shift, and new competitors emerge. Continuous adaptation and innovation are key to sustaining Product Market Fit over time.
Getting to PMF might take months or even years, but once it’s achieved, the business is positioned for rapid scaling. This is when the marketing efforts can truly take off. With a product that perfectly aligns with market needs, marketing becomes a matter of amplifying the demand already there. This is the stage where growth hacking strategies shine, as marketers can focus on amplifying word-of-mouth, leveraging organic channels, and using minimal resources to generate explosive growth.
The Importance of Feedback
Feedback is the lifeblood of the Product Market Fit process. Without it, businesses guess what the market wants and needs. Feedback comes in many forms—customer surveys, online reviews, user interviews, or analytics—and provides crucial insights that help shape the product and its evolution. Successful companies understand the power of feedback and use it to improve their offerings continuously.
One of the most valuable sources of feedback is direct feedback from the users. These are the people who interact with your product every day and experience its strengths and weaknesses firsthand. Their opinions and behaviors can reveal patterns that aren’t immediately obvious to the product team. For example, by analyzing customer feedback, a company may discover that a feature they thought was a key selling point is underutilized, while a secondary feature is receiving overwhelming praise. This insight is invaluable because it helps the team focus on what matters most to their users.
But feedback isn’t just about collecting data—it’s about actively using that data to refine the product. The best companies don’t just listen to feedback; they act on it. For example, after analyzing user feedback, a company may pivot, tweak, or even scrap certain features that aren’t resonating with the market. They may change the user interface to make the product more intuitive or adjust its pricing based on user expectations and willingness to pay.
In addition to direct user feedback, analytics play a vital role in shaping the product. By tracking how users engage with the product—what features they use most, where they drop off, and how often they return—companies can gain insights into what is working and what needs improvement. Tools like Google Analytics, Optimizely, and KISSmetrics allow businesses to measure user behavior and make data-driven decisions. This form of feedback provides an objective view of the product’s performance and can highlight pain points that users may not explicitly mention in surveys or interviews.
Another important aspect of feedback is the ability to gather and analyze negative feedback. While positive feedback is valuable, negative feedback can be even more crucial. It provides insight into the areas where the product falls short and adjustments are necessary. Companies that can embrace negative feedback without taking it personally are better positioned to make the changes that will ultimately lead to greater success. Positive and negative feedback should be seen as an opportunity to learn, grow, and refine the product.
Feedback is also essential in the iterative process of Product Market Fit. Every piece of feedback, whether from a single user or a large group, helps clarify whether the product is meeting the market’s needs. As companies gather more data and feedback over time, they can gradually refine the product until it aligns perfectly with the target market. Without feedback, businesses are simply guessing what will work, making it far harder to achieve PMF.
The best companies use feedback to ensure that their product evolves in a way that resonates with users. This process is an ongoing conversation between the company and its customers, and it’s through this dialogue that Product-Market Fit is achieved and sustained. The importance of feedback cannot be overstated—it’s the foundation upon which PMF is built.
The New Marketing Paradigm: Focus on Product Market Fit
The traditional marketing approach revolved around launching a product, promoting it through advertisements, and hoping the audience would eventually adopt it. Marketers would often use their budgets to try to convince people to buy a product that, in many cases, wasn’t perfectly aligned with their needs. This approach, while effective at times, often overlooks the essential principle of aligning the product with the market. The result was that many products failed despite heavy marketing efforts.
In the modern marketing landscape, however, this approach has shifted dramatically. The focus is now on achieving Product Market Fit (PMF) before launching aggressive marketing campaigns. Companies no longer wait for PMF to happen by accident. Instead, they actively pursue it through product iteration, user feedback, and agile development. The goal is to create a product that fits perfectly with the needs and desires of a defined market before spending significant resources on marketing and promotion.
Focusing on PMF before marketing represents a profound shift in how businesses approach growth. In the past, companies often tried to create demand through advertising and promotions. Today, businesses recognize that marketing is far more effective when the product itself is already desirable and meets a real need in the market. Instead of convincing people to buy something they may not need, businesses now focus on ensuring that their product is something people can’t live without. Once the product resonates with the market, marketing efforts become a simple matter of amplifying the existing demand.
The role of the marketer has shifted as well. Rather than waiting for the product to be finished and launching a marketing campaign, marketers are now involved in the product development process from the start. They work closely with product teams to help shape the product, ensuring that it meets the target audience’s needs. Marketers contribute by providing insights into customer preferences, pain points, and market trends. Marketers ensure that the product is designed to succeed in the market before it even launches by being part of the product development process.
Once Product Market Fit is achieved, marketing efforts can then be focused on scaling the product. This is when the magic happens—marketing becomes exponentially more effective because the product is already a perfect match for the market. Rather than pushing the product on consumers who may not be interested, marketing efforts are used to accelerate the growth of a product that already has strong traction in the market.
In short, the new marketing paradigm ensures that Product Market Fit is reached before embarking on full-scale marketing campaigns. The focus is on creating a product that customers already want and amplifying that demand through smart, targeted marketing strategies. Once PMF is achieved, businesses can scale quickly and efficiently, reaping the rewards of a product that fits perfectly with the needs of its market. This shift in focus—from marketing a product to perfecting it—represents the future of business growth.
Conclusion: PMF is the Key to Sustainable Growth
Product Market Fit isn’t a mythical achievement that happens by chance. It’s a process that requires careful, continuous iteration and a deep understanding of your audience. Once you’ve achieved it, your marketing efforts become a force multiplier. The best marketing decision you can make is not simply about advertising more or louder—it’s about ensuring your product fulfills a genuine, compelling need.
In today’s competitive landscape, companies that achieve Product Market Fit first are the ones who win. And for marketers, the task is clear: don’t wait for PMF to happen by chance. Make it happen with purposeful, data-driven decisions. The future of marketing is rooted in getting the product right—and then letting it sell itself.
This article summarizes the second chapter of Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday.