What Comes After Product Market Fit?

Finding product-market fit is a big achievement for any SaaS organization, but it can leave you feeling lost. It’s like the adage of the dog that finally catches the car. Now that you have it, what do you do with it?

Many leaders think the solution is straightforward: “Just scale up!” they say.

In truth, it’s not that simple. Product-market fit isn’t a single moment in time. It’s a state that you must maintain, even as the market and your customers change. If you’re not careful, you could lose it.

Let’s explore product-market fit and what to do once you’ve found it.

Product-Market Fit Definition

Before we get too deep into the post-product-market fit part of your lifecycle, let’s get on the same page.

Product-market fit is the point where your product satisfies a strong market demand. It happens when your target customers recognize your product as the ideal solution to their problem. This recognition leads to organic growth.

Essentially, it’s the point where you’ve created something people want and are willing to pay for.

There is a misconception that product-market fit happens at the $1M ARR mark, but product-market fit is not a revenue stage. It can happen at any income level.

A trusted way to gauge if you have found product-market fit is the 40% test by Sean Ellis. It is a pretty straightforward assessment using a customer survey question, “How would you feel if you could no longer use [product]?”

If more than 40% of your surveyed customers answer “very disappointed,” then you have found product-market fit. It’s a leading indicator of what portion of users really value your product.

Product-market fit is often considered the milestone that signals your product is ready to scale. It’s not just about acquiring customers, though—it’s about retaining them because your product consistently delivers value.

What Comes After Product-Market Fit?

Once you find your place in the market, the next obvious step is to scale up. But that comes with a caveat: You have to scale without losing product-market fit.

“Product-market fit is a key milestone to reach, but it’s often misinterpreted as being a static moment in time,” say Fareed Mosavat and Casey Winters, product leaders from companies like Eventbrite, Pinterest, Grubhub, Instacart, and Slack.

“The reality is that your customer base is always changing and consumer expectations are always growing. Once you get [an] initial product-market fit, you not only have to keep it, but also expand it.”

If you focus too hard on acquisition and fail to refine your product, there’s a chance you could lose product-market fit. Obviously, that’s disastrous.

Smart leaders who find product-market fit are wise to protect it to avoid losing market share. They continue to iterate on their product so customers always see it as the ideal solution.

Sean Ellis, head of growth at companies like Dropbox, LogMeIn, and Eventbrite, and the guy who coined the term “growth hacker,” says it perfectly:

“The mistake that many marketers make is that they are optimizing for short-term conversions. They think it’s all about maximizing clicks and sign-ups. But if the product isn’t truly great at delivering on the promise, then you will likely lose these people anyway.”

Strategies for After Product-Market Fit

All of this begs the question: How do you scale up without losing product-market fit? It requires a shift in thinking and a bit of strategy.

Step 1: Reassess Your User

In some cases, product-market fit can be fleeting because the users who loved the early version of your product aren’t the same as your long-term users.

We call this the “early adopter problem.” Early adopters love to try new products, especially when those products promise to disrupt existing systems or ways of doing things.

However, those early adopters are also likely to move on to the next big thing. If too many of your customers are these early adopters, your customer base might bleed away until you lose your share of the market.

“The problem is, the early adopters are only ever a small percentage of the overall market,” says Marc Andreessen. “And so a lot of founders, especially technical ones, will convince themselves that the rest of the market behaves like the early adopters, which is to say that the customers will find them. And that’s just not true.”

Early adopters aren’t your only challenge. It’s counterintuitive, but if your product-market fit is good, you tend to grow fast, and your customers raise their expectations.

“Slack had [an] extremely strong product market fit from the early days and ended up growing so fast,” says Fareed Mosavat, VP Programs and Partners at Reforge. “It was extremely difficult to keep up with the rising expectations of our customers over time, and took us a while to launch things like WYSIWYG editing, better ways to launch apps vs. just text commands, and simplified channel discovery that were important for our newer, less-technical users.”

Once you find your place in the market, turn your attention to your users. Continue to conduct research to understand how to meet the needs of customers who aren’t the early adopters.

Step 2: Build a Data-Driven Culture

The need for robust customer research should come as no surprise to any growth-focused company, yet too many leaders take their foot off the metaphorical research gas pedal once they achieve product-market fit.

Maintaining product-market fit and scaling up both require a culture that makes its decisions based on data and research. Scrappy startups can rely on quick, intuition-based movements, but scaling companies can’t ignore their data.

The first step to a data-driven culture is to establish your shared growth KPIs early and ensure your team is moving in the same direction.

Next, dig into your customer research. Conduct interviews, analyze data, and gather feedback to identify pain points, features, and reasons for churn/low engagement. Ideate on improvements to address those challenges.

Finally, rapid test or A/B test changes to your website, marketing, and product to understand if investing resources makes sense.

The key to building a data-driven culture is to make it a habit. You can start small by scheduling a few user/customer interviews each week, as expert human-centered product leader Emma Leyden suggests, and then build on that. With more and better data, you can more easily fold it into your process.

The good news is the value of your data continues to grow as you read this article. A bigger user base and more sessions mean more data points, which makes trends and patterns more apparent and reliable for decision-making.

Step 3: Shift Your Hiring Priorities

With product-market fit, your team and priorities will naturally evolve. You have new scale goals and likely a growing team that needs oversight.

Strong leadership is key here. You’ll likely also struggle at this stage with balancing team support for your growing user base while optimizing your product. Admittedly, that balance isn’t easy to achieve. It requires clear prioritization. Sometimes, newly hired leaders make the mistake of assuming their product is “built” and devest product design and development to work on other initiatives.

It can help to leverage an external pod of product experts to fill in any gaps and help prioritize changes.

The Good is a great option to supplement your product team post-product-market-fit. We can help you simplify decision-making by staying laser-focused on research, data, and goals through our Digital Experience Optimization Program™.

Step 4: Start Building a Feature Moat

A feature moat is when a product offers such unique and superior product features that the competition can’t quickly replicate them. There’s literally a gap—a moat—that your competitors will be scrambling to cross.

Think of it like this: If your product is a great solution, it will change the lives and work of your users. Their needs and preferences change. They develop new problems that you’re positioned to solve. Each solved problem represents a widening moat between you and your competitors.

How do you create this advantage? By continuing to drill deep into user needs and pain points even after you’ve achieved product-market fit.

Don’t rest, satisfied that you’ve learned enough about your users. Continue to leverage generative and evaluative research to uncover new insights into their behavior and needs. Ultimately, this is key to developing a customer experience that evolves with the user.

Step 5: Stop Obsessing Over Registration

Registration is just one moment in the user lifecycle. It’s a big moment, for sure, but too much focus on new users can cause you to ignore your existing user base. After you have product-market fit is an ideal time to level-set with your team about initiatives beyond registration.

This is the time to work on your product-led growth strategy. Focus on improving the rest of the customer experience after registration, including onboarding, activation, engagement, expansion, and evangelism. These stages not only increase growth (through new users and retention), but they also give you a roadmap to iterate on your product moving forward.

Use research in the post-product-market fit stage to lower the cost of acquisition by considering that every user who doesn’t churn is an opportunity to spread positive word-of-mouth.

Step 6: Consider Market Expansion

Your product evolves as you introduce new features, achieve more growth, and scale up your platform. But eventually, your current product will reach a saturation point where growth reaches the limits of the market.

In this case, the only way to grow is to expand your product-market fit by expanding into adjacent products or markets to find new potential customers.

Expanding product-market fit doesn’t necessarily mean building new features. It’s a turn from fulfilling your users’ problems to anticipating their next problems. Expanding usually happens in three ways:

• Same product in a new target market, e.g., Instacart expanding into pharmacy delivery.
• Same market with an adjacent product, e.g., Lyft expanding to bikes and scooters.
• New product in a new market, e.g., Amazon launching AWS.

This kind of expansion does not happen incrementally. It typically happens in bursts when you recognize a new market, vertical, or user to serve. And in nearly all cases, it requires taking bigger bets.

Support for Post-Product-Market Fit

When your entire organization is built around finding product-market fit, the switch to a post-product-market fit strategy can be challenging. It requires a new way of thinking for this new stage in your company’s lifecycle.

In these cases, outside perspective is more important than ever. Our Digital Experience Optimization Program™ brings the pieces you need to build a better digital product. Our team can help you scale up without losing product-market fit. We bring the tools, technique, and expertise that you just can’t find in a single hire.