The clearest sign of finding product-market fit is feeling "pull" from the market.

But what does "pull" look like?

👇 Read on 👇

1/ Sign 1: A sudden inflection in organic growth

Netflix: "Where before we were struggling to get traffic, all of sudden we couldn’t keep up." - @mbrandolph

Tinder: "Downloads started to skyrocket" – @badeen

Uber: "Word of mouth was uncontrollable" – @ryangraves
2/ Sign 2: Customers ask to pay for the product before you ask

Carta: "I've been trying to get to your sales people for weeks!!! Why won't you take my money???" – @henrysward

Github: "To our surprise, users started writing to us asking ‘Can we pay for this??’" – @mojombo
3/ Sign 3: Users flip from excited to upset

Datadog: "When we hit early product-market fit, our users switched from being excited at all the things our product could be to them to being upset about all the things it didn't do yet." – @oliveur
3b/ Segment: "The thing that flipped was, people would previously tell us they wanted a feature, but not use it. Whereas now, people were using it and they would want a second feature." – @reinpk
4/ Sign 4: Customers complain when your site is down

Nextdoor: "10 minutes after taking the servers offline, I started getting emails/calls from users. What happened to Nextdoor? One user called me in a panic because she needed to contact a neighbor immediately." – @sarahleary
5/ Sign 5: People use the product even when it’s broken

Gusto: "A pretty good sign for PMF was when in spite of the obvious gaps in our marketing, product and care, we saw consistently high NPS (80+), low churn, and record high MoM organic growth.” – @tomerlondon
6/ Sign 6: Consistent and accelerating growth

Datadog: "We started seeing a regular influx of sign-ups, and as we added key features (such as alerting), we saw them use our product more and more actively" – @oliveur
6b/ Superhuman: "I asked our Head of Growth to update all our analytics. What we saw was that every single metric was amazing — growth, DAU/MAU, PMF score, NPS, virality, CAC payback, CAC:LTV, activation rates, long-term retention rates, and so on" – @rahulvohra
6b/ Substack: "We've just been growing fairly consistently, and gradually the how-do-we-keep-up anxiety got bigger and bigger until there wasn't time left in the day to worry about whether we had product-market fit." – @cjgbest
7/ For much more check out the full post https://t.co/R5RvHrUNeZ

More from Lenny Rachitsky

More from Startup

>> How To Start a Lead Gen Agency <<

This step-by-step process will help you sign $5K - $20K clients in NO TIME.

Learn how to:

✅ Find Leads
✅ Book Meetings
✅ Sign Clients
✅ Scale Processes

// 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃 //


1/ Make sure you understand the lead gen process.

You NEED to know your shit before you pitch ANYTHING.

A few services you can offer to generate leads:

> Cold email
> LinkedIn outreach
> Facebook ads
> SEO

The list goes on.

Just perfect one of them & you’re SOLID.

2/ Find a niche to pitch your services to.

NICHE DOWN.

Use this doc to find an “untapped” niche:

https://t.co/aYptSNsZw6

I’d suggest choosing 1-3 to start with.

& focus ONLY on these.

3/ Find leads for outreach:

Sign up for a free @IcyLeads account at https://t.co/mz2kYnEko1 to find key decision-maker contact emails for outreach.

You can find emails from the list of niches provided above & filter out job titles such as:

> CEO
> Founder
> Marketing

Etc.

4/ Once you have a list of leads to pitch your services to:

It’s time to write your cold email outreach sequences.

Your cold emails should speak DIRECTLY to the prospect you’re reaching out to.

You can find some winning cold email templates

You May Also Like

And here they are...

THE WINNERS OF THE 24 HOUR STARTUP CHALLENGE

Remember, this money is just fun. If you launched a product (or even attempted a launch) - you did something worth MUCH more than $1,000.

#24hrstartup

The winners 👇

#10

Lattes For Change - Skip a latte and save a life.

https://t.co/M75RAirZzs

@frantzfries built a platform where you can see how skipping your morning latte could do for the world.

A great product for a great cause.

Congrats Chris on winning $250!


#9

Instaland - Create amazing landing pages for your followers.

https://t.co/5KkveJTAsy

A team project! @bpmct and @BaileyPumfleet built a tool for social media influencers to create simple "swipe up" landing pages for followers.

Really impressive for 24 hours. Congrats!


#8

SayHenlo - Chat without distractions

https://t.co/og0B7gmkW6

Built by @DaltonEdwards, it's a platform for combatting conversation overload. This product was also coded exclusively from an iPad 😲

Dalton is a beast. I'm so excited he placed in the top 10.


#7

CoderStory - Learn to code from developers across the globe!

https://t.co/86Ay6nF4AY

Built by @jesswallaceuk, the project is focused on highlighting the experience of developers and people learning to code.

I wish this existed when I learned to code! Congrats on $250!!