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

Earlier today, I gave a talk at the @SubstackInc's writer conference about building a writing habit. Below are the ten concrete strategies I shared that have helped me publish a post every week for 1.5 years 👇

0/ First of all, just sharing advice about this topic gives me serious impostor syndrome because writing is still pretty new to me, and I have much to learn. But these are things that have helped me, and I hope they'll help you.

1/ Strategy 1: Commit publicly

This was maybe 50% of my initial motivation. Having told people I was going to write weekly made me feel bad when even thinking about skipping a week. It gave me just enough nudge to keep


1b/ You don't need to make this super public. Just sending an email to a few friends regularly with your concrete goals about writing (and anything else) works wonders.


1c/ If you *really* want to be motivated, ask people for money. Nothing motivates you more than people paying you for regular

More from Startup

The dirty inside secret most first-time entrepreneurs don't know.

14 tools I use to steal from competitors, and build million-dollar businesses.

Housekeeping note:
Don't do anything that destroys your reputation. Copying what works is a simple & practical strategy, but don't cross any boundaries.

In this thread, I'll show you how to steal your competitors' traffic, product ideas, and customers in a 100% fair way.

1. Steal their social media traffic

Drop your competitors' url in
https://t.co/n4squ8fjHh

It will tell you what % of their web traffic comes from which social media platform

Looks like this


Generally, this traffic will be from ads and not content. To steal their social traffic, you'll need to steal their ad strategy.

If they're getting their traffic from Facebook...

2. Steal their Facebook ads

Go to Facebook Ad Library and find ads that your competitor has been running for 6+ months.

All of these ads are likely profitable https://t.co/bgqtSOvAe2

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