I've had founder-market fit. I've also been without it at the same company.
In the best case, a company goes through four stages:
Searching for PMF. Until you find it, nothing else matters, and nothing else can really be done.
Scaling once PMF is there - growth, taking share as fast as possible.
Optimizing for economics once the potential is reached.
Getting structured so the company can spin up new initiatives that start again from 1.
A note on the word founder: I use it loosely. Most of this applies just as much to a team launching a new initiative inside an existing company, which is stage 4 above.
Founder-market fit is a big part of stage 1, and whether you ever get out of it.
So what is it? Some would define it as the founders’ expertise in the space: years spent there, knowing the buyers, the users, and their problems.
For me, the more important part is whether the founders deeply care about the problem and how passionate they are.
Experience is obviously an advantage, and the data backs it up. Founders with three or more years of experience in the industry they’re entering are roughly twice as likely to build a top 0.1% company. Among those fastest-growing ventures, the mean founder age is 45, and founders in their early twenties have the worst odds of any age group. I started SessionStack at 22 with about two years as a software engineer, so I was on the wrong end of both.
But experience only counts when the passion is still there. I’ve interviewed plenty of people with decades in an industry who are tired of it and want out. This is the reason I put passion first. If you care enough, you learn fast, you spend your time with people who know more than you do, and you do the unglamorous work of getting into the parts you’re weak on. Or you go find the person who has the experience, and make them a co-founder if they’re exceptional.
Before starting SessionStack, I was a developer, and I wanted to start a company that solved a developer problem. I had a good feel for it as I had experienced it, but I was nowhere near an industry expert. I was super passionate and absorbed everything - I spent time with founders in adjacent spaces and picked up whatever I was missing. Then came a series of pivots, and over those, the company moved from a developer tool to a digital experience product. The passion held through all of them. Those were personas and problems I really cared about, and it came very naturally due to the pivots, as we were learning what our gaps were and where the problems were bigger.
Then things changed. Microsoft had launched a free competitor a couple of years earlier, and around 2023 it started taking real share in our segment.
We needed to adapt, so we decided to go after a new problem in our space using ML/Markov chains + LLMs, back when using them for this was still new. I won’t go deep into it here.
The short version: the problem we picked was worst for one segment of our customers, e-commerce shops. Most of our base was SaaS, but the e-commerce accounts had this particular pain badly enough that focusing our new capabilities on them was the obvious move. It worked. We got some paying customers for the new capability quickly, at a good ACV.
So it became our new differentiator, and e-commerce stopped being one segment among several. It was the focus of the company. If this worked, I was going to be running a company in the e-commerce space.
At that point in my life, I had no real pull toward e-commerce. I’d never worked in it, didn’t know the players, the platforms, or the personas. That part didn’t worry me, because I’d done it before and knew I could do it again. So I did the things you do - spent more time with people in the space, went where they gathered, mainly conferences.
The fit never came. On paper it was a good opportunity, but I couldn’t manufacture the excitement. I don’t know why - was it too far from what the company was started for? Was it fatigue? Difficult to pinpoint.
At the start of the company, I had little experience, no traction, and enormous drive. Now I had plenty of experience, an existing business, and real traction on our new capabilities, and I wasn’t as excited. Looking back, that’s probably why an exit started to feel right, rather than continuing on our own.
Founder-market fit is obviously not the only thing that decides whether a venture works. Grit for when things get hard, and they will. Determination, flexibility, imagination, coachability. And whether you’re working on something people actually need, in a market that’s growing.
Reaching PMF alone can take years. A great example is Stripe - the Collison brothers started working on Stripe in the fall of 2009 and launched publicly in September 2011. Two years in, they had 50 users. As John Collison put it, “when you spend two years getting 50 users, it doesn’t feel like a whole lot of progress.” Last year, businesses on Stripe processed $1.9 trillion, around 1.6% of global GDP. Two years of no decent progress is a long time to stay with a problem you don’t care much about.
Founder-market fit matters after PMF too. Reaching PMF is only the first milestone - scaling, then fixing the economics, then building something that can start the cycle again could take more than a decade, and most companies never get through all of it. That’s a long time to spend on a problem and market you’re not deeply passionate about.
So why write all this down? Because when a founder commits to something, they’re usually committing years of their life to it. First-time founders especially - there will be pivots, founder splits, and dynamics nobody warned them about.
Founder-market fit raises the odds of reaching PMF. But it also does something else. If you spend those years on a problem you genuinely care about, you come out knowing that space better than almost anyone, whether or not the company works. That doesn’t disappear with the outcome. You take it into whatever comes next, and the years don’t feel like time you lost. I don’t think there’s a faster way to develop professionally than building something you deeply care about.
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