How to find and maintain product-market fit (PMF) as you scale

In 2025, achieving product-market fit (PMF) is existential for SaaS companies. With less VC money available and smaller SaaS budgets, your prospects simply won’t buy or renew your product unless it has PMF.

According to Roy Robinson, former CPO of MentionMe, “it’s more critical than ever that your software solves one problem really well and really simply.” But even if you find PMF, you can’t get complacent or you’ll lose relevance with customers.

“When you’re confident you’ve achieved PMF, it’s important to maintain it – and you can’t just follow the same playbook you did before,” says Jason Cohen, Chief Innovation Officer of WP Engine.

From key PMF indicators to tips on scaling PMF, here are my highlights from Roy and Jason’s discussions at SaaStock last year.

Finding product-market fit

PMF is SaaS nirvana: everyone is trying to find it — and then keep it.

But PMF is not a binary metric or benchmark, it is an intangible state that everyone defines differently, so how do you know if you’ve achieved it? Look for these qualitative and quantitative signs.

Qualitative signs

Customer sign up becomes normal. For Cohen, achieving PMF is a sudden shift in how the business feels. When you stop celebrating every sale and the orders just start coming in (and you don’t even know why), you’ve reached PMF.
Customers testify on your behalf. For Robinson, PMF is about supplying an easier, better or faster solution to a demand that already exists. You’ll know you’ve reached PMF for one customer segment, when those customers are willing to testify on your product’s behalf by giving you case studies, doing videos or attending conferences with you.

Quantitative signs

High support tickets, but low cancellations. A spike in support tickets and feature requests is a good sign of PMF, but only if matched with low monthly cancellations. For Cohen, below 3-4% cancellations per month is the target, whereas 7% monthly cancellations shows you don’t have PMF (as most of your customers will have left within a year).
Huge bend in the growth curve. If there’s suddenly a huge bend in the right direction (known as the hockey stick), which just keeps going and going, you’ve achieved PMF. According to Cohen, this happens for both bootstrapped and VC-backed SaaS (see the curve for WP Engine below on Cohen’s blog).

Source: Smartbear blog WP Engine early growth curve.

Maintaining PMF

After dealing with PMF growing pains (i.e. hiring new people and adding new layers of communication), you need to make decisions to maintain PMF going forward, be it expanding your market, going to new geos, making a second product or developing a really big new feature. Here are five tactics to employ.

1. Analyse your current market

Is your marketing channel saturated? If so, you need to try something different.
Do you have enough of a market? Use the power of 10 to estimate the customers in the market (i.e. are there 1000, 10,000 or 100,000). If you’ve reached 10% saturation, you’re probably tapped out and should look elsewhere.
Are your sales team struggling? If you have great sales reps, but even they can’t sell anymore, you should try a new market

2. Choose 1-3 projects to focus on

Filter your ideas and choose 1-3 expansion projects to focus on. For each project idea, consider the:

Outcome. Choose projects with high upside potential. Whatever you do is a risk that may not work, so aim for something that might generate 10x (and then you’re still happy if it generates 3x).
Difficulty. Categorise the cost and risk of each project, according to how much change each department will need to make, such as releasing a new feature (easy), training your sales team (medium), hiring new people with new skills (hard).
Practicality. You can still go for hard projects if they make sense for you (i.e. if your sales team has capacity and is up for a new challenge).

3. Test the project idea with your customers

Take your chosen idea and share it with your best-fit customers for feedback. For example, Roy suggests writing a press release of the new idea on day one and sharing it with existing customers (or your ICP in the market). If they’re not excited by the idea, they’re not going to be excited in 3-6 months after you’ve invested millions.

4. Go all in

“Don’t put a few people on multiple projects, put multiple people on a few projects,” says Jason. A company of 100 can lose to a five-person startup if they split people across 20 projects, so leverage the fact that you’re bigger by focusing on just a couple of things. If you put 20 people on a new product idea, you’ll deliver it faster and make it better than any startup.

5. Disrupt yourself

“Disrupt your own product before someone else does,” says Roy. Take Apple, for example. Steve Jobs said that if Apple didn’t disrupt its own revenue streams every two years, somebody else will (hence Apple invented the iPod, made billions of dollars, then destroyed it by bringing out the iPhone). So if you’ve got PMF, you should be constantly looking at disrupting that revenue stream within 18-24 months.

You can watch the full interviews with Jason and Roy below:

Product-market fit will be a core theme for the Founderpath Centre Stage at SaaStock USA in just two months time – book now to reserve your ticket.