Founders obsess over product-market fit (PMF) like Gatsby staring at the green light across the bay. They can see it, they’re reaching for it, they’re convinced that once they get there, everything else falls into place. But just like Gatsby, they’re focused on the wrong thing. We call it product-market fit, but I think we got the order backwards.
The startup ecosystem has over-indexed on PMF as a product problem and under-indexed on it as a market problem. Founders treat PMF like something a product can achieve on its own. Build the right thing, get the right feedback loops, iterate until people love it. But PMF doesn’t live inside the product, it lives in the market. We should be focusing on Market-Product Fit, not the other way around.
To be clear, you still need the product idea. I’m not arguing against that. But the idea alone can’t tell you who will buy it, and a desktop study can only get you so far. Where are the gaps in what they do today that your product fills? Is the real pain a C-Suite level problem that gets executed by someone much lower in the org? If so, have you talked to the C-Suite, or is your plan to sell lower down and hope it travels up? Are you going to create a revenue ceiling by selling to the individual user, or is that actually the strategy? How will the organization actually purchase this solution, and could that buyer ever sign a large deal ($1M-$10M)?
The product can’t answer those questions, only the market can. So I say, start with the market.
It’s easy to describe this all hypothetically, but I’ve lived this enough times it only makes sense to explore this thesis through tangible case studies. I’ve been the person companies bring in when the product is real but nothing is selling, scalable, or struggling to go beyond a minimal contract size. Two of the stories I’m about to share are my own. The third is from someone I trained for two years who learned how to implement complex MPF and went on to scale a company’s revenue engine from scratch. The final story is one everyone will recognize.
The Patent That Sat on a Shelf
When I came into this company, there was a leadership transition underway. A new CEO had stepped in with a clear vision for the product but no go-to-market strategy to match it. I was brought in to help figure out how to bring the technology to market.
The first thing I did was pick up the phone and call CEOs where I had an established relationship. The whole goal of these calls was to listen. If you don’t have someone on your team who knows how to get into C-Suite conversations, whether through their own network or otherwise, you’re missing the fastest path to understanding what the market with multi-million dollar budgets actually wants. What I heard in those calls changed the direction of the company. The market was looking for something very specific, and it turned out that a product the company had patented four years earlier was exactly the answer. It had been sitting there the whole time, but nobody with a tuned-ear had gone to market to find out what budget-heavy buyers wanted.
Knowing what the market wanted was only half the problem. The product was technically sound and the platform was already built. The CEO had made a smart strategic pivot that positioned the company well for the future. But it wasn’t selling. The technology was too complex for the prospective market to understand and the team struggled to explain its value in a simple impact story.
I spent months testing different flavors of the story. I interviewed executives across the industry to get the positioning right. We learned that one part of the platform was our entry point, but the real hook was a leapfrog technology that went beyond what anyone else in the market could offer. Once we matched the right story to the right product for the right buyers (there were multiple), we landed two of the largest companies in our industry in under a year.
The product had existed for years. The platform was already built and patented. But none of that mattered until someone went to market, listened to what buyers actually wanted, and built a story that connected the product to a real need.
The market didn’t find the product. The market lever is what made the product findable.
Better Science, No Market
When I came into this company, we had a weaker brand, a product that looked inferior on paper, and a dominant competitor that the market already trusted. The competitor’s pitch was simple: our product finds more of the problem than theirs does. On the surface, that sounds like a better product. And technically it was.
But what the market didn’t understand, was that finding more of the problem isn’t the same as solving the most important part of the problem. The competitor’s approach found everything, including thousands of small issues that cost as much to address as the large ones, and often went away by the time the company went to go and look. Our product focused on the biggest issues, the ones that represented the most significant losses. Instead of arguing whose science was better, we asked a different question: which solution makes the most sense for your business? The economic math worked in our favor. But nobody in the market was thinking about it that way because nobody had positioned it this way.
The first thing I had to do was rebuild the sales team. The existing reps couldn’t articulate this story. They were selling features against a competitor with better features and losing every time. Similar to what Aliisa Rosenthal described at OpenAI, my first job was to un-do sales and start over. I wiped the team and completely redesigned how we were selling. The new approach wasn’t about competing on product specs. It was about changing how the market defined the problem.
My former CEO and I went to the market with a different story. Instead of chasing the competitor’s strength, we pushed the product in a direction that seemed counterintuitive. We actually went for an even lower cost, lower performing solution, rather than chasing the competitor’s high performing solution. We told the market: you don’t need to find everything. You need to find the worst of it, often. That reframe changed the entire conversation. Now we were selling a smarter approach.
We 4x our customers, went from 3% to 17% marketshare, switch our single use contracts to two year long contracts and saw 480% growth in new sales within a year and a half. Off the back of those numbers, the company was able to raise and was later acquired.
The product didn’t change in any dramatic way. What changed was the market story, the sales team, and how we positioned the product against a competitor everyone assumed was better. The market lever created the growth. And it started with un-doing everything the previous team had built and rebuilding it around what the market actually needed to hear.
The PLG Pedigree That Didn’t Transfer
A company I know well hired a sales leader who was part of Slack’s IPO. Slack is arguably one of the most successful PLG stories in tech. On paper it looked like a great hire. The problem is PLG skills don’t transfer to complex enterprise sales. Knowing how to optimize a self-serve funnel is a completely different skill set from navigating a six month buying process with multiple stakeholders and a C-Suite decision maker.
That hire failed. The company then brought in someone I had trained for two years in complex GTM execution. She understood how to test positioning with the market, identify the actual buyer, and build a sales process from scratch. Within a year she was promoted to Head of Sales, built a team of five, and the company had a functioning revenue engine.
The difference between the first hire and the second wasn’t just how the company went to market. The second hire used what she learned from buyers to influence the product itself. Revenue grew and the product got better because the same person was pulling both levers at the same time.
Someone Got Both Levers Right
Consider the two biggest companies in AI right now. OpenAI and Anthropic both built world class products. They both compete at the frontier of AI. But they went to market very differently.
OpenAI led with consumer adoption. ChatGPT launched and reached 800 million weekly users. The product went viral. PLG in its purest form. But they didn’t reach $10B in revenue on virality alone. They hired Zack Kass and Aliisa Rosenthal as their first commercial hires when the company was still a research lab with no GTM playbook. Aliisa’s VC friends told her not to take the job. They said go somewhere with product-market fit, where everything is established. Why go to a research lab with barely any product? She took it anyway.
What she built there looked nothing like a traditional sales org. Her first job was to “un-do” sales. There were no quotas and no commission. She created new roles that didn’t exist before because the traditional ones didn’t fit. The sales team’s primary goal wasn’t closing deals. It was helping customers adopt AI and gathering feedback that went directly back into improving the models. Both levers, pulling at the same time. Zack built the partnerships, solutions, and enterprise strategy layer alongside her, helping companies understand how to implement AI in ways that aligned with their business goals. Together they grew revenue from $10M to $10B. Even the most famous PLG story in history needed the market lever.
Today, Aliisa is a General Partner at Acrew Capital. She now advises AI startups on pricing, GTM, and the commercial decisions that determine what actually scales. One of the topics she speaks about? Why early GTM decisions shape long-term outcomes. The person who built the market lever at the biggest PLG company in history is now telling founders the same thing: the market lever matters from the start, and the companies that figure it out early are the ones that scale.
Anthropic took a different path. They led with enterprise from day one. They hired Kate Jensen from Stripe, where she had spent seven years building enterprise sales at scale, to lead their Americas sales and partnerships organization. Three people Kate trusted told her to call Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder. She did. Kate’s team doesn’t sit around waiting for inbound. They run strategic account plans, manage the AWS and Google Cloud partnerships directly, and work side by side with enterprises figuring out how to put AI into their operations. Their CEO has said publicly that enterprises account for 80% of their business.
The results tell the story. Claude has roughly 5% of ChatGPT’s consumer user base. But Anthropic generates approximately 8x more revenue per user than OpenAI. They went from $1 billion to $14 billion in annualized revenue in roughly 14 months. No enterprise software company has ever grown at that rate.
Both companies pulled both levers. The difference is Anthropic built the market lever in from day one. OpenAI built it after the product existed. Both got there. But the enterprise-first approach generated dramatically higher revenue efficiency from the start.
So Why Do Founders Keep Getting This Wrong?
If the evidence is this clear, why do most founders stay on the product side? Founders are builders. They think in terms of product because that’s where their expertise thrives. Product-led growth (PLG) reinforces this instinct by telling founders that product IS the unicorn growth strategy. The problem is it only works for a narrow set of products and ideal circumstances.
PLG works when:
The user is the buyer. One person can sign up, experience value in minutes, and pay without asking anyone for permission.
The product is horizontal with built-in virality. It solves a problem every company has, and it spreads naturally as more people use it. Every Calendly link is a product impression. Every Slack invite pulls someone new in.
The price starts small and the switching cost is near zero. A user can try it without a business case, a budget approval, or ripping out an existing system.
All three have to be true at the same time. When they are, PLG is a real engine. If that describes your company, pull that lever hard and hire a growth expert like Elena Verna at Lovable.
But PLG breaks when:
Your market is commoditized. Everyone’s free tier looks the same. How you position, sell, and build relationships is what creates separation.
The product is complex. If time-to-value is weeks or months instead of minutes, users give up before they experience the benefit.
Your addressable buyers are a fraction of the market. If your real pipeline is a known list of names, every relationship is strategic. PLG is built for volume. This is the opposite of volume.
You’re not the incumbent, and switching costs are real. It doesn’t matter if your product is better. “Build it and they will come” pretty much fails every time. The incumbent has trusted relationships and brand reputation that you don’t. Displacing an incumbent requires a strategic approach.
You’re selling to a large or regulated organization. Fortune 500s, healthcare systems, financial institutions, defense contractors, energy companies. The bigger the organization, the more layers between your product and a signed contract. Legal, IT, procurement, security assessments.
Demand doesn’t yet exist. Nobody is searching for your product because they don’t know they have the problem.
Three conditions where PLG works, all of which have to be true at the same time. Six where it breaks. Most products hit at least one of the six, and lack of demand is pretty consistently the number one reason.
The Hire That Changes Everything
Most founders say that they know the market matters. Ask them and they’ll say yes it matters every time, maybe quoting Andreessen by saying, “great team, bad market, market wins.” But look at how they actually build their companies. They hire a CEO, a CTO, a COO and a CPO. Notice the missing letter? Four leaders focused on building and operating the business, but no one with skills in “R,” revenue.
They then post a job for “Head of Sales” which sounds like they get it, but you dig into the job description and it reads something like, “3-5 years experience selling B2B Enterprise SaaS products where you met or exceeded quota.” First, stop using lagging indicators like quota to measure sales talent. It will hurt you. Second, ask yourself, does someone who sold for 3-5 years at one company or even two really understand how to explore Market-Product Fit?
Now imagine a different post. “5-15 years helping find Market-Product fit at at least one or multiple startup companies where your strategy resulted in strong increase in marketshare, hyper new logo and revenue growth and a low burn rate. In your application please explain the most challenging sale you led or you supported as the team leader that you either won or lost and how you worked with the company ecosystem to either secure the sale or learn from the failed execution.”
The first job post hires a rep. The second one hires a GTM strategist.
This is bigger than a bad hire. It’s your path to Market-Product Fit. The right revenue team is how a company actually learns. Every sales conversation is a data point heard by a hyper tuned ear. That ear is trained to hear what the market is telling you because whether you like it or not, salespeople want to sell something that will make them money through commission. That motivation is an asset. It tells you whether your positioning lands, who the real decision maker is, what objections come up, and what the buyer actually cares about versus what you think they care about. That information feeds both levers. It makes the product better and it makes the market motion sharper.
Pull Both Levers
If you’re a founder reading this, here’s what I hope you take away: stop treating revenue as a function you bolt on after the product works with a junior hire. Treat it as a learning system that makes the product work faster.
Bring in GTM expertise early. And only bring in a PLG or growth marketer if you genuinely have potential for PLG. Otherwise, bring in a heavy hitter. Someone who has found Market-Product Fit before, tested a product with end users, closed deals from $50k to $10M+ with C-Suite executives, and can show you the receipts. Testing with end users tells you if the product works. Selling to the C-Suite tells you if the deal can eventually close at $20M. A strong GTM leader has done both and knows the difference between those two conversations.
Founders bring in fractional CFOs early, they bring in product advisors early, they often hire a marketing person early. Sales, revenue and GTM deserves the same treatment, and it rarely gets it.
You have two levers. Most founders are only pulling one. The companies that pull both find Market-Product Fit. And that’s the order that actually works.
About the Author
I am a CRO who specializes in demand creation sales. Until we have better language for demand creation sales, here are the lagging indicators explaining my background: 480% year-over-year growth, multiple 8-figure contracts, and helping companies navigate pivots during challenging conditions. I am currently CRO at Project Canary and developing the PACERS framework. Connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out at hello@jenergylabs.org.
A great product idea with no market is just an idea. Real value comes from deeply understanding the customer, their pain points and the problems worth solving. Products that don’t improve the user experience have little chance of winning.
100% spot on, Jenna!! IMO, most founders treat demand like it's out there waiting to be discovered, when in practice it gets built, by the insights you observe, the story you tell, the buyer you pick, and how you define the problem in the first place. As you point out in your second case study, it is a great example. The product stayed basically the same, and you won by changing how the market defined the problem. That's literally demand creation, not demand discovery.
Also, very true on the Head of Sales point. Most of those roles end up being relationship-building or project management for the client, and almost never actual market research. Two completely different skill sets, and companies keep hiring for one while expecting the other.
-Quy