The Hidden Path to Product-Market Fit: Early Startup Signals to Watch For
PLUS: Former Rippling executive building something new
Behind The Scenes
Building a company in its earliest stages is often a lonely, exhausting journey, requiring immense patience and perseverance. It’s usually just you, maybe a co-founder, and a few early hires—coding, making cold calls, and reaching out non-stop. Even after you’ve launched a product and gained a few customers, it can be difficult to take a step back from the daily grind and assess if you’re actually making solid progress in those first months—or even years.
You might find yourself in a cycle of self-doubt, wondering, “Is our message resonating? Do people genuinely like and use what we’ve built? Is this what product-market fit is supposed to feel like?”
On the quantitative side, there are metrics like ARR, CAC, and sales conversions to help answer these questions. At First Round, we advocate for a more data-driven approach to finding PMF, which is why we created the PMF Method and published benchmarks for B2B SaaS startups, detailing the four stages of PMF with real data from Looker’s journey through each.
But numbers alone aren’t the only signals worth monitoring, especially when it’s so early that some of these figures are still out of reach. In a startup’s initial phase, qualitative cues are equally important and shouldn’t be ignored.
The challenge is that these non-quantitative indicators can be easily overlooked in the hectic early days. In fact, some of them can even seem discouraging—like an increase in customer complaints or a rise in competitors tackling the same issue. Early signs of traction are often clearer in hindsight.
Eilon Reshef, CPO and co-founder of Gong, describes it well: “As a founder, I was always looking for the negatives instead of the positives. Focusing on what can be improved isn’t a bad thing, but it means you’re rarely celebrating.”
For full version of this article, you can read them here.
Geeks of the Week
Startup Name: Partialdata
Geography: US
One-liner: AI teammate for security training.
Founder(s) Background: Director of Engineering at Netflix, Director of Engineering at Capital One.
Startup Name: First Thursday
Geography: UK
One-liner: Collector management tools for galleries.
Founder(s) Background: Head of Strategic Projects / Employee #3 at Welcome to the Jungle (fka Otta, backed by Tiger Global and LocalGlobe).
Founder(s) building in stealth
Episode of the Week
We recently launched the 102nd episode of our podcast, where we hosted Osvaldo Giménez, President of Fintech at Mercado Libre and CEO of Mercado Pago, its financial services division. Osvaldo shares his journey, the challenges of building fintech solutions for diverse markets, and the strategies that have made Mercado Libre Latin America's largest e-commerce powerhouse.