every company did have a clear moment where they recognized they had PMF, and many did experience a sudden hard-to-miss pull from the market, BUT many companies did not see it immediately.

About half of these companies found PMF immediately after launch, but half spent months or years iterating to get there:

There are three things you have to get right to find True Product-Market Fit:

The original idea didn’t work. But hundreds of failed experiments later, and and after many a sleepless night of worrying, we finally tested the unlikely combination of No Due Dates, No Late Fees, and Subscription that ultimately was the thing that ended up working. And boy did it work. Within days of testing it we knew we had a winner.

To our surprise, users started writing to us asking ‘Can we pay for this??’ They liked it so much they wanted to pay for it. That was the first sign this was going to work.

“When my mom booked her first Airbnb, I said to myself, I think we got something here!”