Why PMF Alone Won’t Make You a Breakout Success

The Key to Scaling: Aligning Your Business Model, Channels, and Target Customers

This morning, I had an Intro.co call with a founder who started by asking, "We ran your survey and validated strong PMF, but we're still not growing. Why not?" It’s a great question because many startup founders believe that once they’ve validated product-market fit (PMF), the hard part is over. But in reality, PMF is just the beginning. Without a scalable way to acquire and convert new customers, even the best products struggle to become great businesses.

Step 1: Confirm You’re Targeting the Right Customers

After validating PMF, the first critical step is ensuring you’re targeting the right customers—the ones who truly experience your product as a must-have. Too often, startups assume PMF applies broadly, but in reality, it’s usually strongest for a specific subset of users. Go deep on understanding these customers:

• What jobs are they hiring your product to do?

• What alternatives were they using before?

• What makes your product a must-have for them?

Aligning your messaging and acquisition efforts with this group will increase conversion rates and reduce wasted marketing spend.

Step 2: Set the Right Expectations

A common mistake is driving top-of-funnel growth without ensuring prospects fully understand the value proposition before they try the product. If new users come in with the wrong expectations, even a strong PMF won’t translate into high activation and retention rates.

Make sure your onboarding, website, and marketing clearly communicate what your product does and who it’s best for. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a leaky bucket—acquiring users who churn before they ever experience the value. Optimizing this messaging for response will, of course, require lots of tests.

I often share an example from the early days at Lookout, a mobile security solution. After repositioning the product on the "must have" benefit and streamlining onboarding to deliver this benefit, we saw the percentage of people who considered the product a "must have" climb from around 7% to over 40%, leading to better long-term retention and customer advocacy. Within a few years, Lookout reached a unicorn valuation.

Step 3: Find a Scalable, Cost-Effective Growth Channel

Even with the right target customers and messaging, you need a repeatable and scalable way to acquire them cost-effectively. This requires running lots of experiments across different channels to find what works. Test:

• Paid acquisition (Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.)

• Organic strategies (SEO, word of mouth, community-building, partnerships)

• Sales-driven approaches (outbound, product demos, referrals)

Some channels will appear promising but fail to scale profitably. If that’s the case, take a step back and reassess—sometimes the issue isn’t the channel, but the business model itself.

Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash

Step 4: Optimize Your Business Model

If you’re struggling to make any channel work at scale, it could be that your pricing or trial model is holding you back. Consider experimenting with:

• Freemium or Trials: Lowering the barrier to entry can increase conversion rates. Zoom, for example, became a breakout success by offering free 40-minute meetings. But the real genius wasn’t just the time limit—it was that if an unexpected guest joined, the meeting would abruptly end, making the host look unprofessional. This small tweak created a strong psychological push to upgrade. While other companies had great meeting products, this business model detail was critical in helping Zoom dominate the meeting space.

• Pricing Increases: If your core users aren’t choosing your product based on price, you may have more room to increase pricing than you think. Many startups underprice their product, making some channels unprofitable that would work at higher price points.

• Alternative Monetization Strategies: Subscription vs. one-time purchase, usage-based pricing, premium add-ons—different models can unlock new channels.

The Alignment of PMF, Business Model, and Channels

The companies that scale successfully don’t just have a great product with PMF. They have a business model that aligns with their most valuable customers and a repeatable channel for reaching them. When all three—PMF, business model, and scalable channels—line up, that’s when you unlock breakout growth.

If you’re struggling post-PMF, don’t just keep pushing on the same acquisition tactics. Step back and reassess: Are you targeting the right customers? Are you setting the right expectations? Is your business model enabling or limiting growth? The answers to these questions can be the difference between a startup that plateaus and one that becomes a category leader.

If you're looking to go deeper on this, our GoPractice.io Simulator for learning Data-Driven Product Management is one of the best hands-on ways to learn how data-driven experimentation can help solve these challenges.