PMF is a GTM problem

At Beyond, we spent weeks building things based on assumptions about who would care and why. When those assumptions were wrong, it slowed us down a lot. This was before coding agents, so building was expensive. We could have validated some of those assumptions much faster.

I think technical founders are particularly prone to this. When people aren't interested, we iterate on the product. Add a feature. Redesign the onboarding. The assumption is that the product isn't good enough yet.

Sometimes that's true. But it's worth questioning whether the product is the thing that needs to change.

What "fit" actually means

Finding product-market fit involves figuring out who you're selling to, what you're offering them, and how you talk about it. The audience, the value proposition, and the message. Change any one of those and you change whether the product lands, even if the product itself stays exactly the same.

A founder can have something useful but pitch it to the wrong audience. Or describe it in terms that don't connect. Or lead with a feature when the customer cares about an outcome.

From inside the company, all of these can look like a product problem. Nobody's interested, so we need to build more. But you haven't necessarily learned enough to make that call.

What are you actually iterating on?

Pre-PMF, most teams run something like: build → measure → learn → build again. The iteration variable is the product. Everything else—the positioning, the audience, the way they describe what they've built—stays roughly fixed while they tweak features.

The objective is to learn what users want by shipping something to see if they'll use it. But this commonly gets mistaken for building a v1, and founders end up polishing and tweaking rather than testing the assumption they started with.

I'd put the audience and positioning into that same iteration process. Try a different audience. Reframe the value prop. Change the message. You still need to build, but be clear about what you're trying to learn from it.

You can have the right product for the wrong people, or the right product described in the wrong way, and it looks a lot like having the wrong product. No traction. The next step depends on which of those is happening.

Why founders default to building

Building feels like progress. You can see the commits, count the features, demo something new each week. GTM iteration is messier. Testing a new positioning doesn't come with the dopamine of shipping code. Talking to a different audience segment feels like starting over, and can be gruelling.

I've been that founder. You know how to build, so that's where you spend your time. It's harder to go back and question who the product is for, especially after you've already spent weeks building for them.

At Beyond, I wish we'd spent more time testing those assumptions before committing to the work.

The whole package

Pre-PMF, these decisions are connected. The audience shapes what matters in the product. The product constrains what you can credibly promise. The message determines who gives you a chance in the first place.

You won't figure them out neatly in order. Learning something about the audience might change the product. Showing someone the product might reveal that you've been explaining its value badly.

The mistake is leaving the audience and positioning fixed while expecting product changes to do all the work. Those assumptions need testing too.