Do you even PMF, bro? 🐪

Product Market fit—a term so elusive it haunts founders even more than unicorns.

This fixation is warranted—it's one of the most crucial steps in a startup’s journey. It’s also the point when a founder stops exploring and starts exploiting (see last newsletter).

Why is PMF so hard for founders to define? As Michael Seibel puts it, it’s intellectually easier to think you’ve hit PMF. As actually being in PMF feels like you’re stuck in a river of crap—you’re not enjoying life at all.

Hiring, setting up new offices, and exploring growth channels are clearer and more appealing challenges. Founders often prefer those tasks over the messy exploration of Beofre-PMF. As a result, they sometimes declare PMF prematurely, hoping to move into PMF mode—but it doesn’t work like that. Marc Andreesen’s piece is the best place if you want to read more on this.

If you’ve been following Wondercraft’s journey, you’ve likely seen graphs showing significant growth.

But does that mean we’ve found PMF? It’s complicated. Let me share my perspective.

Fast growth doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve hit PMF. Here are some key questions to consider:

1. How are you growing? Where is the traffic coming from? Is it sustainable?

2. Are you delivering value to your customers? What does your retention look like?

3. Are you making money? Do you have healthy margins?

The first and third questions are usually straightforward to answer. For retention benchmarks, this resource can help.

One of my favorite examples of high growth without PMF is Twitch. Before 2010, when it was still Justin.tv, it allowed anyone to livestream. Four years in, they had 30 million monthly viewers and $8 million in revenue, yet they still hadn’t found PMF.

According to Emmet, Seibel, and the team, the main issues were:

1. They had no control over their user growth and were stuck at 30 million.

2. Many “hijack users” were illegally broadcasting copyrighted events.

They only discovered PMF after realizing some of those hijack users were actually gamers. By doubling down on gaming, they finally hit PMF and went on to sell to Amazon for $1B.

And by the way, there’s even companies that get acquired without ever reaching PMF. Socialcam, for example, sold for $60 million after gaining 16 million users in just six months—despite having terrible retention.

Now, back to 2025.

A factor to consider when assessing for PMF, is that some startups, during exploration, test multiple products across different markets. This is key to assessing Wondercraft’s PMF status.

At Wondercraft, we’ve explored two distinct products across three markets:

1. Dubbing and localization for YouTube creators

2. Audio Content Studio for audio ad production (for creative agencies and brands)

3. Audio Content Studio for content creation, like podcasts (for marketers and more)

Dubbing was promising—arguably the clearest problem set and ICP. We did well, but we paused because the solution was more expensive than the market was willing to pay. So, no PMF.

Audio Ads is interesting—there’s demand, but two issues:

1. The market is too small for Wondercraft’s growth goals.

2. The AI element faces headwinds from the ICP, making it a timing problem.

These factors push us to explore other options. Possibly PMF? So, no PMF. 😈

Then there’s the AI Content Studio—arguably the most interesting. We generate a ton of organic traffic, but much of it isn’t our ICP, so retention isn’t at unicorn levels. Our users, subscribers, and revenue are growing fast. But have we hit PMF? Nope. No PMF. (But there’s a not yet for this one) 😇

Does it feel bad to recognise that we’re not at PMF? Well, yeah sure I’d rather be in the land of unicorns. But it’s necessary to be transparent so that we can act on changes required.

And besides, that is very much the glass half empty perspective. That we’re still in the river of crap as Seibel describes it.

Also I don’t think that anyone in the team sees it that way. We’re all genuinely more hyped than ever as we are quite confident in the exact steps in the next 2 quarters to make our product fit the market.

Perhaps the most exciting point in a startup journey is when you’re still swimming in the river of crap but can finally see land ahead—somewhere to plant your roots. And that’s exactly where we are at Wondercraft.

See you at land.

Dimi

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Hot tip - listen to this playlist to enter the Wonder zone.