phrase · first recorded 2007 · status: og
Reaching PMF
1.Product-market fit, escaped from the startup: the moment anything clicks with its audience. Your joke reached PMF in the group chat. The haircut has PMF. The situationship is pre-PMF and iterating.
The taqueria order reached PMF around visit six. No more menu. The market has spoken.
01Origin
The startup sense is scripture: Andy Rachleff coined product/market fit, and Marc Andreessen's 2007 essay canonized it as "the only thing that matters": the moment the market pulls the product out of you and everything that was impossible becomes easy. Founders describe reaching it the way people describe religious experiences, partly because both are self-reported.
Then SF unbolted it from the cap table, the same move it ran on pivot. Anything with an audience can now reach PMF: a bit that lands, a fit that gets compliments, a dinner party format, a personality adjusted until the room responds. The grammar came along too: things are pre-PMF (still flopping), searching for PMF (flopping with a thesis), or post-PMF (coasting, hiring, insufferable).
The expansion works because the underlying feeling is universal: the difference between pushing a thing at the world and the world pulling it from you. SF just insists on the vocabulary. A pure potential play is by definition pre-PMF; the census means SF dating is a market where almost nothing fits; and when someone says their marriage found PMF, you are legally in San Francisco.
02Notable sightings
03Spread the ism
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