"You'll just know when you have product-market fit."
We’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve heard this Silicon Valley wisdom thrown around. It’s perfect for SaaS startups measuring daily active users and viral coefficients! But when your product is a complex industrial solution with an 18-month sales cycle and a seven-figure price tag, you need something more concrete.
SaaS product-market fit metrics don't translate to industrial b2b, where customers make decade-long investment decisions that affect safety, reliability and operational efficiency. And their go-to-market strategy of rapid iteration and growth hacking falls flat when you’re managing complex distribution networks and procurement cycles.
With most advice on product-market fit coming from the SaaS world, let’s look at a different framework that you can use for measuring success:
