Is It You or Your Product? The Truth About Product-Market Fit | Collin Stewart - 2039

Product-market fit isn't a yes or no question, and treating it like one is what trips up most founders and sales leaders. That's the core idea Collin Stewart, co-founder and CEO of Predictable Revenue and host of the Predictable Revenue Podcast, brought to this episode, and it reshaped how I think about why some go-to-market motions take off and others stall no matter how hard the team works.

Product-Market Fit Isn't Binary, It Has Strength

Most founders treat product-market fit as something you either have or don't, which makes the conversation almost impossible, because any founder with paying customers can point to that as proof they already have it.Instead, Collin described product-market fit as existing on a scale, from barely there to overwhelming, which means two companies can both have "a product in market" while one sells at a fraction of the speed of the other.That distinction matters because it shifts the question from a debate over whether fit exists to a real conversation about how strong that fit is and what would make it stronger.

The Uber Eats Story That Proved the Point

Collin shared that his old cold email agency normally booked around ten meetings a month for a client using the same process and the same team.When a former client joined Uber to launch what's now Uber Eats and asked Collin's team to run the exact same playbook, that single campaign of a thousand outreach emails booked 327 meetings in one month.The rep running the campaign hadn't changed and the process hadn't changed, so Collin concluded product-market fit acts as a multiplier on go-to-market effort, and Uber's fit was roughly 33 times stronger than anything else his team had worked on.

Strengthening Fit Starts With Customer Development Interviews

The fastest way to raise the strength of your product-market fit is to run structured customer development interviews with your pipeline, your existing customers, and people in adjacent markets.The key question to ask is what problem you'd solve for them if you could solve anything, then follow it with two scoring questions: how satisfied are they with how they currently solve it, and how important is solving it to them.The sweet spot is a problem that scores high on importance and low on satisfaction, because a painful, unsolved, high-stakes problem is what founders should build around, not a nice-to-have improvement.

Why Working Harder Without Direction Backfires

Collin compared weak product-market fit to riding a tricycle with