Most apps don’t fail because they weren’t built well, but because they weren’t enough to meet the market demands. In simple words, they had a poor product-market fit that made them useless among customers.

Without a strong product-market fit, any product is meant to fail in this competitive market. So, how exactly do you achieve product-market fit? In this guide, we’ll figure out the same.

What is Product-Market Fit?

The term product-market fit is used to indicate alignment between your product and signficant market demand. An ideal fit is when the product meets the market needs in the best and easiest way possible.

To achieve a successful product-market fit, you should:

Identify the problem that your audience needs solved
Find the easiest way to solve it
Provide the solution at a price your audience is willing to pay

The key goal is to ensure your product meets the real demand and needs of the market. You can use metrics such as user adoption rate, engagement, and feedback to track your product’s market success.

Why is Product-Market Fit Crucial for Product Success?

Product-market fit directly connects to a product’s success. In simple words, the stronger your product-market metrics are, the more likely it is to succeed in the market.

There are other benefits of achieving product-market fit too, such as:

Higher customer retention rates: When your product actually solves your users’ problems, it will have better retention rates and less churn.
Market recognition: Good product-market fit often leads to more market recognition and share.
Lower customer acquisition costs: Your product can benefit from organic marketing channels and word-of-mouth with a strong product-market fit.
Easier scalability: When your business grows organically, it’s easier to scale it up into something sustainable.

In contrast, you’ll find it extremely difficult to grow and scale your business without a strong product-market fit. This makes achieving product-market fit really important for startups.

How to Achieve Product-Market Fit: 6 Steps

Achieving product-market fit can define your app’s success in the long run. Here, we’ve mentioned 6 steps that you can use:

1. Speak to your audience

When you’re defining a product-market fit, you need to understand your market as well. You can research to find answers to questions like:

Who are my ideal customers?
What problems are they currently facing?
How are they trying to solve the problem statement?
Why is the current solution not working for them?

Conduct user interviews and talk to your audience to understand the real market. With extensive market research, you can validate your idea or pivot to find a better solution to the problem.

2. Understand the problem statement

One of the most important yet overlooked aspects of finding product-market fit is: understanding the problem to its core. If you aren’t clear about the problem, how will your app solve it?

You need to get a deep understanding of the problem from your users. Figure out how your users see the problem and where their real pain points are. Ask your users related questions in customer interviews.

3. Define your unique value proposition

Unique value proposition defines what makes your solution different from the existing ones in the market. Once you’ve identified your target audience and the problem your app will solve, you can move onto your app’s unique value proposition.

Unique value proposition also defines your product’s positioning. In simple words, it defines why your target audience should choose your product over another one. More importantly, why they should consider your solution at all.

To define your UVP, you need to clarify:

What your customers’ biggest problems are
What key features and solutions your product offers
What unique features your product has that others don’t
Why your customers should choose you over your competitors

Once you’ve defined your unique value proposition, it will get easier to achieve a strong product-market fit. Hence, it can lead your product to a successful launch.

4. Outline your app’s core features

Before we get into the next step, you need to define your app’s core features. You need to understand what exactly your solution is for the core problem you’re trying to solve.

Start by identifying all the features you can build for your app. Once that’s done, we’ll start with the MoSCow method to eliminate the features you don’t need. In simple words, this is how it goes:

Must-Have: These are the core features of your app.
Should-Have: These are the features your app should have in its future versions.
Could-Have: These are the features that your app could have but aren’t necessary.
Won’t-Have: These are features your app shouldn’t have at all.

Using this method, you can identify your app’s core features and use them for the next step, that is, building an MVP.

5. Get user feedback on the MVP

A minimum viable product, popularly known as an MVP, is your product’s first version with its core features only. It is meant to save you from developing a complete product that doesn’t fit the market demand.

Instead of trying to get feedback on a perfect product, build an MVP and get user feedback first. This can help you validate your idea and measure product-market fit early on.

The good thing is: you don’t need to wait for months to build an MVP. You can use an AI app builder such as Natively to build a mobile app in minutes. Such a quick process can allow you to launch, get user feedback, and launch quickly.

6. Iterate and optimize

Iteration is the real step that helps you determine if your product meets market demand. As you test your app, you should be able to iterate quickly without incurring huge costs. This is crucial as you’ll need to adjust your product multiple times before you find the perfect fit.

Find a way to build and iterate easily, such as with an AI app builder like Natively. You just need to prompt the AI about the changes you want to make and your app’s new version will be ready in minutes. In addition, you can revert to the previous version if you want to.

How to Measure Product-Market Fit?

While it’s easy to understand the steps to achieve product-market fit, how do you determine if you’ve already achieved it? Let’s look at the three strategies by experts:

Ask your users

Your users know the best about your product. So, start by asking them questions like, “How would you feel if you could no longer use our product?” and measure the respondents’ answers.

Aim for more than 40% of respondents to say “very disappointed” as the standard for product-market fit. Such quantitative data allows you measure success and make improvements more clearly.

Product-led growth

After quantitative data comes qualitative data that measures product-led growth. You can measure this with data on word-of-mouth recommendations from your users.

One simple way to do it is through survey data on your user acquisition pipeline. The best product-led growth indicator is when users recommend your product themselves.

View the metrics

Lastly, you can look at plenty of other metrics to measure your success rate too. Look at both quantitative and qualitative metrics, such as:

Word of mouth and referrals
Churn rate
Growth rate
Customer retention rate
Market share
Conversion rate
Ratings and reviews

All this data can give you a much clearer picture on how well you’ve achieved product-market fit and where you can make improvements.

Build Your MVP Quickly with Natively

Natively lets you build native mobile apps in no time and without any coding efforts. Unlike vibe-coding tools like Cursor where you need to code, Natively doesn’t have any such limitations for non-coders.

You can turn any app idea into an actual, functional app with a prompt. If you start building today, your app’s first version will be ready in the next few hours. Start creating your MVP and validate your idea today — all on Natively.