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Key Takeaways
- Even great products stall when founders confuse demand with scalability — real growth only begins once product-market fit evolves into go-to-market fit, where value, acquisition and customer behavior finally align.
Did you know that in 2012, Canva’s founder faced 100+ rejections from investors? When Canva launched, it didn’t immediately achieve the right product market fit. But its founding team understood that most people wanted to create professional-quality designs, but with complex tools.
Melanie Perkins saw this firsthand while building Fusion Books, the yearbook platform that grew into Australia’s largest of its kind. But this experience didn’t guarantee growth for Canva.
Canva’s insight was strong, but the product had to meet the market in a way that felt accessible to even non-designers. Early growth remained slow because the go-to-market engine wasn’t aligned with how users discovered, evaluated and adopted design tools.
Canva’s eventual acceleration came from building unified alignment across:
- A radically simplified onboarding experience
- A freemium model that lowered risk
- A template-driven SEO strategy that met users at moments of intent.
These go-to-market (GTM) strategy foundations gave way to growth that insight alone couldn’t.
This is the point at which many startups stall. Identifying demand is only the first milestone. In fact, research from McKinsey & Company shows that 78% of companies that successfully build a product and achieve product-market fit still fail to scale.
Scalable growth requires a second key element: GTM-market fit, the point where product value, acquisition motion and user behavior finally align.
Related: A Great Idea Means Nothing Without the Right Market — Here’s How to Find It
Clarifying two milestones: Product-market fit and go-to-market fit
Think of your product market fit as the moment your solution solves a tangible problem for a specific group of customers. PMF alone doesn’t explain how customers arrived, whether similar ones exist in predictable volume, or whether you can acquire them at sustainable economics — all core parts of the foundational steps to scaling successfully.
This is where the GTM strategy becomes essential. A go-to-market fit is the point at which product value, acquisition channels and unit economics synchronize. Here, your funnel becomes predictable, your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) stands clear and growth isn’t dependent on founder hustle or mere luck.
If PMF answers “Do people want this?”, GTM-market fit answers “Can we consistently grow this?”. Confusing the two leads to premature scaling and that’s when growth starts to stall.
How the gap between PMF and GTM-market fit shows up
Bridging product–market fit and GTM–market fit starts with sharpening your Ideal Customer Profile. Early adopters may love the product, but they’re not always the customers who help you scale. Focus on segments that convert quickly, activate reliably and produce healthy economics — they reveal patterns worth repeating.
From there, build a repeatable GTM motion around how those customers actually buy: simplify onboarding, clarify messaging and remove friction to first value.
You reach GTM–market fit when acquisition costs stay stable as you scale spend, and finding, converting and retaining the right customers becomes consistent, not accidental.
Related: Your Business Will Never Succeed If You Overlook This Key Step
Common mistakes founders make when they scale too early
When founders move beyond product market fit, the most consistent misread is assuming that strong user enthusiasm will naturally translate into scalable demand. Early engagement often reflects the severity of the problem, rather than the reliability of the acquisition path. Without a clear pattern in how new users discover and adopt the product, attempts to scale simply magnify noise.
Another frequent mistake is expanding commercial teams before the company understands who they should be selling to. Headcount cannot compensate for the absence of a defined Ideal Customer Profile or a repeatable conversion narrative.
The third misread is treating feature velocity as a proxy for growth readiness. More functionality rarely resolves the underlying issue: the market has not yet demonstrated a predictable response to the product.
Premature scaling doesn’t just slow momentum — it obscures the signals required to reach true GTM fit.
What GTM fit looks like in practice
Companies approaching the go-to-market fit begin to show a level of consistency that wasn’t present at earlier stages. The same type of customer appears repeatedly, exhibiting a consistent pattern in how they search, evaluate and adopt the product. Their path to value becomes more uniform, which is often the first sign that the market understands the offering in a predictable way.
A simple way to set this practice is to identify key actions taken by high-retention customers and redesign onboarding that guides new users to complete those same steps early in their journey.
Commercial efforts also begin to scale proportionally. Modest increases in spending or outreach produce steady returns rather than volatility, suggesting the company is no longer dependent on founder-led intuition to drive momentum.
Perhaps most telling, retention stabilizes because customers experience the product’s value in the way the business intended — not through exceptional support or workaround workflows, but through the strength of the core experience itself.
When these signals converge, a company is operating much closer to GTM-market fit than product enthusiasm alone would ever reveal.
Related: 6 Reasons Your Perfect Product Isn’t Selling — and How to Avoid the Marketing Mistakes Behind Them
What founders should carry forward about PMF and GTM
The shift from product market fit to GTM-market fit is less about adding volume and more about changing the questions you ask of the business. PMF tells you why customers care; GTM-market fit reveals how the market wants to engage with you. One is discovered; the other is engineered.
What ultimately separates companies that scale from those that stall is the ability to recognize when the problem changes. After PMF, the work is no longer about improving the product — it’s about shaping the pathways through which customers find, understand and experience it at scale.
Founders who embrace this transition early build organizations that grow with intention, not intensity. And that shift often becomes the difference between short-lived traction and a business built to endure.
Key Takeaways
- Even great products stall when founders confuse demand with scalability — real growth only begins once product-market fit evolves into go-to-market fit, where value, acquisition and customer behavior finally align.
Did you know that in 2012, Canva’s founder faced 100+ rejections from investors? When Canva launched, it didn’t immediately achieve the right product market fit. But its founding team understood that most people wanted to create professional-quality designs, but with complex tools.
Melanie Perkins saw this firsthand while building Fusion Books, the yearbook platform that grew into Australia’s largest of its kind. But this experience didn’t guarantee growth for Canva.
