There’s a moment in every entrepreneur’s journey when the path ahead forks. One road leads to a path where there is hard labor to increase customer traction and hence revenue. The other path, rarer and more elusive, stretches toward a horizon where customers appear not in ones and twos, but in waves that crest higher with each passing quarter.

This is the difference between Product Market Fit (PMF) and Product Market Pull (PMP)—two concepts often conflated in startup circles, yet worlds apart in their manifestation and outcomes.

PMF, that much-celebrated milestone we’ve all been taught to chase, represents harmony between what you’ve created and what a segment of the market desires. It’s the gentle nod of customer satisfaction, there is recurring revenue that allows you to exhale, but with deeper challenges to scale revenue up.

Most founders find themselves here, caught in the delicate balance of a business that works but demands constant attention to grow. This is the realm of the lifestyle business—sustainable, possibly profitable, but rarely explosive in its trajectory. Revenue might reach thousands or low millions, but the climb remains deliberate, methodical, sometimes painfully slow.

PMP, however, exists in another dimension entirely. It emerges when your solution addresses a problem so acute, so widespread that the market itself begins to propel your growth forward. Customers don’t need convincing; they’re already convinced of their problem’s severity. Your solution doesn’t request attention—it commands it across a vast landscape of potential users all experiencing the same pressing need.

The distinction becomes visible in the metrics. Where PMF might show steady, linear growth, PMP reveals itself through that coveted hockey stick curve—adoption rates that suddenly accelerate beyond your marketing efforts, beyond your sales team’s capacity to handle inquiries. Your customer acquisition costs plummet as word spreads organically through networks of people united by a common pain point.

I’ve witnessed countless startups mistake PMF for PMP, assuming their traction indicates imminent explosion when really, they’re simply making good progress along the more common path. But PMP announces itself unmistakably—through inbound requests that overwhelm your systems, through customers who arrive pre-sold on your solution, through competitors who suddenly scramble to understand your secret.

The beauty in PMP is that the market does the heavy lifting. Your growth becomes less about pushing harder and more about expanding infrastructure to meet the pull. Your conversations shift from “How do we convince more customers?” to “How do we serve the customers already trying to reach us?”

The journey from fit to pull isn’t traveled through incremental improvements alone, but through deep understanding of market pain and limitations of existing solutions. For founders navigating early stages, recognizing this distinction changes everything. The question evolves from seeking product market fit to identifying problems with pull potential—wounds in the marketplace so universal and painful that solving them creates not just adoption but devotion, not just customers but evangelists.

And isn’t that, after all, what we’re truly seeking? Not merely to fit within a market, but to be pulled forward by it, carried on the current of market need toward possibilities that once seemed beyond our reach.