In partnership with
Marketing News & Hot Jobs Below 📰
A few weeks ago I posted a list of ten things I wish I'd known before my first startup marketing role. It traveled further than anything I've written, tens of thousands of people and hundreds of comments. And several of them caught the same thing; I left the most important one off.
Product-market fit belongs at the top of that list. Above all ten.
I skipped it because I take it as a given. Most marketers inherit the product rather than build it, so I jumped straight to the parts marketing actually controls. But that's exactly the trap. Marketing gets hired to grow something before anyone has confirmed the thing is growable, and great marketing on a product the market doesn't want doesn't create growth. It just helps you find out faster, and more expensively, that the fit isn't there.
PMF Is Two-Sided, And Marketing Has A Role On Both Sides
Everyone treats PMF as a product question: does the thing work, and do people want it? But fit has two sides. You can have a product the market genuinely wants and still stall, because the market doesn't understand what you are, who you're for, or why it matters. That's the market side of fit, and it's where marketing has a huge role to play.
So there are really two different ways this goes wrong, and they call for opposite responses.
The first is no product fit. The thing itself doesn't solve a real problem well enough for people to change what they're doing. No campaign fixes that, pour budget into it and you just spend faster to reach the same wall. It's a product problem, and marketing's most valuable move is to say so plainly rather than paper over it.
The second is no market-side fit. The product genuinely works, but the positioning is muddy, the buyer is unclear, and nobody understands why they should care. This one marketing can help fix, and it's often the real problem hiding behind "marketing isn't working." The product is fine. The market just can't see it clearly yet.
The Hard Part Is Telling Them Apart
Most of the expensive mistakes I've seen come from confusing the two. A team with a market-side problem goes and rebuilds the product when the product was never the issue. Another team with a genuine product problem keeps pouring money into demand gen, convinced better marketing will save a thing the market has already rejected.
Diagnosing which one you're actually dealing with is worth more than any campaign you could run. It's also uncomfortable, because the honest answer sometimes points at the product, or at the founder's original thesis, and nobody wants to be the person who says the fit isn't there yet.
Even When The Fit Is Real, Don't Pay To Educate A Market Someone Else Already Is
This is where I see early teams burn the most money. Even when the product genuinely fits, most startups aren't creating a brand-new category. They're innovating inside one that already exists. So don't spend your scarce budget teaching the market that the problem exists, the category leaders are already doing that, with content machines and budgets you can't match.
Let them!
Your job is to show up when that education turns into intent, capturing the demand that already exists through intent data, competitive search, and other high-intent channels, rather than trying to manufacture demand from scratch.
If you genuinely are building a new category, that's a different game, and it's worth being clear-eyed about what you're signing up for: time, patience, budget, and capital. But most companies that think they're creating a category are actually entering an existing one with a sharper angle. That's a much cheaper problem to have, and it changes where every dollar should go.
The Bottom Line
The corrected list starts at zero.
Rule 0: Make sure there's fit before you spend a dollar trying to grow it. The product side, does this solve a real problem? And the market side, does the market understand why it matters?
Everything else I've written about early-stage marketing only works once that's true. You can have the sharpest positioning, the cleanest funnel, and the most disciplined budget in the world, and none of it matters if you're marketing a thing the market doesn't want, or can't yet understand.
Get the fit right first. Then go build.
What's the clearest case you've seen of a "marketing problem" that turned out to be a fit problem? Reply and tell me, I read every one.
If This Resonates
These are the kinds of conversations happening every day inside MarketingHQ. Less about running another campaign, more about the questions underneath it: is the fit actually there, what's really broken, and where should the next dollar go.
If that's the kind of conversation you're looking for, come join us. Inside the community, you'll get:
Private chat groups with peers and industry experts (free for a limited time 🎁)
Exclusive insights and hands-on support
Member-only events and roundtables
Practical advice from operators who've solved these problems before
Resources you can apply immediately
Career Up 🚀
Now Let’s Get You Hired!
Chief Marketing Officer at Drs E&E Investment ($150,000 - $250,000)
VP of Product Marketing at Workiva ($241,200 - $313,600)
VP of Marketing at Senteon ($110,000 - $130,000)
Senior Director, Marketing Operations at WalkMe ($190,000 - $225,000)
Product Marketing Manager, Workspace Security at Check Point Software ($156,030 - $211,100)
Product Marketing Manager, Ads Measurement at Google ($116,000 - $166,000)
Digital Marketing Strategist, Startups/SMB (Remote) at Directive ($80,000 - $85,000)
Senior Product Marketing Specialist, Value Messaging at Wolters Kluwer ($85,600 - $149,400)
Payer Marketing Manager at athenahealth ($96,000 - $164,000)
Head of Product, Media OS at IQVIA Digital ($140,100 - $390,400)
Chief Marketing Officer, MedTech/Life Sciences at MarketPro ($300,000 - $337,000)
Find many more roles on our MarketingHQ Job Board
No follow-up questions required
Every sales leader knows the feeling. You walk into a pipeline review with a number you believe in, and twenty minutes later, you're defending every line item to a CEO who just wants to know what's actually going to close.
HubSpot Sales Hub ends that conversation. Every deal, every rep's activity, and every buyer signal are all in one place and updated automatically. So your forecast is built on what's actually happening. And when you present that number, you can stand behind it.
If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here to get our weekly newsletter directly in your inbox.
