Product-Market Fit Is Not Enough

Some companies grow like smooth sailers: growth feels easy, almost inevitable. Others are tugboats: every point of growth takes brute force, more spend, more people, more hours. Balfour's uncomfortable observation is that the tugboats are often following best practices and working just as hard.

His challenge to conventional wisdom is blunt. There are terrible products that reached $1B+ in value and amazing products that never got anywhere. If product-market fit were the whole answer, that could not happen.

The difference is not one fit but four: market-product fit, product-channel fit, channel-model fit, and model-market fit. The smooth sailers have all four aligned. The tugboats are usually missing at least one and trying to compensate with effort.