[NEXT] Lunch and Learn: What's Product Market Fit Without Paying Customers?

​What's Product Market Fit Without Paying Customers?

​Every founder has heard that you'll know product market fit when you feel it. Customers start pulling the product out of your hands, usage climbs, the thing just works.

​The trouble is that some of the signals can be misleading. A free product with strong retention is great signal, getting people to use something free is genuinely hard. But if you intend to build an exceptional business where customers pay, neither answers the question that eventually matters: will they pay for it?

​Put a price on the thing and some users leave. Whoever stays tells you something new about the value you have created. A paid pilot tells you one thing, repeatable demand and customers pulling the product into their organisations tell you something more. Product market fit isn't binary, it develops in levels.

​Rachana Mansinghka puts it plainly. Businesses cannot run on delusion. And if you do not know which level you are at, you do not know where to invest, so you can over-build one part of the company while starving another for a year without noticing.

​Join us for a session on working out where you actually sit, and what to do from there.

​We'll get into:

• ​What usage, retention and willingness to pay each tell you about product market fit

• ​The First Round Capital framework, from nascent through developing, strong and extreme, and how to place yourself honestly on it

• ​Why product and go to market are one job at early stage, and what specifically goes wrong when go to market is filed away as a later phase

• ​A live diagnosis of a real B2B founder with early customers, mapped onto the framework in front of the room

• ​What happens when you start charging, and how deciding your business model early changes what you build

• ​What to do at each level, including the case where the honest read is that you are ready to raise and hire

​Examples run B2B, but the framework travels. Worth the hour whether you sell to businesses or consumers.

​Who should attend?

• ​Founders with strong usage numbers that have not yet tested willingness to pay

• ​Founders with early customers or pilots trying to work out how much fit they really have

• ​Founders who have decided to work out go to market once the product is ready

• ​Product leads and operators who need to tell a board, or a founder, where the company honestly sits

​About Rachana:
Rachana Mansinghka is Cremorne Digital Hub's inaugural Entrepreneur in Residence. Over the past twenty years she has led teams and products at Meta, Wayfair and Gusto, spanning ads and monetisation, data and intelligence platforms, fintech and AI powered workflow automation. Her work has included complex environments shaped by privacy, compliance and tax regulation. She has been on the founder side too, having co-founded MeTime, a wellness marketplace that scaled across two countries, and advised high growth startups and mentored early stage founders through First Round Capital's Fast Track program. She holds an MBA from INSEAD. Across her residency at CDH her focus is product market fit, AI strategy, go to market and scaling product teams. The through line is walking into a messy situation and turning it into something a founder can act on by Monday — which is what she is doing in this room.

​About Inflect AI Labs:
Inflect AI Labs designs, builds and ships AI native software and automation for ambitious businesses. It works with founders and leadership teams to build AI agents and custom automation that solve real business problems, and hold up in production, not just in demos.