Product Market Fit or Magic 8-Ball?

When I was working at an early stage fintech, I helped lead go-to-market for a new product called “Lookthroughs,” which helped LPs view their underlying portfolio company exposure and identify overlap across funds.

We pulled static investment schedules for every fund and turned them into dynamic, filterable charts directly in clients’ portals.

Clients loved the idea—but no one bought it. It was the kind of situation where you just want to bang your head against the wall, and we had no clue what was “wrong.”

SO WHAT WAS THE ISSUE?

Well, after digging in, I realized we didn’t actually have product-market fit. We had built a glorified spreadsheet—a tool to ask questions—but our users didn’t yet have the habit of asking them.

I mean, why would they? Before our product, getting that kind of insight into your private funds meant spending several hours a year doing manual work—for something you already assumed you had no control over.

So we shifted gears. We redesigned the product to tell more of a story—adding visuals, benchmarks, and context to answer questions clients hadn’t thought to ask, instead of just providing them a magic 8-ball.

We made our first Lookthroughs sale to one of my clients—and while we still hadn’t fully arrived at PMF, we knew we were on the right track.

A quick takeaway

If I had to distill the lesson: just because a product technically works doesn't mean it's ready. If your users aren’t in the habit of solving the problem you're addressing, your job isn't just building the tool—it’s creating the behavior. We thought we were delivering insight; what we really needed to deliver was a reason to care. In short, we built the tool, not the habit.