> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cremornedigitalhub.com.au/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # What's Product Market Fit Without Paying Customers? - URL: https://www.cremornedigitalhub.com.au/blog/whats-product-market-fit-without-paying-customers/ - Published: 2026-09-24T08:35:52.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-24T08:35:52.000Z - Author: Angelica Alinsod - Tags: #blog-col Product-market fit can feel like the final piece of the puzzle: once it clicks, customers arrive and revenue follows. In our latest virtual Lunch & Learn, CDH community and partnerships coordinator Darren Huang sat down with Rachana Mansinghka, CDH's first Entrepreneur in Residence, to unpack why that picture is misleading, especially for early-stage founders. Rachana Masingka has spent two decades leading product teams across the UK and the Bay Area at companies including Wayfair, Meta, Gusto and Expedia. She has also founded two startups, one of which exited through the sale of its codebase. She moved back to Melbourne a year ago and is now building her second startup from the hub. Her core message was simple: at the early stage, there is no difference between building the product and building the market. ### **The Trap of Building in a Silo** With tools like Claude Code and Codex, it has never been easier to spin up polished software from your laptop. Rachana admits she's guilty of it too. The danger is that go-to-market becomes something you'll get to "once X is ready", and you end up fixing the thing you've built instead of selling it. "Product-market fit is a stage where there is no difference between the product development side and the market development side," she said. "Both need to be developed simultaneously." ### **Usage is Evidence of Interest, Not Value** Rachana walked through First Round Capital's PMF framework, which treats product-market fit as a series of stages rather than a single milestone. One of the most common situations she sees is founders with thousands of users or an impressive waitlist who assume they've made it. That kind of traction means you're past the nascent stage, but it's not the finish line. People will try anything new. The real test comes when they have to pay, change the way they work and move their data across from existing tools. That's where product-market fit tends to break. "Free usage is good. It's evidence, and evidence is important," she said. "But that's evidence of interest, not evidence of value." ### **The Trap of Waiting** Darren raised a point from our earlier session with Hugh Stephens of Galileo Ventures: if your product is only marginally better, customers won't bother switching. Rachana agreed, with a caveat. Too many founders hear that and decide they can't go to market until their product is 10 times better. Instead, she suggests finding the few people who already appreciate what you've built and will pay for it. If you have 50 users who are hooked, they'll bring their friends and colleagues, and that's a far stronger growth lever than broad, lukewarm interest. The narrower your early customer base, the fewer things you have to fix. ### **Don't Delay the Money Conversation** Darren noted that what kills more startups than any economic cycle is simply the cost of living. Founders have mortgages, families and lives to fund. Generating revenue early is what separates a startup from a hobby project. Rachana was clear that this doesn't mean charging from day one. It means not avoiding the conversation. With her current startup, she's shared a half-built dashboard with early users and invited them to help shape it, with an agreement that once usage and token costs reach a certain point, they'll pay. "Don't delay the conversation that this thing is going to cost you money," she said. This is where the design partner model shines. Rather than giving away a discounted product, you're building something together. Partners commit time through regular meetings, which gives them skin in the game. ### **Get Specific About Pain and Who Feels It** If you can't articulate what pain you're solving and for whom, you're not ready to scale. Using the example of commuters bored on a train, Rachana pointed out that "people are bored" identifies a pain but not a customer. "Senior citizens without smartphones who want something physical to do on their commute" identifies both, and you can start testing before you've built anything. For founders already onboarding customers, she recommends listening for the one thing that's making people switch. That single pain point is what you can charge for. ### **B2B and B2C Fail in Different Places** In B2B, the common hurdle is the cold start problem: you need data or enterprise access just to begin. Once you have budget, the risk becomes building something so custom for one client that you've turned your startup into a consulting gig. In B2C, it's easier to test quickly, but the failure point is the paywall, where users drift to free alternatives. ### **Go-to-Market is Just Conversation** Rachana's advice is to stop thinking of it as sales and start thinking of it as discovery, education and joint brainstorming. She even suggests telling people up front: "I'm not trying to sell you something. I'm just trying to understand how you do this today." That applies to investors and angels too. Instead of pitching, ask whether anyone in their portfolio or network might benefit from what you're building. Her practical challenge: carve out time every week for three to five conversations, roughly 70 per cent with potential customers and 30 per cent with other founders or investors. Do that for a quarter and you'll have done your go-to-market, and your product will be better for it. ### **Want More?** Subscribe to watch the full Lunch and Learn session on our [Youtube Channel.](https://www.youtube.com/@CremorneDigitalHub?ref=cremornedigitalhub.com.au)