Pull-Based Product-Market Fit
Be stubborn on your thesis but open on its form — chase the customer who is surprisingly easy to sell, not the one you must force
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Foody's counter to founders who spend months trying to force product-market fit. Hold conviction about how the world will change, but let the market tell you where the pull actually is. The tell is sales friction: if the marginal customer is extremely hard to sell, you won't build a huge business; the real opportunity is the customer who is surprisingly easy to close and grow with. PMF is the combination of a stubborn thesis and an open mind about exactly what form it takes.
Origin
Brendan Foody, CEO of Mercor, distilling how Mercor found its market — recognizing pull from an XAI meeting and from a crowdsourcing player hiring 1,000+ people on their platform, rather than forcing their original hiring-marketplace product.
Core principles
- 01Be stubborn about your thesis on how the world will change, open-minded about the form it takes
- 02Forcing PMF wastes time; sometimes you must hear it from the market
- 03Sales friction is the signal — if the marginal customer is extremely hard to sell, the business won't scale
- 04Find the customer who is surprisingly easy to sell into and can grow with you
- 05Stay alert to pull, explore it, then go deep on making that experience exceptional
How to run it
- 1
Hold a conviction thesis, loosely on form
Commit to a view of how the world will change, but do not over-specify the product that captures it.
Pro tip Foody's own thesis was that disaggregated labor markets would unify once matching could be automated at software cost — the form (data for labs) came later.
Watch out Persistence on the thesis is good; rigidity on the exact product is how you force a bad fit.
- 2
Watch for pull in the market
Notice where customers reach for you unprompted — an inbound intro, a customer using your platform at unexpected volume.
Pro tip Pull often appears before you have raised money; Mercor's first signals came while bootstrapped and seed-stage.
- 3
Test sell-in friction on the marginal customer
Judge whether the next customer is hard or surprisingly easy to close. Easy-to-sell plus a large pain point equals the place to focus.
Pro tip Difficulty selling the marginal customer is a growth ceiling — treat it as disqualifying, not a motivation problem.
- 4
Go deep on the pulled opportunity
Once the pull is confirmed and meaningful, pour resources into making that specific customer experience exceptional.
In the wild
In Aug 2023, a customer intro'd Foody to XAI's co-founders. They loved his focus on expert quality and were excited, even though they weren't ready for human data yet. The team knew from that moment the market was about to change radically.
→ Conviction to be at the frontier of the human-data shift before dropping out of college.
A crowdsourcing incumbent used Mercor's platform to hire 1,000+ people; Mercor got flooded with support tickets that those workers weren't being paid. This exposed that incumbents were 'resting on their laurels' and that direct-to-lab work was a large, easy-to-serve opening.
→ Mercor began working directly with labs in May 2024; hundreds of millions in revenue followed.
Common mistakes
Forcing PMF
Spending long stretches trying to manufacture fit for a product the market isn't pulling on. Let the market confirm the place to focus.
Chasing hard-to-sell customers
If the marginal customer is extremely hard to sell, no amount of effort makes it a huge business.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early founders with a strong thesis deciding which market signal to commit to
Not ideal for
Deep-tech bets where the market cannot yet perceive or express demand for years
From the transcript
“What you actually need to find is the customer that's surprisingly easy to sell into where you're going to be able to grow with them.”
“it's some combination of being stubborn with respect to your thesis around how the world will change, but also very open-minded with respect to exactly…”
“if it's extremely difficult to sell the marginal customer, you're not going to be able to grow a huge business”
From the episode
Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history
Brendan Foody (CEO of Mercor)