Why Your Product-Market Fit Now Has a 90-Day Expiration Date
For decades, the startup playbook revolved around a single milestone: product-market fit (PMF). The narrative was straightforward. A company struggles, iterates, and eventually creates something the market truly wants. Once PMF is achieved, the assumption is that the hard part is over. The company earns the right to scale, invest heavily in marketing and sales, and ride sustained growth.
That model no longer holds.
In today’s AI-driven environment, where new competitors appear weekly and core technologies shift quarterly, product-market fit is no longer a stable achievement. It is a temporary condition. One that must be continuously re-earned.
Take Lovable as an example. The company reached $200 million in annual recurring revenue in its first year. By any traditional definition, that is undeniable product-market fit. Yet according to Lovable’s Head of Growth, Elena Vera, even at that scale the company is forced to fully recapture product-market fit every three months.
This is not a failure of strategy or execution. It is a reflection of a fundamentally different market reality.
What follows is an explanation of why the ground is moving so quickly and what organizations must do to stay aligned in an environment where product-market fit resets faster than most planning cycles.
The Ground Is Shifting: Technology Changes Every Quarter
The core technologies underpinning modern products, particularly large language models, are not evolving gradually. They are advancing in step-function leaps, often within the span of a single quarter.
Elena Vera describes it plainly:
“Every three months or so, every single AI LLM provider creates a step-function change in what is possible with that LLM.”
This has meaningful implications. The capabilities your product is built on are being redefined externally and frequently. A feature that differentiated you last quarter may become trivial, or expected, in the next.
Organizations that pause innovation in order to focus exclusively on scaling are not just competing against other companies. They are competing against the accelerating baseline of what technology makes possible. In that environment, product-market fit naturally decays unless it is actively refreshed.
The Finish Line Is Moving: Customer Expectations Are Shifting Too
At the same time, customer expectations are changing just as quickly.
What felt impressive or even novel a few months ago is now assumed. Across B2B, retail, and CPG, customers have recalibrated their expectations of speed, relevance, and usefulness. AI capabilities are no longer evaluated in isolation. They are judged by how well they fit into real workflows, decision processes, and daily habits.
Vera points out that what users expected from tools like ChatGPT eight months ago versus today is “night and day.” The bar has moved, and it continues to move.
The result is a market with little patience for offerings that fail to evolve alongside these expectations. The definition of “good enough” is no longer stable, and product-market fit weakens quietly when companies assume it is.
The New Reality: Product-Market Fit as a Moving State
When both your technological foundation and your customers’ expectations change every quarter, product-market fit becomes inherently temporary.
This creates a new operating reality. Product-market fit is no longer something you secure and then protect. It is something you continuously revisit as the market shifts.
Even organizations that appear highly successful are exposed. Vera puts this into perspective:
“Ten years ago, if you told me a $200 million company growing 10% month over month could lose product-market fit in three months, I would have said you were crazy. Now that is the reality.”
This reframes what scale means. Reaching $200M ARR, national retail distribution, or category leadership no longer signals a transition away from discovery. It requires organizations to scale while maintaining the ability to reassess and realign what value they deliver and why it matters now.
Tip #1: Prioritize Reinvention Over Incremental Optimization
In this environment, traditional growth playbooks need adjustment.
Optimizing funnels, improving conversion rates, and refining experiences still matter. But they are no longer sufficient on their own. The most meaningful gains now come from rethinking what the product delivers, not just how efficiently it delivers it.
At Lovable, this shift is explicit. In earlier roles at large technology companies, Elena Vera spent roughly 5% of her time on innovation and 95% on optimization. Today, that ratio is reversed. The majority of her time is spent exploring new approaches to value creation, with optimization playing a supporting role.
This has changed the nature of growth work itself. Instead of focusing primarily on smoothing friction at the margins, teams are working on core product capabilities that redefine how the product fits into customer lives and businesses.
In crowded markets, differentiation rarely comes from doing the same thing slightly better. It comes from reconsidering the solution altogether. As Vera notes, progress comes not from optimizing the problem, but from reinventing the solution.
Tip #2: Treat Product-Market Fit as a Continuous Relevance Loop
Across B2B, retail, and CPG, product-market fit rarely disappears all at once. It erodes as the context in which customers make decisions changes.
New technologies, new channels, new competitors, and new economic pressures reshape how value is perceived. The problem your product once solved may still exist, but it may no longer be the problem that drives choice.
Maintaining product-market fit requires more than improving the product itself. It requires continuously validating that the product still aligns with how customers define progress.
For B2B organizations, this may show up as shifts in buying committees, evaluation criteria, or risk tolerance. For retail and CPG brands, it often appears in changing shopper expectations, channel behavior, price sensitivity, or trust dynamics. In every case, the signal is similar: what once resonated now requires reinterpretation.
Organizations that stay aligned treat product-market fit as an ongoing discovery loop. They regularly reassess:
Whether the core problem they solve still sits at the top of the customer’s priority list
Whether their value proposition still maps to how customers evaluate alternatives
Whether the experience of choosing, buying, and using the product still feels relevant in the current market context
This work looks less like roadmap execution and more like market sensing. It draws from consumer behavior, competitive movement, channel performance, and early signs of friction or hesitation. Product decisions are shaped by how demand is evolving, not just by internal plans.
In this model, product-market fit is not something to defend. It is something to recalibrate as conditions change.
Product-Market Fit Is No Longer a Finish Line
Product-market fit is no longer a destination. It is a moving state that reflects the relationship between what you offer, how it is evaluated, and what customers value now.
The old model of finding product-market fit and then shifting fully into scale mode no longer applies. The organizations that continue to perform are those that remain capable of reinvention while scaling.
Historically, the teams that found product-market fit and the teams that scaled it were different. One optimized for discovery. The other optimized for efficiency. Today, those capabilities must coexist.
The most important question for leaders is no longer how to get to product-market fit, but how to build organizations that can continually re-earn it as markets, technology, and expectations evolve.
Ryan Edwards, CAMINO5 | Co-Founder
Ryan Edwards is the Co-Founder and Head of Strategy at CAMINO5, a consultancy focused on digital strategy and consumer journey design. With over 25 years of experience across brand, tech, and marketing innovation, he’s led initiatives for Fortune 500s including Oracle, NBCUniversal, Sony, Disney, and Kaiser Permanente.
Ryan’s work spans brand repositioning, AI-integrated workflows, and full-funnel strategy. He helps companies cut through complexity, regain clarity, and build for what’s next.
Connect on LinkedIn: ryanedwards2