When deciding where to place your energy, your sales funnel often makes the decision for you. For example, if you’re converting 50% of all visitors to members and 50% of those members to active users, but you’re only bringing in 200 new visitors a day, the answer is clear: focus on getting more visitors.
In other cases, you might want to hold off on driving traffic until you’re more successful at moving people through other stages of your funnel.
Why product-market fit matters first
Growth hacker Sean Ellis popularized the idea of product-market fit — and it’s crucial when setting priorities. He notes that if at least 40% of your users wouldn’t be “very disappointed” if your product disappeared, then you don’t yet have product-market fit.
That means your product doesn’t solve a deep enough pain, or it’s not loved enough by users to justify scaling. In this case, your team should focus more on improving the product itself rather than chasing growth.
Avoid the growth trap
This creates a catch-22: without traffic, you don’t have enough users to measure satisfaction, but without product-market fit, growth efforts are wasted. Driving new visitors to a product that people don’t love is simply optimizing in vain.
The smarter path is to first build an adequate user base, then measure how well your product fits their needs. Growth should come after you’ve confirmed that users genuinely value what you’ve created.
The simple takeaway
You have to grow enough to validate whether you’re on the right track. But don’t burn through time, money, and energy trying to scale a product that doesn’t yet resonate. Nail the product-market fit first — growth will be far more sustainable once you do.