PMF is what might happen to you. OMF (Offer-Market Fit) is what you can actually control

The B2B tech world has been obsessing over Product-Market Fit (PMF) for decades. But we're focusing on the wrong thing entirely.

The market has fundamentally shifted, and it's time we acknowledged a more critical concept: Offer-Market Fit.

Why Product-Market Fit Is Becoming Obsolete

We've entered what I call the "hyper-velocity market phase." The days when businesses could leisurely develop products over months or years, testing market conditions along the way, are gone. Today’s reality is starkly different.

With AI democratising solution creation, any customer problem you can imagine will have an entrepreneur building a solution within days. The accessibility barrier that once protected slow movers has completely vanished. This isn't speculation – it's happening right now across every industry vertical.

The implications are profound. Moving fast is no longer a competitive advantage; it's the baseline requirement for survival. But here's where most teams get it wrong: they think moving fast means building faster. It doesn't. It means testing faster.

The Core Problem with Traditional PMF Thinking

Product-Market Fit assumes you build first, then find your market. This approach worked when markets moved slowly and customer needs were stable. But in today's environment, either your customer has no appetite for what you built (Tinder for dogs), or by the time you've built your perfect product, three competitors have launched similar solutions and customer preferences have already shifted.

I've watched (and worked with) countless teams on this path. They spend months perfecting features, obsessing over user experience, and polishing their product. Then they launch, only to discover their target market either doesn't care or has already moved to a different solution entirely.

The fundamental flaw is timing. PMF optimises for product perfection, when speed to market validation is what actually matters.

Understanding Offer-Market Fit

Offer-Market Fit flips the equation. Instead of building then validating, you test market appetite for specific offers before committing development resources. This isn't about creating vaporware – it's about strategic market intelligence.

Think about what marketers do daily: A/B testing headlines, creative variations, and messaging angles. Every test is essentially a micro-offer validation. We're constantly gauging market response to different value propositions, even at the creative level. But most teams fail to apply this principle strategically at the business level.

The most successful teams I've encountered don't just test creative variants – they test entire fundamental offers: potential products that they think the ICPs might be interested in based on the conversations they’ve had, different value positioning, and sometimes pricing models — before building anything substantial. They let both market response and direct customer conversations guide their product and marketing initiative roadmap.

Interestingly, this principle isn’t just being followed by enterprise SaaS teams. It’s also the core foundation behind several massively successful business thinkers in the mainstream creator/founder space.

Take Alex Hormozi, for example — a controversial figure to some. Many write him off as a “get-rich-quick” grifter, but if you look past the bravado and social media flash, his book $100M Offers is essentially a blueprint for Offer-Market Fit. He teaches founders to test and craft “grand slam offers” based on what the market wants before they build or scale anything.

Or consider Noah Kagan, the founder of AppSumo and author of Million Dollar Weekend. His entire playbook is grounded in launching products quickly — often in 48 hours — by testing offer ideas, messaging, and pricing before writing a single line of code. What he calls “making $1 fast” is Offer-Market Fit in action.

While these creators speak in different tones and target different audiences, the strategic DNA is the same: Don’t wait for PMF to happen to you — engineer OMF as a methodical, repeatable process.

Why Speed Alone Isn’t Enough

Here’s the counterintuitive insight: in a hyper-velocity market, moving faster without insight-led direction is more dangerous than moving slowly with purpose.

The U.S. Navy has a saying: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The question is: in the B2B tech space, what does smooth actually mean today and tomorrow?

When everyone can build quickly, the differentiator isn’t speed – it’s accuracy.

This is where OMF becomes your competitive advantage. While your competitors are rushing to build features, you're systematically testing which offers your ideal customers actually want to pay for. You're building market intelligence, while they’re building assumptions.

I've seen this play out repeatedly in SaaS. The companies that dominate aren't necessarily the first to market or the fastest to build. They're the ones that most accurately identified what their target customers were willing to pay for – then built exactly that.

The Testing Framework That Actually Works

Effective Offer-Market Fit testing requires a systematic approach. You need to create what I call a "market prediction system" – a framework that gathers signals and predicts outcomes before you commit resources.

Start with offer variations that target the same core need but package the solution differently. Test different value propositions, pricing structures, and delivery methods. The key is testing these as concrete offers, not abstract concepts. Your prospects need to make real decisions about real commitments.

One approach that consistently works is pre-selling solutions that don't fully exist yet. This requires tactical skill to maintain trust while gathering genuine market feedback. But when done correctly, it provides the most accurate market intelligence possible.

Consider Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO. His team runs hundreds of experiments daily, with a dedicated Head of Failure role focused entirely on testing new concepts. They're not just testing content variations – they’re testing entire offer structures until they find the ones their audience truly wants, then scaling those aggressively.

This kind of experimentation embodies OMF perfectly: fail fast on 100 things to find the one offer that scales 10x.

The Strategic Implications for Go-to-Market

For marketing and go-to-market teams, OMF thinking should be foundational, not optional. Traditional PMF puts marketing in a reactive position: you're tasked with finding markets for predetermined products. OMF makes marketing proactive – you're identifying market opportunities that guide product development.

This shift changes how founders, teams, and marketers should operate. Instead of optimising conversion rates for existing products, you're optimising for market intelligence that drives business strategy. Instead of supporting product decisions, you're informing them.

The most effective Product Marketing Manager (PMM) roles already embody this approach. They're constantly refining positioning and messaging based on market feedback — essentially running continuous OMF tests at the tactical level. But the real opportunity is scaling this thinking strategically across the entire business.

Why This Approach Resists AI Disruption

Here’s something AI can’t replicate (yet): the nuanced human judgment required for strategic offer testing. AI can optimise existing campaigns and generate creative variations based on data — and the larger the dataset, the better. But it struggles (and will continue to struggle) with the strategic context needed to design and interpret meaningful, human-first market experiments.

Crafting offers that accurately test market appetite while maintaining customer trust requires emotional intelligence, lived experience, and contextual sensitivity — things that no model can learn from spreadsheets or scrape from the internet.

This makes OMF a defensible competitive advantage in an increasingly automated world.

The Lean Startup Connection

Eric Ries popularised Lean Startup methodology around similar principles, but most teams implement it superficially. They focus on the build-measure-learn cycle without truly understanding the strategic depth required for effective offer testing.

True Lean methodology is about creating systematic market intelligence. It's about building the minimum viable experiment to test maximum market insight.

Creating Your OMF System

Building an effective OMF system requires both mindset and structural changes. But first and foremost, it’s a priority problem. If you're leading any growth initiative — whether you're a founder, chief of staff, or marketing leader — you need to get really good at:

1. Gathering qualitative, human-to-human, anecdotal insights from your ICPs that AI can’t easily access;
2. Turning those insights into human-led hypotheses — unique angles your solution (or mission) represents;
3. Working with tactical experts to design and launch hypothetical offer experiments;
4. Defining what success looks like, and setting rules for measuring, qualifying, and disqualifying offers;
5. Running clear post-mortems: What was the exact context of the offer tested? Why did it fail (or succeed)? What would we change next time?

The outcome of this process informs everything else: from product, to sales, to marketing.

This is not a tactic. Some would call it Lean Startup. Others might say it’s micro-pivoting. The truth? None of this is new — sales-led companies have been doing this for decades using "street smarts" without articulating it formally.

But if you're not doing this now, you better get good at it very soon.

You need dedicated resources for experiment design, execution, and analysis. This isn't something you can bolt onto someone’s job description as a side task. The teams that thrive on OMF treat market experimentation as seriously as product development.

Your system should capture both quantitative signals (response rates, conversion metrics) and qualitative insights (customer feedback, objection patterns). The combination creates a full picture of market appetite — and a roadmap for where to go next.

What’s Next

The market has already shifted to hyper-velocity mode. The question isn’t whether that trend will continue — it’s whether your organisation will adapt fast enough.

Leaders and teams still working toward PMF without an experimental mindset are solving yesterday’s problems. They’re building perfect products for markets that no longer exist by the time they launch.

Product-Market Fit is what happens to you. Offer-Market Fit is what you can actually control. It’s the approach that brings your investment closer to the PMF line — faster and more accurately.

The best teams will master Offer-Market Fit. They’ll engineer better market certainty by testing systematically, listening deeply, and building and selling precisely what customers want to buy.