3 product-market fit patterns working right now
What's working for founders building toward real demand.
Product-market fit (PMF) is one of the single greatest determinants of whether a company lives or dies. Get it right, and you have a shot. Get it wrong, and nothing else saves you.
More capital just extends the runway to a bad outcome. Growth hacks and continuous airdrops disconnected from real strategy look less like a path to PMF and more like a substitute for admitting you haven’t found it. Some of the very things that make crypto so powerful — tokens and network effects — can even mislead companies on their path to product-market fit.
The good news is that strong teams across crypto are finding PMF faster now, thanks to killer apps like stablecoins and more widespread adoption among TradFi and other consumers.
Here are three patterns that are working — pay attention, especially if you’re pre-PMF or in the middle of a pivot.
1. Partner with elite customers to build what they need
Find the most sophisticated potential customers in your space and build with them. Their requirements become your spec.
It’s slower than shipping a generic product and iterating in public, but when your first customer touches trillions in daily volume, their adoption is worth more than any amount of press, TVL, or retail attention. The very definition of product-market fit is when your product resonates with a broad set of customers, and those flagship customers are the best indicators of adoption.
As we’ve seen with several high-profile announcements of partnerships and product releases between crypto startups and TradFi companies, the product roadmap is currently being written by institutions. Blockchains are beginning to run the global financial infrastructure.
2. Find an exponential curve and get in front of it
Sometimes PMF comes from serving an existing market better. Sometimes it comes from seeing where the market is going before the market fully understands it, and positioning early enough to matter.
The curve right now is AI agents becoming economic actors: Autonomous participants calling APIs, deploying capital, and executing transactions at machine speed. The human-in-the-loop assumption is breaking down faster than most people expected.
Take the example of agentic commerce — Samuel Ragsdale and Ryan Sproule at Merit Systems saw this early and are building AgentCash on top of x402. AgentCash lets AI agents pay for API access using crypto — the infrastructure the world needs where agents transact programmatically without human-managed billing.
Payments are how agents become actors rather than assistants. Whoever builds those rails now owns a foundational piece of the agentic economy when it arrives.
3. Be your own first best customer
The most durable infrastructure companies don’t wait for external developers to validate their tech. They build the application themselves first — on top of their own rails — and use it to prove out the capabilities they’re asking others to build on.
Amazon pioneered this approach and played it to perfection with Amazon Web Services (AWS). They didn’t pitch AWS to startups first. They built the infrastructure they needed for their own e-commerce business, got it working at scale, then externalized it piece by piece for everyone else.
Alex Gluchowski at Matter Labs is running this same play.
Rather than selling Prividium as an abstract enterprise product, he anchored it to a concrete application: tokenized deposits. The result is Cari Network — U.S. regional banks, including Huntington Bancshares, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyCorp, and Old National Bancorp, moving customer deposits instantly across institutions on blockchain rails, without those funds ever leaving the regulated banking system. ZKsync didn’t just build the rails. It found the killer app for them.
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Three patterns, one underlying truth: The fastest path to PMF isn’t iterating in the dark. It’s choosing the right game and playing it with conviction before everyone else jumps on board.
Co-build with the customer whose validation compounds. Get in front of a curve before consensus. Be your own first best customer.
Pick the one that fits your product. Then move.
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Lovely - the “design partner” idea comes from the first approach you share. We’ve been on it for a bit in Anden - super useful
Very informative.