Ask HN: Did you find it harder to reach product market fit, or to scale?

I scale internet services for a living. I think it is relatively straight forward. I can't think of a product or a market. That one is vastly more difficult for me.

We hit PMF in two weeks. Scaling was hard but we consistently got about 5% week on week growth with no funding.

The problem was mostly that there were plateaus where cash would have made things much easier, but nobody was interested in funding it. For example, taxes hit and our 7% margin went down to 1%. We migrated stock to in house, and holding half a ton of stock got margins from 1% to 30%.

We could have hit 80% margin with about $50k plus distributed it in a lot of major stores. It would have been better promo than billboards and made money. But I think it was a hard time to close deals - everyone we approached either was buckling down for recession, investing in crypto, or chasing after some other kind of sexy tech (e-commerce was going out of fashion).

You can lose PMF though. We've slipped it a couple times. This is why you need product teams.

Consumer market, e-commerce. Moderate tech. Low capital. Target market was diet/health so we got a spike in income at the start of the year which slowed down a lot then rose again end of the year, near wedding season.

As far as I understand, reaching PMF is the exception. But the PMF definition is so weak and inconsistant than people think they have when they dont or the other way around ( I tried to answer this question for my own company for weeks and I am still not sure )

Then scaling with PMF is okish. Scaling without is complicated as things doesnt stack up