#79: PMF Mirage & PMF: the Vercel Way
April 27, 2025 – DevTools Brew #79
I’m Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery. Every week, I share the real, often uncomfortable lessons from building and scaling devtool startups—from 0 to 1 and beyond.
In today's edition:
1. The PMF Mirage
→ The most dangerous kind of product-market fit? The one that feels real… until it isn’t.
2. PMF: the Vercel Way
→ How Guillermo Rauch (Vercel’s CEO) went narrow, hit hard, and built Vercel from the pain up.
Same goal. Different paths.
Let’s dive in.
The PMF Mirage
It looks like traction. Feels like momentum. Kills both.
“The scariest place to be? Not failing. Just succeeding in the wrong direction.”
The trap isn’t failure. It’s false confidence.
Mistaking motion for progress. Thinking you’ve hit product–market fit… when you haven’t.
I’ve been there.
At Qovery, the signals looked good—users signing up, revenue ticking up, growth on paper.
It felt like progress. But underneath, something didn’t feel right.
We didn’t know exactly who we were winning with.
The market didn’t feel deep.
And feedback was inconsistent—spread across too many use cases, too many personas.
That’s when it hit us:
We didn’t have product–market fit.
We had something else.
→ Product–persona fit
→ Temporary–pain fit
→ Enthusiast–feature fit
It looked like PMF.
But it wasn’t one we could scale.
My take is: PMF is a compound equation.
It’s not just about product and market. It’s about:
→ The depth of the pain
→ The lack of (strong and better) alternatives
→ The repeatability of adoption
→ The criticality of the use case
→ The quality of expansion over time
It took me time to see that clearly.
And once it clicked, we had to make some hard calls:
→ Kill features that were “working” but not valuable
→ Say no to customers who were paying—but pulling us in the wrong direction
→ Rebuild our product, positioning, and roadmap around a narrower, deeper pain
That’s when things started to shift.
We stopped chasing surface-level traction and started building conviction.
Our roadmap got sharper. Our message got clearer.
And the momentum came back - with pull, not push.
I learned that the illusion of PMF is worse than no PMF at all.
Why?
Because it anchors you to the wrong market.
Because it delays the hard questions
Because it gives you “just enough” signal to keep building—while quietly stalling real momentum.
You become scared to move.
Scared to lose what you’ve gained.
And eventually, you realize you’ve built a product… with no deep, scalable market behind it.
So now, we ask different questions:
→ What are they doing today without us?
→ What’s the real cost if they don’t switch?
→ Are we replacing something painful—or just adding something convenient?
→ Is this a deep, urgent need—or just a nice-to-have?
→ Could they rebuild it themselves—how hard would it be?
→ And if this works… does it open up something bigger—or is this all there is?
Because the hardest PMF to walk away from…
Is the one that kinda works.
But “kinda working” doesn’t compound.
It doesn’t scale.
It just delays the reset.
Better to kill a weak PMF early than to keep building around the wrong one.
It’s painful.
But the cost of starting over is nothing compared to the cost of scaling something fragile.
PMF: the Vercel Way
How Guillermo Rauch (Vercel’s CEO) went narrow, hit hard and built Vercel from the pain up.
Before Vercel raised hundreds of millions or powered the web for brands like McDonald’s and Notion, it was an open-source project built on a simple hypothesis:
The future of frontend wasn’t static—it was dynamic, distributed, and developer-first.
That belief took shape with Next.js, an open-source framework that quietly solved real problems for frontend teams: rendering, routing, performance. Not flashy—just fast. And it worked.
But open-source love doesn’t equal product-market fit.
Guillermo didn’t also confuse traction with product-market fit.
He didn’t try to build for everyone.
What made the difference?
They found a niche. E-commerce.
E-commerce wasn’t just a vertical. It was a pressure cooker—where infrastructure issues hit hardest:
→ A one-second delay = revenue lost
→ Flash sales crashed backend stacks
→ Marketers wanted changes fast. Developers couldn’t keep up
Vercel stepped into that pain—not by promising a revolution, but by making life incrementally better. They didn’t ask teams to rip and replace. They offered a step forward.
Incremental integration became their playbook: coexisting with legacy tools, enhancing what already worked, and gradually earning more of the stack.
From there, PMF came into view—not in a big bang, but through a series of sharp validations:
→ Teams moving from weekend hacks to production rollouts
→ Faster pages
→ higher conversions
→ Execs seeing frontend performance as a business lever—not a nice-to-have
And crucially, Vercel backed all this with authentic developer content.
They didn’t just write for clicks. They wrote to teach. Their product blog was a playbook—technical, real, and grounded in the problems engineers were facing daily. It built trust, long before it closed deals.
That’s what made the business side work.
Because behind the open-source motion, Vercel made two critical bets:
1. That performance would become a business priority
2. That developers would be the ones trusted to deliver it
They didn’t just monetize open source. They built services and infrastructure where it mattered most—on the critical path between idea and production.
Today, they call it “framework-defined infrastructure.”
But what they really nailed… was finding a narrow, painful, urgent problem—and delivering just enough magic to make the solution feel inevitable.
Final thoughts
False PMF feels safe. Real PMF feels sharp.
Most companies don’t miss product–market fit by a mile - they miss it by a few degrees. And that’s what makes it so dangerous.
You get traction. Feedback. Revenue. But none of it compounds.
I’ve lived that firsthand at Qovery. And I’ve had to unlearn a lot of what early traction taught us.
Vercel’s path shows the opposite instinct: start narrow, go deep, stay close to the pain. They didn’t get everything right from day one—but they resisted the temptation to build for everyone.
Because the illusion of PMF pulls you wide.
The real thing pushes you deeper.
And the difference isn’t how it feels.
It’s what it builds.
That’s it for me today! :)
Thanks for reading and Happy Sunday!
— Morgan
Do you like personal lessons like this? More insights/stories from other devtool founders? Let me know, I’m always open to feedback.
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn.