Pay, Stay, Say: The 3 Pillars of SaaS Product-Market Fit

We have spent years observing the secret sauce of SaaS growth across hundreds of ventures.

While the industry is often flooded with complex attribution models and fleeting growth hacks, the actual scientific method of scaling—knowing exactly when and why a market wants you—is much simpler than most realize. The rest is often just noise.

It’s hard enough to keep up with the modern B2B landscape. Most of us don't know half the features of the latest CRM update we use every day, and we certainly can’t stay on top of every disruptive tool hitting the market this morning. We sympathize with founders who just want to pour fuel on the fire and hope for the best.

But if you pour that fuel before you’re ready, you aren’t starting a fire; you’re just making a mess. The reason most of that fuel fails to ignite is that it may be being poured onto a product that the market hasn't actually asked for yet.

You May Be Accidentally Scaling a vitamin

We’ve all heard the old maxim: solve a pain, don't just offer a benefit. But in the rush to scale, we see many companies settle for being a vitamin. They offer something that is good for you, something that makes a process 10% smoother or looks nice on a dashboard.

The problem is that vitamins are optional.

When the economy tightens or the board demands efficiency, vitamins are the first things cut from the budget. Scaling a vitamin is a death sentence; it leads to a burn multiple that will eventually swallow your company whole. So you probably aren't losing deals because your sales team is underperforming, but because you haven’t found a starving market that views your product as an aspirin.

Our rule of thumb is simple: If your customers don’t complain when you take your product away, you haven't hit Product-Market Fit (PMF). You’re just a nice-to-have in a world that only pays for must-haves.

But How Do You Know If You're An Aspirin Before It's Too Late?

We suggest using a specific set of customer interviews designed to bypass politeness.

Don't ask if they like the product; ask what would happen to their specific KPIs if the software went offline for 48 hours. If the answer involves workarounds rather than disaster, you’re likely still a vitamin. If the diagnostic proves you are a vitamin, you rarely need to rebuild the whole product; usually, you just need to find a different, starving beachhead where your current features solve a more urgent crisis.

Here’s a cold, hard diagnostic to help you move beyond this gut feeling of being an aspirin:

The Pay, Stay, Say Framework: Quality of Signal Beats Quantity of Noise

While the Kalungi playbook outlines 10 specific milestones to confirm you've reached full PMF, the sauce lies in the quality of the signal, not just the quantity. We tell our clients that even six gold-standard clients can be a stronger signal than 600 curiosity-seekers. If those six clients are paying you significant money, staying for the long haul, and telling their peers, you have found a beachhead you can dominate.

To move from your founder-led intuition to market-led precision, we look for these three pillars to emerge:

1. Pay (Market Viability)

This is where your customers move past voting with their time and start voting with their budget. They are spending someone else’s money to solve a problem. If you have a small handful of clients paying your target ACV (Annual Contract Value) without a heavy discount, the market is telling you your value proposition is real.

Being Sales Fit vs. Market Fit

We often hear the fear: "I have 10 paying customers, but they all came from my personal network. Does that count?"

It counts as sales fit, but not yet market fit. If your sales only happen when you are in the room, you haven't proven the market—you’ve proven your own charisma. You transition out of this by stopping the search for "Who" (the person) and starting the search for "What" (the broken process).

If you're in a highly competitive market where everyone expects a 40% discount, don't panic. PMF isn't just about price; it's about the ratio of value to friction. If the aspirin is real, the discount won't be the only reason they stay.

2. Stay (Product Viability)

You’ve achieved repeat usage. High churn is the market’s way of saying you have a cool tool, but not a business. If your first six to ten clients stay and integrate your software into their daily workflow, you’ve proven that your product isn't just a shiny object—it’s infrastructure.

If your clients aren’t staying, we recommend decoupling churn from "bad fit" sales. Is it the product, or are you just selling aspirin to people who don't have a headache?

Often, PMF issues are actually sales-targeting issues. Whether you've been in this hustle for two months or two years, the timeline matters less than the alignment between your product's outcome and the user's daily pain.

3. Say (Category Viability)

This is the ultimate validator. When your users become your evangelists, you’ve built a flywheel.

If you are in a quiet industry like Banking or Healthcare where PR policies block testimonials, look for hidden advocacy. Are referrals happening in private Slack groups or via direct email?

Achieving Syntropy: Shifting From Founder-Led Hustle to Growth

Once you identify the signal from these milestones, your feedback loop becomes your greatest competitive advantage. You stop fighting for expensive, generic clicks—what we call demand capture—and start demand creation. This is where you begin solving problems for your prospects before they even realize they are in a buyer’s journey.

The outcome is what we call Syntropy. It’s the opposite of the black box of traditional marketing. It’s a state where every sales call you make, every blog post you publish, and every product update you release reinforces the other.

We believe acknowledging the speed of the market is easier when you have a proven system to filter the noise. When you have real PMF, you stop being your own lead salesperson and start being the CEO. You stop guessing and start scaling. After all, once you have a repeatable experiment, the rest is just a matter of propulsion.

Webinar: The 3 Pillars of Qualified Pipeline Generation in B2B SaaS

Have you reached Product-Market Fit but feel stuck in "founder-led hustle"? In this masterclass, Kalungi Co-founder Stijn Hendrikse explains how to turn your Pay, Stay, Say signals into a repeatable growth flywheel.

You’ll learn:

• From PMF to Scaling: How to move beyond your first 6–10 "gold-standard" clients and build a predictable engine.
• The Revenue Formula: Managing the trade-offs between MQL volume, conversion rates, ARPU, and churn.
• Flywheel Mechanics: How to transition from capturing existing demand to creating it through category authority.

Watch the recording here

Ready to Get Clarity on Your 2026 SaaS Growth Strategy?

If you're ready to move from founder-led hustle to a predictable growth engine, we invite you to apply for a T2D3 Growth Workshop.

In this focused 1:1 session, we will:

• Audit: Review your current GTM model and funnel in real-time.
• Identify: Pinpoint the specific growth constraints—whether you are still proving "Market Fit" or struggling with "Sales Fit."
• Build: Translate those insights into a clear, actionable GTM plan you can execute immediately.

Apply for Your T2D3 Growth Workshop here