“I had zero marketing. I just submitted it to the App Store. And people were finding it and paying for it — people I'd never talked to, never told about the app. That's when I knew the product had something.”

The clearest PMF signal: strangers paying without you ever talking to them

Duffett submitted Shot Pattern without a launch campaign, email list, or social media push. Organic downloads followed by paid conversions from strangers — people who found the app through App Store search and chose to pay — told him the product solved a real problem at a price people accepted. He contrasts this with a previous app that required constant persuasion to convert anyone, which he now recognises as an absence of product-market fit.