“The most important stuff was the qualitative in the early days. You need qualitative at scale — it's not just your friend, it's 50,000 MAUs at that time — and then people were actually able to record music on their phone and share it.”

Early PMF signal is qualitative at scale — not a single metric

Seth Miller's first sign of product-market fit was searching his own app's name on Twitter and finding strangers sharing tracks unsolicited. App Store reviews piled on. He had no formal retention dashboard — just unmistakable organic signals from people who genuinely loved it. His caution: qualitative enthusiasm only counts when it comes from a large enough pool of non-affiliated users, not friends and family.