I’ve been working on B2B2C products for my entire career, so I thought I’d share my thoughts on how to know if you’ve found product-market fit. It’s a complex topic, and I’ll clarify that my experience comes from what I call the “paid behavior change model” - the B2B customer has a relationship with a large consumer user base, and is willing to pay for them to change behavior at scale because it will benefit their business. This is different from the marketplace model (ex Uber or DoorDash), which is another flavor of B2B2C. Throughout this post, I’ll share examples from my career on how this “paid behavior change” version of B2B2C works.
What is Product-Market Fit?
Before we dive into product-market fit (PMF) for B2B2C products, I’ll start with a general, high-level definition:
You’ve found product-market fit if you can essentially stop product development and your go-to-market teams (sales, marketing, customer success, etc) can continue to grow revenue significantly.
Said another way, your product does everything the market wants it to, and you’ve hit an inflection point where you no longer need to build deal-winning features to close customers. In the B2B2C world, this also means that the consumer product doesn’t require major enhancements to drive the behavioral change customers seek.
Here’s a graphic to explain this concept:

On the left, you see a product that hasn’t found product-market fit requires development efforts that scale its revenue and user base proportionately. Every new customer requires some new product changes, and the user base only grows when new customers give you access to large swaths of consumers.
On the right, you see a product that has found product-market fit. This development team can move on to work on something else because the product does everything the buyer and consumers want it to. Unlike the team on the left, every new customer or user segment doesn’t require new features or major product changes. Note that this team doesn’t actually stop development entirely. They might move on to helping the product scale by investing in performance or internal tooling. They might also work on implementing your product for customers. This includes things like data integrations, single sign-on, or other changes to integrate seamlessly into the company’s workflow.
But what do you do if you’re not seeing the “hockey stick” growth shown on the right? Let’s take a look at a visual framework to help you diagnose what’s going on and develop a strategy to find product-market fit.
The 4 Areas to Evaluate B2B2C Product-Market Fit

I use a 4-circle Venn diagram to show all the moving pieces that need to align to find product-market fit in the middle.
- Consumers: the collection of users who are trying to achieve a key outcome. For example, at Opower, one of our segments was people who wanted to reduce the environmental impact of their home energy consumption. Another segment was people who wanted to save money on their energy bills. Both made up our target user base.
- The B2B Buyer: usually a business executive who’s trying to change the behavior of a large set of consumers. For example, at HelloWallet, our buyer was an HR executive who wanted to improve the retirement readiness of their employees. In this case, the consumers were the employees of the company.
- Pricing: the amount your B2B buyer would be willing to pay for the consumer behavior change your product delivers because of its business ROI. For example, at Savonix, our health insurance buyers were willing to pay for our product, a mobile app that detected early signs of dementia, because it helped them accurately price their insurance based on population risk. Note that in the B2B2C model, users almost never pay for the product themselves. The customer is effectively subsidizing the cost.
- The Product: a combination of your consumer-facing user experience and the B2B product your customers use to evaluate and monitor the efficacy of your consumer product. For example, at Regrow, we had a farmer-facing product that helped them enroll in regenerative agriculture programs, and a customer-facing product that measured the impact of those programs and how those programs were helping food companies achieve their net zero sustainability goals.
In the middle of all four areas is product-market fit. That is, you have a sustainable (maybe even profitable!) business because B2B buyers are willing to pay your prices to offer your product to their consumers, who in turn use your product enough to change their behavior at a scale that generates an ROI for your customer’s business.
Step 1: Evaluating Product Market Fit Zones - Doubles

To start analyzing your B2B2C product-market fit, start by looking at the gray areas in the diagram above. I call them “doubles” because they represent the overlap between two areas of the Venn diagram. Let’s look at each zone in detail.
Consumer-Product Fit
You have consumers who are using your product because it helps them achieve the key outcome they care about. You’ll know if you have consumer-product fit based on:
Product adoption rates > 25%. Your product marketing attracts over a quarter of prospective users to sign up for your product.
Product engagement rates of 30-40%. Once registered, your daily active user (DAU) or weekly active user (WAU) base represents 30-40% of all registered users.
An average of 5-star ratings. If you have a mobile app, you’re seeing hundreds, if not thousands of users whose average rating rounds up to 5 stars. If you don’t have a mobile app, consider using a review site like TrustPilot to measure this.
Enthusiastic qualitative feedback. During user interviews, in emails / chats, or in reviews, you’re hearing a lot of excitement, love and stories from users about how valuable your product is. The more life-changing it seems, the better.
40% of users would be very disappointed if they lost access to your product. Also known as the Sean Ellis Test, this metric can be really helpful when you’re first launching as it can work with small groups of alpha / beta users.
Buyer-Consumer Fit
You know there are B2B customers who would pay for consumers to use your product. You’ll know if you have buyer-consumer fit if:
There’s a strong business case to buy a product to generate new revenue. For example, our former client Ordergroove makes 1-click subscriptions quick and easy for ecommerce stores. They knew consumers would value the subscription, and that brands would value the recurring revenue stream but didn't want to build all the functionality themselves.
There’s an opportunity to cut costs for companies. The most classic example of this would be a customer service product like Intercom. Their AI agents can handle the majority of customer support requests, helping users get answers faster and making customer support teams more efficient, avoiding new headcount costs as a company’s consumer user base grows.
There’s a true win-win situation for companies and consumers. For example, our client Candidly offers student loan repayment benefits to companies. Employees want to shed the weight of debt to achieve their other financial goals, and HR departments want to attract and retain top talent with this type of benefit.
There’s a regulatory requirement to offer the product. For example, our former client WireWheel’s product helps companies comply with data privacy laws.
There’s a way to monetize consumer engagement. For example, our former client Octopus (which was acquired by T-Mobile) sells ads on rideshare tablets, giving advertisers a new set of eyeballs and attention at a time when consumers might otherwise be bored.
Buyer-Pricing Fit
B2B buyers have a budget for the outcome your product delivers, whether it’s growing revenue, cutting costs or complying with regulations. You’ll know if you have buyer-pricing fit if:
You’re working in an established market where budget line items for your product category already exist. For example, nearly every company has to pay for email and collaboration tools like Google Workspace or Microsoft Office for their employees.
Customers can shift budget from another line item to yours. For example, if you’re building a data product, your engineering buyer might be able to pay for it from their data infrastructure budget.
You can convince customers to find new budget. For example, maybe your product is priced below their internal procurement review thresholds so they can use “slush funds” or the corporate card to pay for a pilot.
Your product pricing is clear and connected to customer value. This means a buyer can estimate their costs, see if it aligns to their budget and understand how the value they’re getting scales as they spend more on your product.
You’re not losing deals due to being too expensive. Prospects are able to make the internal business case to justify the ROI for your product.
Product-Pricing Fit
Since the B2B2C model almost always includes a product that’s “free” to consumers, this zone is about pricing a product reasonably for buyers. You know that some customers out there should be willing to pay for your product and the value it drives for consumers. But maybe you haven’t found the buyers yet. This is most likely true before you’ve launched or taken your product to the B2B market. You’ll know you have product-pricing fit if:
You see similar products priced in the same ballpark as yours. This is a good sign, especially if some of those products are gaining traction with buyers.
You’ve been a buyer for this type of product before and have validated with other prospective buyers that they have budget to deliver the outcomes your product promises. For example, I was recently exploring a new product idea to help recruiters source vetted talent faster. I know there’s budget for this as LinkedIn Recruiter charges $140/month per user.
Your pricing is connected to customer value. For example, at HelloWallet we priced based on the number of employees who had access to our financial wellness product. If a customer saw good retirement readiness improvements after a pilot with a few thousand employees, they could scale it to all employees and amplify the business case ROI for increased retirement savings.
Your pricing allows you to build a sustainable business. That is, you’re not going to lose money as you add more users because it’s so expensive to acquire or service those users. Another way to think about this is whether your pricing lets you have the right LTV / CAC ratio. This way you know if the cost to acquire a customer (CAC) produces way more lifetime value (LTV) to your business.
Your pricing matches the expectations of your buyer personas / ideal customer profiles (ICPs). For example, at HelloWallet we pivoted from a D2C to a B2B2C model and therefore had a consumer subscription that buyers used as a benchmark. We were able to offer deeper per-user discounts to our enterprise clients who bought the product for more employees than our small and medium sized clients.
Scoring Exercise
For each of these zones above, look at the checklist and rate the zone on a red/yellow/green scale based on how many checkmarks you can check for each overlapping area.
- Red = 0-1 checkmarks
- Yellow = 2-3
- Green=4-5
If you’ve shaded all the intersections green, congrats! You’ve likely found product-market fit for your B2B2C product - not an easy feat. If you’re reading this blog post, though, you probably shaded at least one of the four overlapping areas as yellow or red. In the next section, we’ll talk about what to do depending on which one of the zones is not green.
Step 2: Evaluating Product Market Fit Zones - Triples

If we go around the 4 zones shown in the middle of the diagram above, we’ll see that they show where you’re doing well on 3 out of the 4 categories needed for product-market fit (“triples”). That means you have “no fit” on one of the categories and need to address that in order to start scaling. Let’s look at each situation to identify next steps.
No Pricing Fit
In this “triple zone”, you have fit on the consumer, buyer and product side, but not on pricing. Usually you’ve either priced too high in order to generate a positive ROI for your buyer or are not generating enough value to the business. To remedy this, you can:
- Do more research on the business case your buyer is making internally. Listen to sales calls or talk to new customers to understand what financial outcomes they believe your product will deliver for their company. Think about how your product will help them achieve their annual goals. Help them create a spreadsheet that shows a positive ROI from your product in terms of revenue growth, cost cutting or regulatory compliance. You may need to lower your price to generate a better ROI for them, or think about whether your product can deliver more value to justify your existing pricing.
- Learn about your buyer’s benchmarks. How are they used to buying products like yours? What are acceptable ranges in the market? Consider looking at B2B review sites like Capterra or G2 and searching for keywords like cost, ROI and pricing in the reviews.
- Test new pricing models with prospects, existing customers or people who match your buyer profile (you can recruit them on platforms like User Interviews).
No Product Fit
Here you’ve found fit on the buyer, pricing and consumer sides, but the product isn’t driving the behavior change your customer wants at the right scale. To fix this, I’d recommend you:
- Analyze user engagement to understand who’s using or not the product. What insights can you glean from existing usage patterns? For example, at Savonix, we saw better adoption rates with younger users and saw how much friction downloading a new mobile app created for older users.
- Talk to new users to find out what was most intriguing to them about your product. What did they hope it would help them accomplish? Contrast this through conversations with prospective users who did not sign up to find out what held them back or caused them to drop out of the flow. These conversations will help you understand if your product is really driving value to users, and whether your marketing is communicating the value props correctly.
- Review your onboarding and see if there are better ways to shrink the time to value for new users. Consumers have very little attention span. If they don’t understand how your product will help them achieve their key outcome within the first few seconds, they probably won’t stick around. Consider experimenting with your onboarding and monitoring your 30-day retention curves to see if the changes are improving cohort retention rates over time.
No Consumer Fit
In this situation, you have a buyer with budget for a product like yours, but there are not enough consumers interested in it. I’d recommend you:
- Resize the consumer market - it might be too small. Build a spreadsheet to show how you calculated the total market size, and what assumptions drove your addressable market segment. Use your pricing model to see if you can hit your business goals with this many users.
- Talk to the users who have signed up for your product. What attracted them to it? What about these users might be surprising, or different from who you assumed your target market to be? Consider whether your product is only valuable to a niche audience.
- Look at the competitive landscape from your user’s perspective. Is there another app they’re already using to do what your product does? If so, are there any reasons they’d want another app or to switch to yours? If not, you might have lost the market to a competitor.
No Buyer Fit
Here, you have a consumer product that consumers are using and that’s reasonably priced, but no buyers are interested. In this case, I’d suggest you:
- Consider your buyer’s priorities. Ask them about their personal, team and company goals for the year. Is it clear to you how your product will help them achieve those goals? If not, your product might be irrelevant as it’s not solving a problem that keeps them up at night.
- Reevaluate your target buyer. Are there other types of companies who would benefit financially from your user’s behavior or data? For example, at Savonix, we targeted payers who wanted to stratify their population’s risk of dementia to properly price their insurance products as well as Alzheimer’s drug companies who wanted to recruit clinical trial participants from our user base, based on who was showing early signs of cognitive impairment. These two buyers sought different outcomes and had different business cases internally.
- Analyze whether the ROI of your app is high enough. Maybe the incremental revenue from the users of your product is about the same as the cost of your product, so there’s no ROI. For example, at HelloWallet, it took us a while to figure out how to show that our users felt more confident about their financial wellness than non-user employees, so our buyers could quantify the impact on employee retention from this benefit.
Closing Thoughts
As you can see, finding product-market fit with a B2B2C model is complex. Please reach out to us if you’d like to discuss your particular situation, or go through this exercise together.