Product-market fit is the most expensive lie in startups, and almost everyone repeats it. The story goes like this. You build, you iterate, you talk to users, and one magical day you find the fit. The product clicks into the market like a key into a lock. Marc Andreessen described the feeling and the whole industry turned it into scripture. Founders now spend years hunting this state, VCs demand proof of it before they wire money, and every pitch deck claims to be approaching it.

Here is what nobody says at the demo day. The companies that “found” product-market fit did not find anything. They caught a wave of timing, rode it, and then narrated their luck backward as skill. And the companies that “never found it” often had a nearly identical product that showed up to the beach a year before the wave or a year after it. Same key. Wrong moment. Locked door.

Product-market fit, as founders use the phrase, is survivorship bias wearing a lab coat.

The Graveyard Is Full of Products That Were Right

Walk the startup graveyard and you will not find a pile of bad …