Most eCommerce founders believe they have a marketing problem. They think if they just had better ads, a smarter conversion funnel, or a stronger retention strategy, they'd finally break through.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: product-market fit is the invisible ceiling on your entire business.
Everything else—the ops, the media buying, the creative, the retention playbooks—only widens the aperture on a fire that already exists. If the fire is weak, even excellent execution grinds. If the fire is strong, imperfect execution can still scale.
Think of your business as a fire:
The Kernel = What creates the fire
The Aperture = How the fire spreads
The pattern everyone misses: Brand A launches, gets to $1M, then stalls. The founder grinds for years, often alone, unable to afford help. Brand B launches, the pull is obvious from day one, customers love it, margins are strong, word spreads—suddenly they can afford agencies. The agency steps in, rides the wave, writes a case study about "how they scaled the brand."
But the spark was already there. The agency just poured gasoline on a fire that was already burning.
That's survivorship bias in eCommerce. We reverse-engineer the tactics, but the thing we're trying to replicate was never really visible in the first place: the kernel of PMF.