I used to think product-market fit meant that buyers told you they loved the product. In higher ed, that’s a trap.
The problem is that the people who use your product — enrollment counselors, digital marketing coordinators, communications staff — are almost never the people who sign the contract. So you can have a room full of enthusiastic users and still lose the deal to a vendor who spent more time in the CFO’s inbox.
That took me longer to figure out than I’d like to admit.
What I got wrong
When we started Halda, I measured traction by user enthusiasm. Demo calls where people leaned forward. Pilot programs where staff actually used the tool. Quotes like “this is exactly what we’ve been missing.”
Those signals felt like product-market fit. They weren’t. They were product-user fit, which is real and valuable, but it’s only half the puzzle in enterprise.
The other half is economic-buyer fit: whether the decision-makers — provosts, VPs of enrollment, CFOs — see the problem as urgent enough, and your solution as credible enough, to write a check.
“Product-market fit in B2B isn’t a single point. It’s the overlap between users who love it and buyers who fund it.”
What changed
We started paying attention to different signals:
- Which deals closed without a champion fighting for us internally?
- Which renewal conversations happened without us having to re-sell?
- Which institutions referred us unprompted?
Those signals — low internal friction, effortless renewals, organic referrals — pointed to something more durable than enthusiasm.
It also meant rebuilding how we talked about the product. Not “here’s a feature your team will love” but “here’s why enrollment is leaking and here’s how you stop it.” The VP of Enrollment doesn’t want a software demo. They want to stop losing students to peer institutions.
The actual lesson
Product-market fit in higher ed requires you to understand two distinct jobs-to-be-done for two distinct buyers, and you have to nail both. Users need to feel like the product is built for them. Economic buyers need to feel like the category is urgent and you’re the obvious solution.
Most companies I’ve watched fail in this space optimized for one at the expense of the other. We came close to making that same mistake.
The honest answer is that we’re still working on getting both right. But at least now we’re measuring the right things.