When Denis Shatalin speaks about product-market fit, he does so with the quiet urgency of someone who has watched too many startups burn through time and money chasing growth before they’ve nailed the fundamentals.
As the founder of SaaS Camp , a structured growth accelerator for early-stage B2B founders, and former Growth Marketing Manager at Qapsula — a digital health platform that scaled into regulated pharma markets — Denis has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs. Many of them arrive at his mentorship program with impressive technical achievements but no real traction.
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“Most founders I meet don’t have a growth problem,” Denis says. “They have a clarity problem. They’re trying to scale something that hasn’t yet earned its place in a real workflow.”
For Denis, product-market fit (PMF) isn’t an abstract milestone or a moment of sudden breakthrough. It’s a systematic process grounded in user behavior, validated hypotheses, and operational focus. His method is based on four pillars: ICP clarity, problem depth, offer testing, and behavioral validation .
At the core is a deceptively simple idea: your product must solve a painful, specific problem for a narrowly defined segment — and do so in a way that users recognize and are willing to pay for.
He challenges founders to strip away generic buyer personas and instead build “high-resolution ICPs” .
These aren’t vague labels like “SMBs” or “early adopters” but detailed portraits of real individuals — their job roles, daily frustrations, decision-making triggers, and current workaround solutions.
“Your buyer isn’t a persona on a slide,” Denis says. “They’re a real person with a calendar full of meetings, a boss breathing down their neck, and ten tools they already hate using.”
Once the ICP is crystal clear, the next step is problem validation . Denis teaches founders to obsess not over features, but over user pain. “If you can’t describe the problem in the user’s own words — not your words — you’re not ready to sell anything yet.”
This approach extends into what he calls “offer testing in the wild” : running controlled outreach experiments with targeted messaging and tracking responses like a scientist would. A message that gets a meaningful reply is often more valuable than a beta user who signs up out of politeness.
“You don’t need to build a full product to test PMF,” he explains. “You need a clear outcome, a message that resonates, and a small group of people who’ll take action — whether that’s booking a call, replying to an email, or paying for early access.”
This principle plays out again and again in his work with founders at SaaS Camp. One participant secured $20,000 in annual contracts within three weeks after a small pivot in messaging.
No changes to the product, no new features — just sharper positioning, clearer articulation of outcomes, and direct outreach to the right people.
Denis’s thinking was shaped in part by his time at Qapsula , where he helped reposition a consumer-focused health app into a B2B-ready platform used by pharmaceutical clients and healthcare providers. “In healthcare,” he says, “you don’t get to throw messages at the wall and see what sticks.
Every claim, every interaction has to be deliberate, compliant, and valuable.” That discipline instilled a deep respect for rigour — an approach he now brings to B2B SaaS founders looking to grow without guesswork.
One of the common mistakes he sees early-stage founders make is mistaking early usage for true fit . “Just because someone tries your tool doesn’t mean they need it.
We focus too much on signups and not enough on behavior after signup — how quickly do they reach value, do they come back, do they tell others?”
Instead, he encourages founders to define and track what he calls “evidence of fit” — measurable behaviors that indicate users are not just testing the product but relying on it. This might include activation rates, time to first value, repeated engagement from the same personas, or organic referrals within a company.
He also rejects the idea of PMF as a one-time milestone. “It’s not a finish line. It’s a moving target. As your market shifts, your customers mature, and your product evolves, you need to continuously validate whether you still have it.”
This is why Denis warns against premature scaling. “If you put money into acquisition before you’ve nailed these signals, you’re just accelerating failure.
You’ll get traffic, maybe even users — but they won’t stay, and you won’t learn why.” Founders, he argues, should treat early growth like an experiment, not a campaign. “The goal isn’t volume. The goal is signal.”
At SaaS Camp, he often works with technical founders caught in what he calls “the builder’s trap” — endlessly refining features that haven’t been tested in the market.
“You don’t need a polished UI or mobile app to prove there’s demand,” he says. “I’ve seen founders raise pre-seed rounds off of a landing page and five interviews — because they could show urgency, clarity, and willingness to pay.”
When asked what the signal of PMF actually feels like, Denis pauses. “You’ll feel it in pull. Suddenly, prospects reply faster. They show up to calls already halfway convinced. They ask fewer questions, and more often, they ask ‘how soon can we start?’”
But until that happens, he insists, the only job is to learn fast and refine . “Product-market fit isn’t about hype. It’s about alignment. You’re aligning your message with a problem people recognize, your channel with where they already are, and your product with what they already want to do.”
For founders navigating the fog of early-stage SaaS, Denis offers both clarity and caution. “There’s no shortcut to PMF. But if you’re willing to slow down, ask sharper questions, and test like a scientist, you’ll find it faster than most.”
This story was originally published on 3 October 2024.
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