Time is the enemy.
Fit Fades. Fight Back.
It’s 2021. The world’s locked down. Jobs vanish, time stretches. Crypto explodes.
In a tiny village in the Philippines, a father opens his phone. Not to scroll Instagram or check the news. He opens a game.
He’s not here for fun. He’s here to earn.
He breeds digital monsters and sends them into battle—not to win glory, but to earn a few dollars in crypto from Smooth Love Potion tokens. Enough to buy rice. Medicine. Keep the lights on.
This game spreads fast.
By mid-2021, millions of people—largely from the Global South—were logging in daily. Players in the Philippines, Venezuela, Nigeria. Investors and speculators from the U.S., Korea, and Europe. Discord servers turned into global economies. Guilds pop up. Scholars. Managers. Micro-loans, all built around these tiny cartoon creatures.
This is Axie. By July, millions of players across developing countries are farming Axies like their life depends on it. Because, for some, it does.
Axie didn’t just go viral. It became a parallel economy. A poster child for Web3. It grows to 2.7 million daily users.
And then—just as fast as it rose—it collapses.
Not because it didn’t work. Because its fit broke.
Fit Matters
In startup circles, product–market fit is the holy grail. Founders obsess over it. Investors demand it. Blog posts promise to help you find it in 3 easy steps.
But here’s the irony:
Once most teams find PMF, they stop thinking about it.
They treat it like a milestone. Like some finish line.
But fit isn’t fixed. It shifts. It slips. It dies quietly. And if you’re not watching, you’ll lose it.
PMF is not just something you find. It’s something you have to fight to keep.
Four Fits, Not One
Growth isn’t just about one magical fit. It’s a multi-dimensional puzzle.
PMF has a bunch of frameworks and definitions. Get into the context: Start with Sean Ellis to test if you’ve found it. Then read Marc Andreessen. Rahul Vohra. Or see Kunal’s Delta 4 theory.
My favoured approach when working with a company is Brian Balfour’s Four Fits Framework. It’s more nuanced, but helps you really understand what’s needed to achieve it. What needs to click. And how each layer can break.
Why Axie Worked (For a While)
Axie Infinity didn’t just hit PMF—it nailed all four fits at once:
It was built to spread. And when crypto markets crashed, so did the incentive loop that made it work.
Axie didn’t lose fit because it was flawed. It lost fit because the world changed and it didn’t.
Fit is Temporal
Here’s the thing you don’t find implicitly in even the most complex of PMF models. The extra dimension of TIME.
PMF isn’t permanent. Markets evolve. Channels saturate. Users mature. Competitors undercut.
Models like Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm framework, and the Product Life Cycle apply here. Launch too early (before the chasm), and you stall. Too late, and you're just another also-ran.
What’s implicit is that over time, your product becomes mature. Less exciting. Less viral.
And if you don’t adapt, you decline.
Diagnosing the Decay
Here’s my thinking. Don’t wait for your growth chart to flatline, even when it’s looking great. Monitor the early signals of fit decay: retention dips, NPS drops, viral loops stall and CAC spikes.
Use Balfour’s Four Fits as a diagnostic stack:
Then, refined with one of the most actionable frameworks to dig into it - Rahul Vohra’s Superhuman PMF Survey. Essentially, ask the customer "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?". If less than 40% say “very disappointed,” you’re not there. Or you were—and now you’re not and it’s time to start work, the alarm bell is ringing.
Fit vs. Maturity
There’s another factor to consider here, one that I come across time and again. Products gain notoriety, ride the wave, then fade. The product life cycle describes this effect - of moving from novelty – new and exciting to utility – being reliable and useful to a commodity - where it’s just expected.
In novelty, you win with virality. In utility, with retention. In commodity, with moats—or lowest cost.
If you keep acting like a shiny new product when you’re actually just table stakes… you're in trouble.
So What Do You Do When Fit Fades?
Three paths:
Re-segment – New market, same product.
Rebuild – Evolve the product for today’s problems.
Retire – Know when to walk away.
Slack started as a game. Netflix mailed DVDs. YouTube was a dating site.
Reinvention is not a pivot. It’s survival. The longer you leave it, the harder it becomes to get it back.
The Real Lesson
Fit isn’t something you find once. It’s something you maintain, monitor, and earn—again and again.
Axie Infinity had fit. Wild, viral, explosive fit. And then it lost it.
Fit doesn’t stay found. You either keep earning it—or you lose. Brands are oil tankers, and take time to turn around. So as marketers, we need to make sure we’ve got the room to move.
If you know someone who’s fighting a fading fit, maybe forward this on. Challenges are better fought together.
Jared
Fxxking Remarkable