This is PMF /evals ◎✨ by Chargebee

Editor’s note: The SaaS Baton is now PMF /evals — a change driven by what’s next:
AI-native PMF, examined with the same rigor you’ve come to expect.

“For me there was a visceral sense of your thing taking on a life of its own and lurching forward, like getting pressed into the back of your seat by a fast car or a plane taking off.” — Drew Houston, Dropbox

Product-market fit used to feel a certain way.

Forever ambiguous, but it had some familiar edges: usage spikes in unexpected pockets of users, ballooning waitlists, overzealous bug reports sweeping Slack. Some math. Some signals. Something.

Not anymore, though. AI-native products are hitting record ARR with impossibly lean teams. Entire enterprise workflows have collapsed into simple prompts.

Pricing models (not just price points) now shift mid-flight. Savvy, not-new-to-disruption incumbents are layering new S-curves on top of old moats. And the LLM makers you build on? They’re launching apps that look a lot like yours.

It’s a fascinating flux state. ◎

So, at Chargebee, we decided to do something about it, because we love stories of builders and builders have loved our stories (thanks for supporting Relay).

Introducing PMF /evals ◎✨

a bi-weekly newsletter where we /evaluate AI-native PMF through first-hand stories of early-stage founders, operators scaling AI-native second acts, investors seeing the world unfold around this tech, and with some research/curation by us.

Here we will document what PMF really looks like today: the impossibly-hard-to-pin-down market pull, the enthralling new logic of monetization, the strange new shapes this thing is assuming overall.

The aim? To surface truths that help the ecosystem make better bets; a second brain all over.

Brought to you by Chargebee. Chargebee helps AI-native, recurring revenue businesses scale with billing and monetization infrastructure built for speed, flexibility, and rapid iteration.