Hi Neil, thanks for being a user of ChartMogul, nice to connect with you here and thanks for your question.
I don’t think the type of PMF you describe is probably possible for the majority of product categories. There are certain realities to the market and problem space for each new product which will likely dictate how fast you can grow. Of course you can polish your product, your onboarding, add features that deliver increased value, get better at sales and marketing, etc. However, the majority of startups don’t scale as fast as Slack, Zoom, etc. and that’s not because we’re not as smart or as dedicated as the people working at those companies.
There are two main factors which I believe have an out-sided impact on how fast you can scale. Market, e.g. how strong is the demand for a solution to the problem you’re solving. And secondly, the onboarding - this is so critical to rapid scaling. How easy is it for a large enough group of potential customers to get value from your product. If we look at Zendesk, where I used to work, they ticked these two boxes perfectly – there was huge demand for a way for teams of people to manage email support (there was also an an existing market, there just wasn’t any SaaS products), and secondly all Zendesk required was for you to setup email forwarding for your support emails into a dedicated Zendesk email address. This was a fairly easy and consistent onboarding pathway (email is a universal technology that hasn’t really changed in decades).
Sometimes just creating a company that has better onboarding than what came before is enough to create a category leading player.