If a startup consistently fails to achieve product-market fit despite multiple iterations, what is the most likely underlying cause?

If a startup keeps missing product‑market fit, the most common culprit is that it is building the wrong thing for the wrong audience. In Lean Startup terms, the team keeps testing assumptions that don’t match real customer problems, so the feedback loop never shows a clear demand. This means the product is misaligned with the market’s needs or the target segment is too small or uninterested. For example, a company that builds a fancy analytics dashboard for HR managers might keep iterating, but if HR managers actually prefer simple spreadsheets, the startup will never find fit. The fix is to re‑identify the true customer pain point and validate with real users before further iterations.