The main leading indicator of product market-fit is
whether more than 40% of your users would be “very disappointed” to see
it go away.

Via 20VC: Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra on How To Measure Product Market Fit

Rahul Vohra has shared his thoughts on product-market fit – and how to measure it – before. They’re inspired by Sean Ellis’ startup pyramid, in which the ex-Dropbox growth guru explains that the best way to find out if users are loving your product is to ask them ¨how would you feel if you could no longer use the product”?

The golden number to aim for is at least 40% of users responding “very disappointed”.

Rahul
explains in the excellent 20 Minute VC episode how Superhuman adapts
this framework into a 4-question “satisfaction” survey of sorts, which informs
everything they do:

• segmentation (based on the answer to that first question)
• marketing messages and USPs
• product roadmap
• resource allocation

Superhuman’s survey asks the following 4 questions:

• How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?
• Very disappointed
• Somewhat disappointed
• Not disappointed
• What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman?
• What is the main benefit you receive from Superhuman?
• How can we improve Superhuman for you?

Now the real value of this simple questionnaire is in how you analyse the answers. For Rahul, it’s all about segmenting, and making it into an engine for creating a better product, and focusing on the right features.

• Focus on the “very disappointed” respondents and enrich their profiles with what you know about them e.g. job titles. They are your users with the highest expectations (HXC), and your core segment.
• Still with your HXC in mind, check what their answers to the second question were: they’re likely to have described themselves, and to have given you valuable insights into your core segment – use these to build your target persona.

• Now onto your USPs – just look at what your HXC replied to the third question and check the top 2 or 3 common answers. On top of that, Superhuman also looked at those who had replied “somewhat disappointed” and cited similar USPs to the HXC.

• Finally for the product roadmap, well Rahul recommends spending about 50% of your resources on making your USPs even stronger, while the rest of the 50% can go into building the features asked for by both HXC and the “somewhat disappointed” with common USPs to the HXCs.

Wih this framework, Rahul and his team are able to get a better understanding of what they’re doing well for the clients who truly value their products.