In the last few days, every time I've logged online, I've seen something about Product Market Fit. 

There's been far too many incidents for me to ignore the sign anymore, so I've decided to write this post about Product Market Fit. 

Buckle up ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be a fun ride…

Almost every startup fails due to a lack of product market fit - and that is what really drives startup success. Therefore, from the very beginning, founders strive to achieve product-market fit. 

Most of us understand the concept of product market fit, but there is no tried and true method for achieving it.

Do You Know About the 40% Magic Number?

Sean Ellis, the early growth leader of Dropbox, LogMeIn, GrowthHackers.com, etc., found a leading indicator for determining Product Market Fit through customer surveys.

There might be a strong Product Market Fit if more than 40% of the respondents say they will be "very disappointed."

It’s a very interesting take on confirming if you have a Product Market Fit.

Slack’s Product Market Fit

In an open research project from 2015, Hiten Shah, Co-founder and CEO of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, asked Sean Ellis' question to 731 Slack users. 

Once again, the 40% magic number proved that Slack had a Product Market Fit.

The rest is history. Slack became a unicorn and got acquired.

Superhuman’s Road To Product Market Fit 

Superhuman’s founder shared his story on how the company went about finding the product market fit. They followed Ellis’ advice and decided to survey their customers to validate their Product Market Fit. 

Superhuman asked following question to their customers:

It may seem discouraging, but this survey helped develop a solid product roadmap for the company, allowing more people to enter the “very disappointed” bucket.

The overall results for the first question looked like this -

The Framework Used By Superhuman

Superhuman followed a series of steps that every Marketing and Product person should follow if you are at an early stage startup that isn’t sure if there is a Product Market Fit yet.

Cutting The Noise

From the survey responses, the first thing Superhuman did was to remove the submissions from the job titles that were not as relevant to their business, and recalculate the survey results. 

Your early marketing may have attracted all kinds of users - especially if your product is free. There will be many people interested in your product, but most of them will not be qualified; they won't need it and its primary benefit or use case may not be suitable. In any case, you wouldn't want these people as users. Therefore, no harm removing those users from the dataset.

After doing this exercise, the survey sample submission size reduced, and took the “very disappointed” pool to 32%. 

Still under 40%, but better than earlier. 

Validating The Core Value Proposition

Next they looked at the answers for the question - What is the main benefit you receive from Superhuman?, submitted by 32% of respondents who were “very disappointed”. 

Seeing the patterns across all the submissions enabled them to see what was most commonly mentioned as a benefit to the audience who cared about their product.

Greater Emphasis on “Somewhat disappointed” Pool

Next they looked at the pool of people who were “somewhat disappointed”, this is the pool of people who are finding some value from the product, but due to some missing things aren’t yet part of the true fans of the product. 

With a few tweaks, maybe you can persuade them to love your product. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that some of these people won't be very disappointed without your product no matter what you do.

In any case, this is the audience to lure into being the raving fans. 

Therefore, Superhuman decided to segment this audience even further by bifurcating the audience based on the most loved feature of the product. 

For example, "Speed" was one of the most appealing features for Superhuman’s audience who couldn't live without their product. Therefore, they segmented the "somewhat disappointed" pool by separating people who mentioned "Speed" and those who did not.

Now from the pool who said “Speed” as the core benefit out of the “somewhat disappointed” pool, Superhuman looked at their submissions for the next question i.e. How can we improve Superhuman for you?

After some analysis, they found that the main thing holding back “somewhat disappointed” users was simple: lack of a mobile app.

Building the Product Roadmap

When it came time to commit to a product roadmap, it was not immediately clear how to navigate the tension between why users loved Superhuman and what held others back.

Eventually, Superhuman realized that you won't increase your product market fit score by only doubling down on what users love. 

It is likely that the competition will overtake if they address only what holds users back. By using this insight, they were able to write the product roadmap effectively.

The effective product roadmap was based on: Half-n-Half approach. 

And finally to prioritize items on the product roadmap, Superhuman team stack-ranked initiatives by using a very simple cost-impact analysis: they labeled each potential project as low/medium/high cost, and similarly low/medium/high impact.

Make The Product Market Fit Score The Most Important Metric 

As time went on, Superhuman constantly surveyed new users to monitor their product market fit score. They were careful to ensure that we didn’t survey users more than once, so as to not throw off the 40% benchmark.

The percentage of users who answered "very disappointed" quickly became our most important metric. On a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis, Superhuman tracked this metric.

Is it Really Possible to Measure Product Market Fit With a Survey?

Marc Andreessen, the Venture Capital, doesn’t believe you could measure Product Market Fit via surveys, he wrote in a blog post in 2007 -

The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it -- or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can.

In other words, if you're overwhelmed with your product's usage—usually to the point where you're too swamped just to keep it running—you've reached Product Market Fit.

Shaan Puri, the host of popular podcast, My First Million, also echoed his views with Andreessen, and said - 

When you hear founders talking about problems such as:

Hey, my AWS (Servers) bills are running crazy, how can I get more servers for cheaper?

Do you know more support people, I need more support people?

Instead of product or product features. That's when you know there is a Product Market Fit.

My Take on Product Market Fit

In my opinion, there is no leading indicator that can confirm a Product Market Fit, but you can leverage the survey results to construct your product roadmap using the right priorities to get there faster.

Remember, getting a product roadmap right is an art. There are two key components to it:

1. Knowing what to build

2. Knowing what to build first

The approach established by Superhuman is a great way of superficially knowing product market fit, but is essential to building a product roadmap that will lead you to product market fit with greater certainty and confidence.

When it hits you, you know it is there, and you have all sorts of other operational problems.

That's all I have to say!

Thanks for reading this post. I hope you found it useful. I would appreciate any feedback or questions you may have.