Do you measure product market fit?
Superhuman famously measures PMF with this question:
How disappointed would you be if you couldn't use Superhuman anymore?
Very disappointed
Somewhat disappointed
Not disappointed
If 40% or more would be Very disappointed you're on the right track!
(Rahul adds more to the method, its pretty cool actually, link below)
My question is:
How do you go about finding PMF? And: Do you measure your progress?
Curious to hear your approaches 👀
I'm pretty basic & simple. I build the most simple one page website w/out much gloss & fluff then go about trying to sell the product/service. I chat w/, email, text, contact 10-100 people & see how many people become paying customers (and try to find out when someone says no, why it's a no). Done this since 1989 for things $99 a year, things $175 a month and things $50,000 a month. Basic & simple, but it works for me.
I've heard this approach before, but as a novice founder specializing in B2C apps, I find this hard to execute. Do you think this strategy could be applied to B2C products (e.g., mobile apps) as well?
Also, how do you usually bring potential customers to the one page website?
I think this approach could work for B2C apps, if the price & margins are good enough. Getting people to the website varied per business model. I've always had links in my email sig file, made event posts on Craig's List, talked 1:1 w/ folks, and generally open to trying various different and interesting things that are free/cheap, never spam, and could learn something from.
Very cool. Love how even a simple one pager requires all those reach out initiatives to execute effectively.
When you try these methods out, do you sometimes get clues or validation on which marketing channels will work well for the product/service you are trying to sell? Or these reach outs are usually just for testing the business idea?
Excellent question @jayjson . I'm really looking at the overall reaction to the biz idea/model first, then will drill down on the marketing channels after that
Ah, makes sense. Thanks for sharing your experience and view. Really appreciate them. This approach looks to be the most straight-forward way to validate business ideas but also can be counter intuitive and hard to execute on for novice founders like me, especially if they are coming from engineering/development. 😅
One last question if you don't mind, for the one pager site, do you use any landing page builder/platform with payment or build it yourself?
Happy to share as much as I can, but founders need to evaluate if what I'm saying (or anyone is saying) makes sense for them. I'm a marketing/sales guy, w/ zero real tech skills. My first two co's in 89 & 92 were pre web, the others were HTML I cobbled together myself, like w/ RAW HTML for one and HoTMetaL. May sound counter intuitive as well, but I like things to look just a little rough and not overly polished. Happy to grab a quick phone call if you think that might help in any way.
I'd love to hop on a call to hear more about your approach. I've emailed you my calendar booking link in case you are still available!
Love the simplicity of it! Maybe we are overengineering it haha
I've been fortunate enough to work w/ a boatload of amazing founders from around the world over the years, so I have seen a thing or two, good and bad. And anyone offering startup advice, certainly me included, might offer wrong advice...and everyone will offer varying device. Each founder needs to decide what is right for them. Many early stage founders take way too long trying to sell their thing early on. You almost can't start too early, but you can start too late. Many founders often undervalue and underprice their thing too. Easier to start high and go down than the other way around. Plus a higher price usually makes you perform better too. Also, beyond ALL the planning, once the thing is launched and in front of potential and paying customers...it evolves. It changes. So all that planning, out the window, because now...you're in the deal. You've jumped off the cliff and time to build the airplane. Good luck everyone.
What were you selling for $50,000 a month?
Online advertising & marketing services 1996-2002
Been in Micro SaaS ecosystem for some time. Most first time founders consider the churn rate as their typical product market fit.
Theoretically the PMF is good and is a good way to find out how much people love your product. But I haven't seen many IHers running this survey because it's not a priority for them. Their priority is to try and hit $100 MRR first.
Definitely agree with this, we measure churn rate and MAU as a proxy for PMF and we talk to users to get direct feedback from time to time but we don't do mass surveying like this.
That's right and same is the case with many IHers we interviewed at FounderBeats
Thanks for getting back :)
I see, the bigger idea behind it actually is to ask these follow up questions:
What would you use if product were no longer available?
What is the main benefit you receive from product ?
What type of people do you think would most benefit from product ?
How can we improve product for you?
What is your job title?
With this data at hand you create segments (based on job title) and try to find out which user group is happiest with your product.
Then you look at the "somewhat disappointed" groups answers about how to make the product better and move them to "very disappointed".
What is stopping you to run micro surveys? Too much effort for probably too little insights?
Thanks again!
I get it. But my point is most IHers are struggling to get the first 3-4 paying users and so this wouldn't be a priority at that initial stage.
At Superhuman scale, I can understand about running surveys, doing massive research. But my point is if a product is struggling to make $100 MRR, this may not be a high priority.
ahh okay, I know what you mean :)
Thanks for your insights!
👍👍
Churn rate is a major problem in every SaaS business because there are many reasons for customer churn like:
But first, you need to know what is the major reason customer leaving your product. You can get this info from Churnfree. Churnfree also helps you to reduce your high customer churn by offering custom offers to your customer who is churning from your product. That can save up to 46% of churned requests.
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I love this post. I actually executed on this strategy to try to measure PMF of my mobile app (https://lookscopeapp.com/).
I created a survey with Typeform, implemented a pop up in the app to prompt existing and new users to fill out the survey, and have collected about 60 responses in 3 weeks.
One thing I wasn't 100% sure if I was doing correctly was related to the timing of the survey prompt. My app had a bunch of existing users who had been using it for some time, so I thought that these users would likely respond with 'Very disappointed', which sort of adds a bias to the result. Anyone has an opinion on how to decide when to show or how to select the audience for conducting this survey?
Hey! That's funny, I did the exact same thing for the consumer app I was working on last year :)
Generally, when you gather feedback you want to seperate signal from noise. There usually are lots of users who are not the target group nor have experienced the value of your app who provide feedback. This feedback can confuse and lead product teams astray. So its actually critical to do a careful pre-segmentation.
This is a lot easier said than done. You have to determine at which point in the user journey the main value has been experienced and track accordingly. Then you create a cohort based on this usage data and only display the questionnaire to this cohort.
How did you go about pre-segmentation? You said they were recurring users which generally is good, because they only come back if they get value out of it. So even though you bias your result, its exactly what you are supposed to do :)
Super curious to learn more about how you set everything up as well as how you analyzed the results. Im so interested because at the moment we are building a productized version of the Superhuman PMF survey and try to make it match current approaches as closely as possible.
Thanks for the response and many great points! About pre-segmentation, my app currently requires payment to download (I knew this is not ideal and am preparing to transition to subscription). I think this download wall filtered out those who are not serious about the target problem.
In terms of analysis, I haven't done a full one yet, but I've been relying on Typeform's automatic summary page to get the first high-level impression. I plan to do a more thorough one for the qualitative parts of the responses soon.
About the setup, I basically did: iOS app -> a popup UI with yes/no to help -> open webpage without exciting the app -> a PMF survey with Typeform
Happy to give more info if needed and good luck!
Ah that's pretty cool to charge them right away :) Good call!
And you plan to go through the analysis of the data as described in the Superhuman article? Or will you "freestyle it" so read through them and see what you can get out of it?
Here is a cool way to have ChatGPT help:
https://twitter.com/deadly_onion/status/1601015603476631553
I'll reach out, would love to chat in person, if you could spare 15mins :)
What a great idea haha. Thanks for sharing it. I was going to follow Superhuman's approach but I might actually try this idea as well! Yup, happy to chat.
Hey Jay!
We've launched the PMF Survey product on Product Hunt today. Please have a look and leave a comment, if you like :)
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/product-market-fit-survey-by-formbricks
coolio, I've sent you an email with my booking link :)
PMF was first coined by Don Valentine, then refined by Andy Rachleff and popularized by Marc Andreessen (& perhaps Steve Blank).
The usual description is that you've got PMF when people are damn near beating down your door to get your product.
For obvious reasons, pmf is rarely talked about in marketing science.
But if you'd ask me how to measure it, I'd think what you'd be looking for is negative churn in absence of paid marketing.
If you're solely doing organic marketing, then if not only churn is quite low but each customer is bringing in friends, you're on to something.
IRL though, I'm not terribly convinced PMF is a useful concept because ultimately it describes a destination more than a way to get there. And also, how many companies have pmf? Look around you, pretty much everything you bought, you're barely ambivalent about.
This is exactly what the literature reflects. Most lit on consumer loyalty (frequency of repeat buying) shows consumers being polygamous not monogamous brand-wise. We also know that most purchase decisions are not made with system II thinking (slow, effortful), but rather mostly with system I thinking (automatic and unconscious).
I think PMF can be a useful mental tool for truly unique and disruptive innovations, but for the vast majority of companies and indiehackers (who're simply trying to make a living) I don't think it's necessary.
Just figure out who you wish to serve, do ethnographic research such that you have a solid understanding of their wants and needs and the exact language they use to describe those, figure out how much they'd pay for a solution to their problem (WTP: willingness to pay), and make sure your price point sits below that.
IMO it's important to remember that almost no IH is creating new dog food. We're all addressing existing needs (which, most of the time are already being addressed). While in VC-land, new technological breakthroughs can create needs that didn't exist before.
Hey RJ!
We've launched the PMF survey today on Product Hunt. Would appreciate a vote, if you like it:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/product-market-fit-survey-by-formbricks
Cheers!
I think you're right!
Looks like I have to fail a few more times to get realistic enough to approach it how you describe it: solid, from the ground up research to do something which already works a little bit better. This should do the trick :)
Yeah it's called revenue 🤓
I prefer to use leading indicators over Sean Ellis' quantitative approach. https://www.stage2.capital/blog/the-science-of-re-establishing-growth-when-where-how
Nah, it's a meaningless vanity metric.
The only metrics that matter:
Are you making enough revenue to stay afloat and not worry about money?
Is that revenue growing?
Everything else -- including the so-called "product-market fit" -- is noise.
Okay, 60% of people are "very disappointed" if they could no longer use your service, so what?
I see what you're saying but I for me that are outcomes.
The question you should as is: What do I do if I do not make enough money to not worry and it is not growing at a satisfactory pace?
Well finding out how many percentage of people "would be disappointed if they could no longer use your service" definitely ain't it.
Very true, I suggest reading the article where the question originates from:
https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
How to measure product market fit wasn't clear to me until I saw this video: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6k-growth-for-startups
The idea is to look at the retention curves of your user cohorts. Hopefully you'll iterate to a state were you have retention curves that are somewhat flat after the initial drop off. My understanding is that this means you have product-market fit for the group of users that stick around.
Hey lgrammel!
We've launched the PMF survey today. Wanna check it out?
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/product-market-fit-survey-by-formbricks
Thanks!
Hey! Took a while until I watched it but you're right, this is pretty insightful :)
Thanks for sharing!
I follow these strategies in order to determine the PMF for our app https://reinforz.ai
There are more metrics that we use but those are the most significant one. There is a healthy threshold for all the above and if we cross that then PMF otherwise, its not for that specific metric. Then we see the majority and finally declare PMF. The threshold is constantly increased based on our current market value, so that we keep improving.
Hey there!
Have you ever heard of social listening? It basically listens to the internet. We use that internet chatter to create "lookalike audiences" that are more likely to be interested in your brand and ultimately lead to more growth and subscriptions.
If that sounds cool, check it out :D
https://hypercrowd.carrd.co
sdfsd
Sweet dreams forever, sweet dreams? :D
Running that survey with all new users, and the PMF related insight is limited - you would need at least 20+ qulified responses per week to understand if you move in the right direction, and my website doesn't require a registration.
Also noticed the first question is misunderstood regularly (double negation).
Anyway every effort to get feedback is worth it!
So the way they do it is only running it with people who have been using your product for a while so they have derived some value from it. The segmentation here is key for both the selection of the survey participants and the analysis of the data.
You are right, I made a similar experience with my previous B2C app where I got quite a lot of answers of people not understanding the question right.
Don't go looking for PMF. It's a trap that kills most startups that try. Wrote a (controversial) piece about this a while back on here about why this happens and the alternative - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/this-is-why-90-of-indie-hackers-fail-3630f9a12c
Haha you're quite effective in selling your Gumroad book ;)
What you dont consider in the article however is segmentation. It is key to find the right target customer to improve the product for and sell it to.
Yeah I do alright :-)
Oh yeah there's tons of things I couldn't touch on in the article - if I mentioned everything it'd turn into a tome worth of war and peace!
Thanks for everyone who contribute this question
best regard
https://thelinenhouse.pk/search?type=product&q=prayer+mat