Essential metrics for checking your PMF?
As an early-stage founder, I was constantly looking for an answer. Is my first product really taking off? Should I pivot now or keep pushing? Until it’s failed miserably.
I accumulated tons of tweets and articles about the product-market fit. Andrew Chen, Growth hackers, Amplitude and Mixpanel industry reports, you name it. But what are these metrics that matter for PMF? What are the benchmarks? How should I know if I’m moving closer to PMF?
Then I combined the data from the articles and knowledge of twitter into product-market fit checker.
It has 10 essential chart types: NPS, LTV/CAC, Activation, Conversion, D7, and D30 Retention, Churn, DAU/MAU, and Growth Rate. There you can add your own data and check how well your PMF performs compared to your industry baselines.
Now I'm validating it.
Is it something early-stage founders really need? Are they using entirely different set metrics for checking the PMF?
What's your story with PMF metrics? Do you use any tools for tracking it?
The "Sean Ellis test" is a well-known measure of product-market fit. Roughly speaking, it holds that PMF has been achieved when 40% of current users would be "very disappointed" if they could no longer use your product (based on survey responses).
Ellis discusses the test in more detail here:
https://blog.growthhackers.com/using-product-market-fit-to-drive-sustainable-growth-58e9124ee8db
thanks! I did include the Seam Ellis PMF as one of the metrics on the dashboard. I'm a bit concerned if that list of 10 metrics covers the basic needs of common Delaware c-corp saas?
One way to get relatively definitive answers to your question could be to pursue customer development discussions with online marketing agencies that serve startups. In addition to being potential enterprise/white-label customers for your business, they also are likely to have broad knowledge of industry practices, which should inform the feedback they give you about your product.
Of course one needs to be alert to the risk of brain r*pe in such interactions ( https://svdictionary.com/words/brain-rape ).
talking to agencies sounds like a good idea, thanks!