How we run Product-Market fit survey

We've been running the Product-Market fit survey for over a year at Rows. Since we last sent it, we rebranded from dashdash to Rows, added 10+ integrations, released the waiting list and onboarded thousands of teams. What remained the same is, of course, our goal - we're building the first true spreadsheet with built-in integrations and a slick sharing experience.

Rows is a spreadsheet that works as you expect it to: it has cells, the functions and everything else that makes spreadsheets great. Plus a whole bag of new tricks.

So, as the end of Q1 2021 was approaching, it was time to send out the survey again. How did we do? The following is a short article with the "how", results, reply rates and more.

We run the product-market fit survey with 1 multiple choice question, and 4 with open answers:

1. How would you feel if you could no longer use Rows?
   a) Very disappointed
   b) Somewhat disappointed
   c) Not disappointed
   d) N/A—I no longer use Rows

2. What would you likely use as an alternative if Rows no longer existed?

3. What is the main benefit you received from Rows?

4. How can we improve Rows for you?

5. What type of people do you think would most benefit from Rows?

We sent the survey to a subset of users who were active at least in 2 different months in the previous 6 months. We chose this subset because for this survey we're interested in the feedback from people who are actually using the product, or at least gave it a hard try.

We got a 10% reply rate using this email. Question by question, these were the top insights from the survey:

1. How would you feel if you could no longer use Rows?

28% of people responded with "very disappointed". This was similar to last time was did it. It is an encouraging sign taking into account we had a lot of new sign-ups in Q1 from the funding round announcement and the release of the waiting list.

2. What would you likely use as an alternative if Rows no longer existed?

Not surprising, the majority (45%) of users replied that the alternative to Rows was working in spreadsheets with a combination of manual work and/or automation via scripts.
It becomes clear that for people that are into spreadsheets and need to find/enrich/analyse data from other tools, we're just a much better, faster alternative.

3. What is the main benefit you received from Rows?

• Again, aligned with our value proposition and position, the majority (62%) of people highlighted time saved as the number 1 benefit.
• "Easy to collect information or data"
• "Enriching leads that I got from scraping."

4. How can we improve Rows for you?

This is always our favorite question to analyze. Here, the feedback was clustered in 2 areas:

• Making the product simpler to use (picking functions, getting the data, transforming it)
• Increasing feature parity with other spreadsheets - add charts, conditional formatting, etc.

All things we are working on now or are in the immediate roadmap. Now we just need to ship them 🚢

5. What type of people do you think would most benefit from Rows?

This is always some confirmation bias in these question. Nevertheless, there are often surprises in the data. This time, the top responses were:

• Sales/Business Development
• Analysts
• Startups/Entrepreneurs

And that's pretty much it. Always insightful, we’ll keep running this survey in the next few quarters so expect another update from us. If you're curious, check us out at https://rows.com/