How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit
This articles describes a way to utilise Sean Ellis’ heuristic for product market fit to test and refine your product to see how far you are from the mark, and who your power customers are.
Sean Ellis’ metric is as follows, ask you users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with options ranging from not disappointed to very disappointed. If 40% of your users vote very disappointed you have hit product market fit. Rahul then arranges his users by how they answered the PMF question to get an understanding of who they are so that they could better serve them.
This is their process:
- Find the customers who love (not just like) your product, and find out exactly what their needs are
- Analyse feedback from the on the fence users to convert them into high use customers
- Build your roadmap 50/50 for users who love you and users who almost love you
- Repeat
They key find here is when surveying users the PMF question allows you to segment those users. People who would not be disappointed if they could no longer use your product can be ignored - as they might of found your product by accident and be the wrong kind of user. The users who would be very disappointed then give you the information you need in the rest of their answers to test against the middling group to find out what you need to do to make them love your product too.
Strategically speaking, using this method you are finding out what activities will help you win, then doubling down on them.