What is your method of measuring Product/Market fit?
Ali Alsayed
16 replies
Replies
Dane Lyons@duilen
The Daily Subset
There isn't one clear definition of PMF. You could look at the total value of a customer (LTV) vs the total cost (CAC + tech support + CS + infra + whatever else...). Once the value exceeds the cost, you could declare PMF.
This approach could be valid for some businesses and meaningless for others. But I'd tend to think this approach is too conservative of a measure because it equally weighs the existing value vs the existing cost. I think it's more important to be forward thinking here. What you're really asking yourself is this...
Is our product valuable enough today that we could optimize our expenses and be comfortably profitable?
If the answer is no, then forget about optimizing expenses and continue hammering away at the product. If the answer is yes, then start ramping up efforts to acquire customers while you start optimizing.
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I'm working on a free consumer-oriented platform, so I measure Product/Market fit based on a mix of:
- Total users (and user growth)
- User retention (how often do the same users come back)
- Feedback (what do users say about my product in App Store reviews etc.)
For a B2B SaaS tool, Product/Market fit could look at the same + conversion rates (assuming it's a paid product) and churn (assuming it's subscription-based).
Monitor the activation then monitor the churn rate.
Retention rate mainly, and if our users recommend the app to other people. In 1 month we did not promote or share our app in any way, and we got 100 new users. That probably means that people talk about it to other people. Maybe not. I think the most accurate way of measuring PMF is, does anyone use the app again and again? If so, is the number of people who use it again and again big enough?
Creatosaurus AI
already have some great metrics here in the comment will add a couple of more that i think are useful
1. NPS
2. benchmarking how your users feel about your product https://firstround.com/review/ho...
@malavwarke can you tell me how to understand these metrics in simple way ? Would like to know more. Regards
Creatosaurus AI
hey @amit_tank for second one has the blog reference I think that will be the easiest as I myself have not derived the process and for NPS i guess below bon and i have shared some thoughts and you can also check here for more details https://www.medallia.com/net-pro....
i would like to see at least few paid orders. when someone get out the credit card and pay, it is usually strong indicator that there is a value.
When customers/users are sending you angry messages on Social networks on in private, that when are you releasing those new features and constantly following up. That's when you know you are in a good spot, so hurry up!
There are 2 mettric I'm looking at:
- free trial to paid user conversion.
- retention time of paying user.
The free trial conversion rate is coming first of course.
keypup.io
Usage, retention/churn and when you are moving to monetization, paying rates. People ultimately vote with their wallets ;)
Wizen Guides
It is actually a somewhat tricky question. Do you think of PMF in terms of "yes"/"No": either you have it, or not? Or do you define a "quality of the PFM": how much of it you really have? It's all very context-oriented. If you're building a global-wide service and looking for VC money, you should show more than a dozen of users and some good feedback advice. If you're not raising, you probably can ignore it all and focus on profitability. If your product is profitable, there's a market for it and it fits.
To some extent, PMF is more a physiological dimension. I know some YC founders who grew their company to 7 figures in ARR (valuation $35M) and they still don't believe they have a PMF. They say it's easy to measure PMF - if customers are ripping product from you hands, it's a fit. Everything else is not
Offer some value for free, and hope to convert them to fee paying clients
I really like the Superhuman way of measuring PMF - it's very data-centric: https://firstround.com/review/ho...
I’ll tell you something you probably know already: most companies still think that measuring product-market fit means sending a simple NPS survey.
NPS stands for Net Promoter Score - A metric that measures customer satisfaction and helps you understand how close you are in satisfying your customers or users.
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Creatosaurus AI