This article is by Rahul Vohra, the founder and CEO of Superhuman — a startup building the fastest email experience in the world.
“You can always feel when product/market fit is not happening. The customers aren't quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn't spreading, usage isn't growing that fast, press reviews are kind of ‘blah,’ the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.
And you can always feel product/market fit when it is happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account. You're hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can. Reporters are calling because they've heard about your hot new thing and they want to talk to you about it. You start getting entrepreneur of the year awards from Harvard Business School. Investment bankers are staking out your house.”
But no matter how intense the pressure, I wasn’t ready to launch. Common practice would be to "throw it out there and see what sticks,” which may be fine after a few months of effort when the sunk cost is low. But the “launch and see what happens” method seemed irresponsible and reckless to me — especially given the years that that we had invested.
ANCHORING AROUND A METRIC: A LEADING INDICATOR FOR PRODUCT/MARKET FIT
Growth hacker - just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”, - Ellis had found a leading indicator
After benchmarking nearly a hundred startups with his customer development survey, Ellis found that the magic number was 40%. Companies that struggled to find growth almost always had less than 40% of users respond “very disappointed,” whereas companies with strong traction almost always exceeded that threshold.
Ask your users how they’d feel if they could no longer use your product. The group that answers ‘very disappointed’ will unlock product/market fit.
Typeform survey by Superhuman
1. How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?A) Very disappointed
B) Somewhat disappointed
C) Not disappointed
2. What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman?
3. What is the main benefit you receive from Superhuman?
4. How can we improve Superhuman for you?
FROM BENCHMARK TO ENGINE: THE FOUR-STEP MANUAL FOR OPTIMIZING PRODUCT/MARKET FIT
1) Segment to find your supporters and paint a picture of your high-expectation customers.
Segment the high-expectation customer (HXC) framework
With this in mind, I sought to pinpoint Superhuman’s HXC. We took only users who would be very disappointed without our product and analyzed their responses to the second question in our survey: “What type of people do you think would most benefit from Superhuman?”
Using our customers' words and Supan’s tips for building a profile, we crafted a rich and detailed vision of the Superhuman HXC:
Nicole is a hard-working professional who deals with many people. For example, she may be an executive, founder, manager, or in business development. Nicole works long hours, and often into the weekend. She considers herself very busy, and wishes she had more time. Nicole feels as though she’s productive, but she’s self-aware enough to realize she could be better and will occasionally investigate ways to improve. She spends much of her work day in her inbox, reading 100–200 emails and sending 15–40 on a typically day (and as many as 80 on a very busy one).
Nicole considers it part of her job to be responsive, and she prides herself on being so. She knows that being unresponsive could block her team, damage her reputation, or cause missed opportunities. She aims to get to Inbox Zero, but gets there at most two or three times a week. Very occasionally — perhaps once a year — she’ll declare email bankruptcy. She generally has a growth mindset. While she’s open-minded about new products and keeps up to date with technology, she may have a fixed mindset about email. Whilst open to new clients, she’s skeptical that one could make her faster.
It’s a commonly held view that tailoring the product too narrowly to a smaller target market means that growth will hit a ceiling — but I don’t think that’s the case.
“When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.” - http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
2) Analyze feedback to convert on-the-fence users into fanatics.
To get to the root of how we were going to improve the product and expand the depth of its appeal, I found it helpful to focus my efforts on these key questions:
- Why do people love the product?
- What holds people back from loving the product?
To understand why users loved Superhuman, we once again turned to the segment of those who would be very disappointed without our product. This time, we looked at their answers to the third question on our survey: “What is the main benefit you receive from Superhuman?”
Here’s a sample of some answers that stood out:
- “Processing email is much faster with Superhuman for two reasons: show one email at a time and overall speed is much better than gmail. I get through my inbox in half the time.”
- “Speed! The app is crazy fast, and the UX + keyboard shortcuts make me an actual superhuman.”
- “Using Superhuman is so much faster than using Gmail. Not even close. And it mirrors my favorite Gmail shortcuts, so there is zero learning curve for a power Gmailer.”
After throwing the responses into a word cloud, some common themes emerged: the users who loved our product most appreciated Superhuman for its speed, focus and keyboard shortcuts.
Our next step was somewhat counterintuitive: we decided to politely pass over the feedback from users who would not be disappointed if they could no longer use the product.
Politely disregard those who would not be disappointed without your product. They are so far from loving you that they are essentially a lost cause.
Focusing on this last group, we looked more closely at their answers to the fourth question on our survey: “How can we improve Superhuman for you?”
Bruh, that’s so clean analysis
After some analysis, we found that the main thing holding back our users was simple: our lack of a mobile app. In 2015, we had taken the contrarian approach of starting with the desktop. Most emails are sent from desktop, so that's where we thought we could add most value. We were always planning on building a mobile app, but at the beginning of our journey — like every startup — we had the chips for just one bet. In 2017, it was clear that we could no longer delay this, and that mobile had become critical for product/market fit.
3) Build your roadmap by doubling down on what users love and addressing what holds others back.
I eventually came to this realization: If you only double down on what users love, your product/market fit score won’t increase. If you only address what holds users back, your competition will likely overtake you. This insight guided our product planning process, effectively writing our roadmap for us.
To double down on what our very disappointed users loved, half of our roadmap was devoted to the following themes:
To gain ground with our speed-loving-yet-somewhat-disappointed users, the other half of our roadmap was focused here:
To stack-rank amongst these initiatives, we used a very simple cost-impact analysis: we labelled each potential project as low/medium/high cost, and similarly low/medium/high impact. For the second half of the roadmap, addressing what held people back, the impact was clear from the number of requests any given improvement had.
To increase your product/market fit score, spend half your time doubling down on what users already love and the other half on addressing what’s holding others back.
4) Repeat the process and make the product/market fit score the most important metric.
If you're a SaaS company like Superhuman, you simply have to keep on improving the product as the pool of users expands. To do that, we rebuild our roadmap every quarter using this process, ensuring that we’re improving our product/market fit score fast enough.
BRACING FOR IMPACT
In the twists and turns of following this process, I found a way to define product/market fit and a metric to measure it. Our team had a single number to rally around instead of an abstract goal that left us feeling hopeless. By surveying our users, segmenting our supporters, learning what users loved and what held them back, and then dividing a roadmap between the two, we found a methodology to increase product/market fit.