Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit

Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. In the early days of the company, he was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize it.

He eventually came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis:

Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed.

It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it:

“If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.”

40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat.

For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case.

Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too:

“I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Full video: Creator Lab “RAHUL VOHRA: Finding Product Market Fit (Deep Dive)” (Sep 2019)

If you’re looking to go deeper on this topic, I’d recommend Rahul’s article “How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product Market Fit” and Sean Ellis’s book Hacking Growth.