How do you measure product-market fit?

Retention/Churn Rate is the only safe metric to know if the market is happy with your product. If they're happy, they stick around. However, this is a lagging indicator of product-market fit. A leading indicator would be nice of course. What that is, depends on your product/service. Possibly something related to specific milestones reached, frequency of actions performed etc. Leading indicators are dynamic formed by your current customers and they way they behave/use the product.

My co-founders and I built and open-sourced this framework: https://review.firstround.com/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit

You just know you hit it :) On a more serious note it's a mix of product, ICP (ideal customer profile), distribution channel that makes hypervelocity adoption.

Hello @noyanidin I will say Growth and Profit once you detect the Retention is good enough in your product. If every month you see your user base growing and also your profit and retention keep stable, I will say you have a product-market fit. What do you think? Cheers,

If it's pre-launch, I would say by competitor analysis. Their growth, customers, traffic etc.

I really learned a lot from reading this article: https://medium.com/swlh/the-prod...

Good question! I think in the world of positivity it makes this quite difficult to get true sense. Competitiveness in sw space doesn't help. You almost need a viable channel and GTM plan in place as well just to get above noise floor. I'm sure there are generic responses, but its more complicated than that. Engagement of organic users may be purest form.

Retention rate, churn rate, organic growth rate (likes, recommendation, feedback)

My go-to is the product-market fit score coined by Rahul Vohra: https://review.firstround.com/ho... Bonus article on PMF: https://www.nfx.com/post/superhu...

if you have to ask your self if you have product market fit. you probably not have it

1) paying customers for sure 2) people who will use your product even though it's not refined 😊

It's an area that we struggle to teach at universities and entrepreneurship centres. Getting idea validation data is a more mature science now but very little work has been put into defining product-market fit and measuring it. It probably lies in the words: "Does your product have a large enough customer segment (market) that is buying and using it". But how do you measure this? You posted a good question. I'm enjoying the answers. Please keep them coming😀.

Are customers happy ? Do they use the product ? Are they happy to pay the price you're asking ? Also, I've tried to sum up a more pragmatic view that the official version : https://geer.fr/en/product-marke...

My team took an interview about this here - https://www.reskript.com/post/ac...

We do it with surveys and feedback, user engagement, customer retention and sales growth.

Customer Acquisition, Usage Metrics, Feedback, and Retention Rate are the key metrics to measure PMF.

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I find that many makers/founders see product-market fit as binary (you either have it or you don't) while in reality, it's rather dynamic. Markets are constantly changing, and products (competitors) are constantly evolving — this means that p/m fit at best is something you can accomplish for a limited time. Venture-backed early stage founders are especially obsessed over p/m fit because it's a box we need to tick to be able to raise more capital. In those situations, investors have pretty clear benchmarks and frameworks to define it. But when you're creating something truly new, or building a product in a nascent market, it's really up to you to define it.

Wrote a whole thread about how we learned we have PMF here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/up... Here are the first 3 signs we found: 1. Selling like crazy with limited reach. 2. Close to zero refunds 3. Working with large companies early on. I go a bit more in-depth on each one in the thread.

Here's a whole podcast with examples of how people found PMF: https://open.spotify.com/show/21...