In this Revenue Today episode, host Jared Robin introduces guest Nadja Komnenic, who shares a practical framework for achieving product‑market fit (PMF) by first identifying “high‑expectation” customers—those who would be very disappointed if the product disappeared. She recounts how her founder used a video‑enhanced email survey to achieve a 59% response rate from early adopters, asking a key question about disappointment if the product ceased to exist. Drawing on Sean Ellis’s 40% benchmark, she explains that when 40% or more of active users say they would be very disappointed, the startup is likely on the path to PMF. She outlines a four‑question survey sequence to uncover the ideal customer profile (ICP), key value propositions, and improvement ideas, emphasizing the need to focus on feedback from very or somewhat disappointed users while ignoring indifferent respondents. Nadja stresses tracking metrics that balance doubling down on loved features and addressing pain points of the somewhat disappointed segment, iterating to raise the very‑disappointed percentage. She also highlights common founder mistakes—internal dishonesty, lack of metrics, delegating too early, trying to serve everyone, and treating PMF as a one‑time event. Finally, she lists signs of true PMF such as organic word‑of‑mouth, strong engagement, short sales cycles, positive reviews, rapid growth, and low churn, urging founders to prioritize PMF over fundraising or hiring before validation.
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.
Our founder back in the day was actually deciding to do a survey on our current users at that point. So those AppSumo users that came to us and actually launched a cold email campaign sending out a survey asking them a couple of questions. Now, as you can see here, he actually used videos in his outreach to actually catch the attention, make it personalized, and he was able to kind of get those early adopters to really connect with them in the first place. The reason that worked. Obviously, it took them to a landing page where they will be able to go into the next slide. I will show you how the landing page itself looked like. This survey itself ended up having very nice results. So we ended up having— if you can just skip to the 2 slides from now, please. We ended up having very nice conversions on the survey itself. So 59% of the old customers that have actually received this email actually went through the survey. And the survey itself asked this question, how would you feel if you could no longer use Lemlist? Very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, and not disappointed at all. The benefit of this question is that once you ask these questions to your users, your idea is to get an understanding of who are going to be those people that if your product no longer existed, they would be very disappointed. And this is the group of people that you want to focus on mostly. This lets you know who the product is working for and the language that really resonates with them in the first place. This will actually get you to a moment where you will be finding your high expectation customers. High expectation customers are the customers that are going to be in love with your product and they're going to actually spread the word around your product. To the other companies and other potential users of your product. Once you segment them out, those are the very disappointed batch of people, and paint a picture of your high-expectation customers, you're going to be actually measuring what is the percentage of people that answered very disappointed. The number that this should actually look like is that you, once you actually ask users how the product would be, how they would feel if your product no longer ceased to exist. And they answer, very disappointed. This number should actually be above 40%. This is the number that came from Sean Elise, the trend early growth of Dropbox, LogMeIn, and Eventbrite. And the idea behind this number is that you're going to be able to find a batch of people that have used at least twice in the last 2 weeks your product. And if 40% or plus of them actually say that they would be disappointed in using your product, this is a good chance that you have your product market fit. In the beginning, there is no reason— there is high chances that you will not have this 40% rate. So your goal is to actually get to this 40%. The way that you will get there is that you will use this very disappointed group of survey respondents to narrow down who is your ideal customer profile. And then following that, you will ask the second question. So what type of people do you think would most benefit from Lemlist? This will actually give you a clear picture of who your ICP is, which definitely your VP of sales at one point is going to appreciate if you document it right. The third question to ask is what is the main benefit that you will receive from Lemlist? So what are the key value propositions? And if it actually, if the answers align, with what you had in mind and how you wanted to build your product? And the 4th question would be, how can we improve Lemlist for you? This feedback here is critical because it's gonna help you actually build your roadmap around it. Now, the most important part is that in this stage, you really wanna ignore the feedback that you've gotten from people who said they won't be disappointed at all if your product doesn't exist. These are not people that are gonna give you feedback that will help you out build your roadmap because they will not be interested in your product in the first place. And it might help you actually get distracted from your, really, the roadmap. Now, you want to analyze the somewhat disappointed group of people, and because those are the people who are on the verge to get converted into fanatics. So like the very disappointed batch of people. These, once you actually are able to cater to the feedback of somewhat disappointed people, and you build a product around it, you're going to actually convey them to kind of be become the very disappointed batch of people, which will actually increase that number from, let's say, 20% to 40% plus. So the goal here is to actually identify your metrics. So I'm gonna go skip a bit of the slides because we have 3 minutes left. And to really make sure that while you're building out your product-market fit, that you're leading with metrics and identifying the metrics that you wanna track. To increase your product-market fit score, you need to spend half of your time doubling down on what your users already love, so your key value propositions, and the other half on addressing what's holding others back. So that second batch of somewhat disappointed people. The goal is to repeat the process and make the product-market fit score as most, the most important metric in your first initial stages of growth. Now, the mistakes that we see happening all the time across the board, and we're speaking with a lot of founders that sometimes succeed with their startups and sometimes unfortunately fail, is, as I said first, internal dishonesty and sticking just to their own gut that this is something that can work. So try to put that ego aside a bit and actually validate it through some of the numbers. Again, not tracking metrics. Make sure that you have your metrics in place while you're tracking out your growth in the in the initial stages of growth. And the third and my favorite, not mistake, I don't like the mistake itself, but I do see it happening all the time, is that founders tend to delegate too fast. So they would focus on, you know, raising funding, they would focus on just the way to grow the business, etc., instead of actually spending initial months of learning, communicating, exchanging with their potential customers. And those initial stages are critical in growing your business because this is where you really understand your ICP. You understand what is the pain and you're able to eventually grow your business and build your roadmap around it. This is also the moment where you're getting your most loyal customers and the ones that are going to stick with you long-term. Now, mistake number 4 obviously is like trying to cater everyone instead of one niche. So this is what we mentioned like about sticking to your product, not listening to your audience and coming up with features without actually validating there is a need for that and in the initial stages, not documenting all of the learnings, because once your VP of sales at one point comes in, you don't wanna repeat everything that you've been learning for years before they came in. And thinking that product-market fit is a one-time action versus the process itself, which you need to always go back to and validate in the meantime. Signs that this will actually, that you actually have found your product-market fit is that you know that the word of mouth is not spreading. So if people are not talking about your product or sharing and statically expressing it to the others, you have not probably found your product-market fit. Users are not engaging with your product, sales cycles are taking too long, a lot of deals never close, reviews are poor, user isn't growing that fast, and users aren't churning. So we ran out of time, although I had a couple of more slides that I wanted to share with you all. But I really hope this very short event today was actually actionable enough. And I would really encourage all of you to really not spend time figuring out your product-market fit instead of rushing, racing after the investments and funding. Because at the end of the day, no matter the greatest VP of sales that you can get, the amount of funding that you get, or the best marketing in place that you might have, if you don't have product-market fit and you don't have people that are willing to buy your product, there is no way that your business exists. So hope this was useful and actionable enough. Hope you enjoy the event. And if anybody wants to connect, obviously I'm on LinkedIn. If you have more questions, feel free to ask me anytime. And I hope you really enjoy the remaining of today's event.
Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thanks, Jared.
