Sean Ellis explains how to measure product-market fit by asking users how disappointed they'd be if they lost access. The key: focus on the 'somewhat disappointed' segment, not everyone, to find what actually drives growth.
You'Re going to ask people, how would you feel if you can no longer use this product? You give them three responses. One of them is very disappointed, the other is somewhat disappointed, and the other is not disappointed. Very disappointed means I would be like devastated. I love this product or I need this product. And what Sean Ellis found, Sean Ellis, if you don't know him, he benchmarked this initial question. What he found is that the companies that struggled to grow almost always had less than 40% very disappointed, whereas the companies that grew the fastest almost always had more than 40% very disappointed. How do we make this number go up? Well, you want more people to be very disappointed without your product. And the trick here is not to act too much on the feedback that the very disappointed people are giving you. Also not to act at all really on the feedback that the not disappointed people are giving you because they're so far from loving your product that they are essentially a lost cause. But to focus on the segment of the somewhat disappointed people. So you then divide them into two camps, the camp for whom the main benefit of your product resonates and the camp for whom it doesn't. And what do I mean by that? You go back to the people who really love your product and you basically ask them why. In the early days of Superhuman, it would have been speed as well as the time that we were saving you. You then go back to the somewhat disappointed users and in the Superhuman example, I would simply ask, wait, do you like Superhuman because of its speed or for something else? And if it's something else, politely disregard those people and their feedback because Even if you built everything that they asked for, they're still pulling you in a different direction. And the thing that they like the most from your product isn't actually what the people who en masse love it the most for is.
