There’s a seductive myth in the startup world: “Build it and they will come.” It’s the belief that a great product or service is all you need. Create one, and you’re all set—customers will find and love it. Easy, right?
Unfortunately, that’s rarely how it works. The harsh reality is that even a beautifully designed offering packed with features can fall flat, unappreciated, and forgotten if it doesn’t solve a real problem for a real group of people.
Instead of moving forward aimlessly, you can refer to a concept known as product-market fit (PMF) to determine whether what you’ve got truly sparks joy. PMF is when a product satisfies a specific market need and triggers a strong, positive response from its target audience.
When you’ve achieved product-market fit, you’re good to go. Customers are hooked, and they’ll tell friends and family about it. Most importantly, they’ll be genuinely upset if your offering suddenly disappears.
How do you achieve this lofty milestone? By conducting product-market fit surveys. A well-designed PMF with the right questions eliminates guesswork and provides clear, actionable evidence that they care about your product—and details the reasons why.
What is a product-market fit survey?
A product-market fit survey is a form of research in question-and-answer format used to gauge a customer’s interest and dependency on a particular product. For startups, these surveys are crucial. The feedback tells you how well your offering resonates with those who matter. This not only informs the direction and roadmap you should take, but also saves precious time and money.
For new businesses with limited resources, it can be the difference between failure and success, and key to building something people desperately want.
What’s the ‘Sean Ellis method?’
At the heart of PMF surveys is a single, powerful question that cuts through and signposts whether customers truly value and rely on a product. This has been dubbed the Sean Ellis method or test. It asks:
“How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?”
- Very disappointed
- Somewhat disappointed
- Not disappointed
Ellis, a renowned author and growth expert, found that a product has achieved the elusive product-market fit when at least 40% of users say they’d be very disappointed at the prospect of it disappearing entirely.
While not an absolute guarantee, hitting the 40%+ milestone is a clear sign that the product has solved a meaningful problem. Bingo: you’re a step closer to startup product validation.
When should you run a PMF survey?
Timing is everything with PMF surveys. Go too early and your product might not have made a lasting impression with customers not fully aware of its features. Leave it too late and your product may already be drifting off course. In both cases, the feedback will have little value.
Finding the sweet spot is key.
Ideally, that’s when you’ve launched a product that works with real, active users, and you’re already seeing some sort of traction. This is the point where you can use a survey to validate whether it’s ready for lift off. Running a survey can also provide clarity on where to go next if you’ve got plans to scale or pivot.
Step-by-Step: How to Build a Product-Market Fit Survey
‘Build the right product-market fit survey and they will come’ is perhaps a more apt rule to live by! Here’s how to start crafting a PMF survey template:
1. Define the goal of your survey
You can’t answer everything at once, unfortunately. You need a primary goal to ensure the feedback is laser-focused and actionable. Start by outlining what exactly you’re trying to find out. This will help you to draft product-market fit questions and shape the survey to a specific objective.
Three common goals for PMFs are:
- Validation—Are you solving a real problem for your target audience?
- Prioritization—Which features or pain points matter most to users?
- Retention — How indispensable is your offering to existing customers?
You can run more than one PMF survey, but each one should be built around a single goal to improve response rates and provide clarity.
2. Choose the right set of questions
The great thing about PMF surveys is that they cut to the chase. You don’t need pages upon pages of multiple choice and open-ended questions to get relevant responses. This saves you time and keeps customers focused on what truly matters.
In addition to the Sean Ellis’ showstopper, there are three other ‘core’ PMF questions you should consider asking:
- How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?
- What is the primary benefit you get from using this product?
- Who do you think this product is best suited for?
- What can we do to improve this product for you?
Build out these core questions based on your goal. For example, if you’re looking to identify features and benefits that users want, you could ask: “If you could improve or add one thing to this product, what would it be?” This is very useful for prioritization.
Getting some context for the main question won’t hurt either. You can follow up question 1 with: “What’s the main reason for your answer?”This will provide clarity on why exactly they’d feel ‘disappointed’ or ‘not disappointed’ if the product disappeared.
You can even take an opportunity to assess your competition by asking: “What would you use if you could no longer buy this product?”
Remember, short and sweet is the order of the day with PMF surveys. Typically, you want between 4 and 7 well crafted questions at a maximum.
3. Select Your Audience
Thinking of sending your survey to everyone you know, including friends and family? Bad idea! Great questions won’t mean anything if they aren’t pitched to the right people.
Your survey audience must use your product—that’s a given. However, not everyone in this group qualifies. You want to engage early users who are fully onboarded and have used your product and its features enough to form an opinion. Setting a benchmark helps, i.e. anyone who’s used it twice during the last month.
Consider segmenting, too. You might create noise and mixed signals by surveying both trial customers and paid users, for example.
It’s a common assumption that at least 40 responses are required to make the survey ‘valid.’ Any less, and you risk the feedback from being skewed by individual opinions and false anomalies.
4. Choose the right tool
It’s unlikely you’ll be on the street canvassing opinions, so you’ll need the right tool to craft and deliver your survey to customers online. There are quite a few options available.
Survey tools you can use, include:
- Typeform — A user-friendly platform that lets you craft PMF survey templates with customized branding.
- Google Forms—A more basic but accessible service that allows you to create surveys for free.
- Hotjar — A more advanced tool for survey pros with heatmaps and feedback widgets.
Most of these tools allow you to embed or share your PMF surveys on the web, in emails, and across social media. If it’s your first rodeo, Google Forms will probably suffice, but if you want more branding and analytics to dig into, it might be worth investing in something like Hotjar.
How to maximize PMF survey response rates?
You’ll need to add a personal touch to emails and posts containing your survey to maximize response rates. Use a friendly human tone—think light, breezy, and conversational, not serious and corporate.
You can also thank them for being a valued customer etc. and maybe offer small incentives, such as discounts or early access, to give them a nudge in the right direction.
Timing is also important. Sending a survey at the dead of night or on weekends will likely result in it getting overlooked. Most research points to non-peak times in the early morning, lunch, and early evening from Monday to Thursday being the best for maximizing the amount of survey responses.
5. Distribute the survey
After you’ve got your survey together, it’s time to send it and start gathering responses. There are multiple ways you can set up and distribute a PMF survey.
A few examples include:
- Email using a CRM or email marketing system
- Pop-ups on a website or a landing page
- In-app on a mobile app
- Publishing posts on social media
- Post-onboarding using push notifications on an app or website
The main objective is meeting your customer in the right place, where you expect them to be, and where they are accustomed to engaging with you.
And just as important in the context of PMF surveys, sending it to the right subset of your target audience, at just the right time in the development of your product or service to get meaningful insights. Times you might need to use surveys to assess your position include:
- Before you seek funding
- A/B testing before making significant changes or updates to your product
- Before launching a new payment system or a UX overhaul
- When scaling your products
Creating a PMF survey invitation
The style and tone of your invitation must be tailored to the channel you are using to send it. Mobile app pop ups won’t require as much copy, for example, but you might need to spend a bit more time crafting an email. Here’s a sample survey invitation for email:
Subject: Quick favor? We’d love your input
Hi [First Name],
As one of our early users, your feedback is really valuable to us. We’re working hard to make [Product Name] better and it would be great to hear your thoughts.
It’s just 5 quick questions and will only take a few minutes.
[Link to survey]
Thanks for being a [Brand Name] customer.
How many PMF survey responses do I need?
You don’t want to run a survey for months on end. Try to get a large enough sample size—40+ is the threshold to clear—within a short time frame. A typical run time for a PMF survey is 5 to 14 days. You can send reminders and follow-up emails to boost response rates during this period, but after a while, diminishing returns will kick in. Focus on quality, not quantity.
The aim is to have fresh and valid responses to analyze.
6. Analyze the results (how to measure product-market fit)
Once the results are in, you can start digging deeper into what you’ve collated to glean those all-important insights about your product.
First up is zoning in on the Sean Ellis question and finding out whether you’ve hit the magical 40% figure for “very disappointed” responses. This is simple math: divide the total of responses by the number of people that said “very disappointed” and then multiply by 100 to get your PMF score.
If your PMF score is above 40, great—you’ve achieved product market fit. But there’s lots more to analyze and discover.
Next, calculate the response percentages for any multiple-choice questions.
Don’t just stop at percentages and fixate on raw numbers, though. Patterns matter more. Look for recurring themes in any of the open-ended answers, and try to match them up with your raw figures for additional context. Are users highlighting the same feature as the main value driver? Are there clear friction points of missing capabilities being mentioned?
For example:
- If many users say they would recommend your product to “X type of person”, that helps you create better, targeted buyer personas for marketing.
- If feedback repeatedly points to a confusing onboarding process, you might have to sharpen this up and overhaul your activation flow.
Look for insights from any optional questions, too. If you asked: “what would you miss the most if this product disappeared?”, the findings can unearth your product’s true value proposition; sometimes in words you hadn’t considered using in your branding and marketing.
Once you’ve got all your insights together, it’s important to make some definitive conclusions that you can start taking action on.
7. Take action based on feedback
Now you’ve got your insights, you can start iterating and improving your product. The goal isn’t to please every customer, but to refine your product for your target audience—those who matter the most.
Here are a few examples of how you might make changes:
- Reworking features (or killing them)— If certain features are rarely mentioned or create confusion, it’s a sign they may need to be overhauled or removed entirely to reduce clutter and streamline your product.
- Adjusting positioning and messaging— If the open-ended responses have been an eye-opener with customers describing your product differently to how you expected, it’s time to realign your message to match their language and expectations.
- Improving onboarding and user experience—If users struggle when first using your product, you could simplify tutorials, and add tooltips to increase engagement. And address any usability issues or inefficiencies that customers may have flagged.
- Tweaking product roadmap—You can use the feedback to focus development efforts on features that customers want.
You can also refer to Dan Olsen’s Product Market Fit pyramid—a sort of hierarchy of needs for creating products that people truly want. There are five layers to this period, which when delivered, will help you to achieve PMF. These are:
- Target customer
- Underserved needs
- Value proposition
- Feature set
- User experience (UX)
You can use your findings to tick off each of these: are you really delivering on each one?
Finally, surveys will reveal all the good stuff you are doing as well. The key is to prioritize changes that will amplify what’s already working, while eliminating anything that’s holding users back. This customer feedback loop—survey, analyze, act—is how successful startups move from early traction to true product market fit.
Common mistakes to avoid with product-market fit surveys
Practice makes perfect. You’ll get better at PMF surveys the more you do them, but there are some common pitfalls to watch out for. Mistakes that companies often make, include:
1. Asking too many or irrelevant questions
A bloated survey with too many questions is unwieldy and difficult to manage—for you and your customers! Less is more when it comes to PMF feedback. You want clarity and insightful feedback. Stick to between 3 and 7 purposeful questions that align with a single, specific objective. Extra questions can muddy the data and lower response rates (low enthusiasm from users often translates to poor findings).
2. Surveying the wrong users
A great survey and some great analytical tools won’t be able to save a survey that’s pitched to the wrong people. Strike out casual visitors, friends, or new users. You need engaged users (paying customers, repeat users etc.) to get insights that mean something. These are the people that know enough about your product and have used it enough to provide honest, valuable feedback.
3. Ignoring qualitative feedback
What people say can be just as important as numbers and metrics. While the 40% benchmark is central to PMF surveys, it can be dangerous just to action findings without taking anything else into context. You want to know the “why” behind user sentiment. You should be looking for pain points, unmet needs, and opportunities to address and take advantage of—not just figures to pore over.
4. Misinterpreting the 40% rule
The 40% benchmark is valuable, but it’s not a universal truth for every survey. Sample size matters. If you only get 30 responses, 12 people saying they’d be “very disappointed” is a weak signal compared to 400 out of 1,000 respondents stating it. You can start trusting patterns more when you get 40 to 50 responses. And remember to pair percentages with qualitative trends and user segmentation.
A great survey won’t be enough if you don’t take the time to analyze the findings correctly. Don’t rush this final stage.
Summing up: Your next step to achieve product-market fit
So, there you have it. Product-market fit isn’t some abstract milestone. It’s the foundation for sustainable growth. And the simplest, fastest way to find out whether you’ve reached this holy grail is by running a well-executed product-market fit survey.
Even though we’ve covered a lot of ground in this blog: don’t overthink getting a survey together. You don’t need weeks of prep or a huge data team. In fact, you can start building and running a survey this week.
Here’s a starter kit to get you going:
- Template: Use the proven Sean Ellis question and 3 to 6 other tailored questions using some of our survey examples above as inspiration.
- Checklist:
- Define your survey goal
- Pick a survey tool
- Target the right users
- Plan your distribution
- Set a clear deadline
- Send survey
- Tool:Start with Google Forms if your budget is tight or for first drafts, and upgrade to TypeForm or Hotjar if necessary.
Need a hand to find your product-market fit? exceptfriday can help you to design a survey that reveals what users really think, and turn that feedback into an action growth strategy for your business. Let’s validate your product vision and build something people really love.
Book a free discovery call today to discuss the framework for your custom product-market fit survey.
