EP9: How to Know You Have Product-Market Fit

Product market fit is often talked about like it is a specific destination. A place you arrive at once and know that you’ve arrived. But the reality of growing a SaaS company is that you may not know if you have product-market fit or if you have it, you may not know how good the fit really is. In this episode of In Demand, Asia Orangio of DemandMaven shares the seven best indicators for when you’ve found product-market fit and how to take action if you haven’t reached them yet.  TLDL:  It feels like you are guiding a boulder down a mountain, not pushing it up the mountain.  When customers are signing up despite some product issues and every new lead or customer doesn’t feel like a lot of work, that is an indicator that you’ve found product-market fit.  Prospects are willing to pay right now and they don’t bat an eye about the price When you have customers finding you and signing up right away, that is a great sign of product-market fit. Retention and active users improve with every new cohort of paying customers  If you look back 12 months (or 6 in case of being a new venture) and you have retained at least 50% of your customers and that rate is growing over time, that is a great sign of product-market fit.  Running a product-market fit survey and getting 40% of your customers saying they would be very disappointed if your product disappeared Using the SuperHuman fit survey (https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine-to-find-product-market-fit/) and finding that at least 40% of your customers are every invested in your product shows that you have found product-market fit.  To quickly recap the survey, ask “How would feel if you could no longer use the product?” With three options:  Very Disappointed  Somewhat disappointed  Not disappointed at all When one new customer generates two or more customers When a customer generates two new customer without you having to do anything, you have a great indicator of product-market fit.  Having this viral growth from word of mouth dramatically decreases your cost of acquisition and is a sign that you have a great segment and fit.  Cost to acquire a customer is under a third of the lifetime value of a customer If the lifetime value of a customer

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Growing a SaaS? Yeah, that's hard. Growing a SaaS without a clue what you're doing from a marketing and growth perspective? Pretty much impossible — especially if you want to break the $1M and $10M ARR marks. Kim Talarczyk sits down with Asia Orangio to extract and unpack all the strategic insights she holds in her brain from working with hundreds of SaaS companies and interviewing thousands of their customers. Together, they break down how to diagnose and troubleshoot growth challenges across every part of a B2B SaaS business. About your hosts: Asia Orangio is the CEO & Founder of DemandMaven. Asia helps founders of PLG SaaS companies troubleshoot their growth across GTM, acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion and get unstuck. In early 2018, Asia founded DemandMaven — a consulting firm dedicated to helping bootstrapped and funded SaaS companies build revenue-generating growth engines. Previously, Asia served in a number of marketing roles, but most notably as head of marketing at Hull where she helped the team 10.5x in growth, and #FlipMyFunnel / Terminus as demand generation manager. Asia also served on the board of Moz before its successful acquisition in 2021. Kim Talarczyk is the Client Services and Operations Manager at DemandMaven, where she ensures all client engagements are executed to the highest standard. With a strong background in client-facing roles and professional service firms, Kim has played a key role in scaling operations and delivering exceptional experiences for both B2C and B2B brands.