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Comment by kevsim | Hacker News Reader

At my startup [0] it's still early days, but we're trying to use the Superhuman "engine" [1] for testing PMF. Basically this is a survey where you ask your users how disappointed they'd be if they couldn't use your product anymore, and if enough say "very disappointed", then you're on to something. By no means is it the only/best measure of PMF, but it's a data point.

0: https://kitemaker.co

1: https://firstround.com/review/how-superhuman-built-an-engine...

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OP here. Superhuman's framework is great, but in many enterprises the buyer and decision maker is different - most times you have to build a stronger justification for the exec sponsor to pull the trigger using the value/RoI framework unless the product is cheap enough to flow below the radar. You also need to justify why it makes sense to yank out what you have right now and replace with something else causing a lot of disruption.

Superhuman is not a b2b purchase but more of a prosumer purchase, so the framework works really well for them.

This definitely resonates. We’re building a product management/issue tracker and it sometimes happy that we have very satisfied users who are then forced into using Jira or something else because of company-wide mandates.

*sometimes happens

Yes in this case it can be seen as a necessary but not sufficient condition.

A company I worked for used this measure and customers were consistently confused by the wording. Happy customers would respond Not Disappointed At All and we'd have to followup and double check if that's what they actually meant (it wasn't).

In your experience, how does that compare to measuring continual "use" of your product, like churn, cohort tracking, and others?

From the linked article, I'd say the "what's missing" question is perhaps the best signal, if customers list tons of missing things yet continue using the product despite those shortcomings, as measured by usage stats for instance, then you know you not only have PMF but also the beginnings of a lock on the market.

OP here. Always a good place to be in. Hard numbers is more valuable but you need to think about how to address the concerns else you will hit a glass ceiling, or the moment they find an alternative they will jump. Thinking about lock-in is very important.

Your product looks interesting. Only blocker for me is that you only bill annually. This is SaaS, there is very little onboarding cost, why lock people in?

Hi! We offer both monthly and annual billing. Sorry for the confusion- we’ll clear it up on the landing page.

We added the pricing with monthly billing cycles now. Thanks for catching it!

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