And you can always feel product/market fit when it is happening. The customers are buying the product just as fast as you can make it — or usage is growing just as fast as you can add more servers. Money from customers is piling up in your company checking account.

Ellis had found a leading indicator: just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.”

Ellis found that the magic number was 40%.

We identified users who recently experienced the core of our product, following Ellis’ recommendation to focus on those who used the product at least twice in the last two weeks.

We then emailed these users a link to a Typeform survey asking the following four questions:

If you instead use the "very disappointed" group of survey respondents as a lens to narrow the market, the data can speak for itself — and you may even uncover different markets where your product resonates very strongly.

With this more segmented view of our data, the numbers shifted. By segmenting down to the very disappointed group that loved our product most, our product/market fit score jumped by 10%.

I turned to Julie Supan’s high-expectation customer framework as a tool to do just that. Supan notes that the high-expectation customer (HXC) isn’t an all encompassing persona, but rather the most discerning person within your target demographic.

you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.

After throwing the responses into a word cloud, some common themes emerged

Politely disregard those who would not be disappointed without your product. They are so far from loving you that they are essentially a lost cause.

From analyzing our third survey question, we knew that happy Superhuman users enjoyed speed as their main benefit, so we used this as a filter for the somewhat disappointed group

If you only double down on what users love, your product/market fit score won’t increase. If you only address what holds users back, your competition will likely overtake you.

we got to work, starting with the lowest hanging fruit of low cost, high impact work so we could deliver improvements immediately.

To increase your product/market fit score, spend half your time doubling down on what users already love and the other half on addressing what’s holding others back.

We were careful to ensure that we didn’t survey users more than once, so as to not throw off the 40% benchmark.

the product/market fit score is something that we’re going to continue to track. I think it's always useful for startups to look at this metric, because as you grow you'll encounter different kinds of users.

Investors advising early-stage teams should avoid pushing for growth ahead of product/market fit. As an industry, we all know that this ends in disaster, yet the pressure for premature growth is still all too common. Startups need time and space to find their fit and launch the right way.