A Product Market Fit (PMF) survey measures how well your product meets the needs of your target audience. PMF surveys ask how disappointed visitors would be if they could no longer use your product, providing early insight into whether your product addresses a genuine need. This type of survey is most useful during product development and iteration cycles.
Use cases
Use a PMF survey when you want to:
- Validate whether a new product or feature resonates with your target audience.
- Measure how critical your product is to visitors.
- Look for signals of market readiness before scaling.
Use segments to target visitors who've reached milestones, such as completing onboarding or engaging with a new feature.
PMF survey questions
A standard PMF survey includes a primary disappointment question and an optional open answer follow-up.
The key question asks: "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?"
Visitors select from three options:
- Very disappointed
- Mildly disappointed
- Not disappointed
This question determines the overall PMF score and can't be removed or reordered.
The survey also includes an optional open answer question: "Tell us why you gave this rating." This provides additional context for interpreting the score.
Customize your survey
You can customize the non-essential questions in your PMF survey to match your feedback goals. When editing a survey, you can:
- Add questions. Add open answer, rating scale, or multiple choice questions to your survey.
- Reorder questions. Use drag and drop to change the order of non-essential questions.
- Remove questions. Remove any question that doesn't determine the overall PMF score.
The key question that determines the overall PMF score is fixed and can't be moved or removed. You also can't add questions to the confirmation message step.
For instructions on how to create a survey, see Create a PMF survey.
Limitations
Surveys in Sentiment use a fixed template to ensure consistent scoring and reporting. This means you can't:
- Remove questions that determine the overall survey score.
- Reorder the questions that determine the overall survey score. They must appear first in the survey.
- Add additional sections to the "Thank you" message.
- Combine survey steps into a single step after you've created a survey.
How a PMF score is calculated
The overall PMF score is calculated as a percentage of positive responses out of the total number of responses. For PMF, the answer "Very disappointed" indicates a strong product-market fit and is counted as a positive response.
\[ PMF = 100 \times \frac{Positive Responses}{Total Responses} \]
For example, if 42 out of 100 respondents answered "Very disappointed," the PMF score is 42%. If all responses were "Mildly disappointed" or "Not disappointed," the PMF score would be 0%, since no positive responses were recorded.
A score of 40% or higher is commonly used as a benchmark for product-market fit. In Sentiment, this benchmark is displayed as a threshold line in the Insights tab for your PMF surveys.