Product Market Fit Survey: The Key to Successful Product Launches

According to ExplodingTopics, the SaaS industry has grown approximately 500% in the last seven years. 

However, achieving product market fit remains a significant challenge for SaaS businesses looking to launch new products or services. Without it, companies can struggle to gain traction, retain customers, and achieve long-term growth.

So, how do you measure product market fit? 

You can use a product market fit survey. It is a powerful tool that provides insights into the needs, preferences, and pain points of your target market. By gathering direct customer feedback, you can refine your product, messaging, positioning, and overall strategy rather than relying on guesswork or assumptions.

In this blog post, we will demystify product market fit surveys, explain how to create one and show how to use the results to achieve product market fit.

We will also introduce Customerly, our customer satisfaction tool, which enables you to create, deploy and analyze product market fit surveys quickly and efficiently to gain valuable insights and execute successful product launches. Sign up today to evaluate all features.

Let’s start with some basic information.

A product market fit survey helps you collect and analyze feedback directly from potential or existing customers to determine whether your product or service fullfills their needs and expectations and provides value to your target audience.

A product market fit survey helps you make data-driven decisions about your product roadmap and overall strategy, leading to long-term growth and success.

You can use it to identify gaps in your product offerings, reduce failure risk, increase product adoption and boost customer satisfaction metrics.

You can also use your findings to create a unique value proposition to differentiate your business from competitors, giving you an advantage in the market.

Achieving a desired product-market fit requires monitoring several critical indicators. They include:

• Customer retention: If customers continuously use your product and renew their subscription, it shows it meets their needs and provides value.
• Customer acquisition: If you attract new customers cost-effectively, it suggests the product is well-suited to the target market and fits customers’ preferences well.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend your product to others. A high Net Promoter Score indicates that your product meets or exceeds customer expectations.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): It helps you understand the value of your customers beyond their initial purchase. By estimating the expected revenue a customer will generate over their lifetime, you can make more informed decisions about how much to spend on customer acquisition and retention. 
• Time-to-value: It measures the time it takes for a customer to receive value from a product or service after making the purchase. If a customer can quickly and easily derive value from a product, it meets their needs.

Tracking these metrics helps you increase customer loyalty and revenue and achieve growth.

Launching a new product or service without surveying your target audience is risky. It can severely impact your business’s growth and success. 

Let’s discuss the potential consequences you may face in the process.

Inaccurate understanding of customer needs

Without understanding your customer’s needs, you risk creating a product that nobody wants to use. It can lead to poor sales, low customer satisfaction, and negative word-of-mouth.

Wasted time and resources

You may have additional expenses for product development, marketing, and sales to generate interest and attract customers after the launch.

Low product adoption rates

Low adoption rates show that customers are reluctant to try or use your product. It can be detrimental to your company’s overall growth and financial health.

Negative customer feedback

Negative feedback can come in many forms, such as poor product reviews, negative social media comments, low Net Promoter Scores and many NPS detractors. When customers share their negative experiences with others, it can hinder your customer acquisition and retention efforts.

Poor market positioning

A lack of audience understanding can result in unsuccessful product positioning that fails to connect with the target customers. It can happen if you focus on irrelevant features and benefits or target the wrong demographic.

Inability to differentiate from competitors

Without understanding what makes your product unique, you may struggle to communicate its value proposition and fail to differentiate yourself from competitors.

Customers may not understand your product or how it differs from similar products on the market. This confusion can lead to low sales and slow adoption rates.

Limited market growth potential

Without proper market research, you may not recognize the opportunity to expand into new markets and increase your customer base, limiting your growth potential.

Missed opportunities for product innovation

Customers are always looking for the next best thing. If your product fails to meet their evolving needs and expectations, customers may seek alternatives from your competitors. Failing to innovate can lead to stagnation, ultimately affecting your bottom line.

Increased risk of product failure

Without conducting market research and evaluating the competition, there is a risk of creating a product that is not unique or innovative enough to stand out in the market. It can result in the product being lost among similar products and failing to attract a significant customer base.

Determining the right pricing strategy and distribution channels can also be challenging. It can lead to overpricing or underpricing the product, resulting in lost revenue or decreased profit margins.

A product market fit survey helps you overcome these challenges by providing insights into customer needs and preferences, leading to better product development, positioning, sales and marketing. 

It results in increased adoption rates, customer loyalty, and business growth.

Let’s discuss creating product market fit surveys to help you facilitate the process and achieve product market fit faster.

In the following sections, we will outline critical steps for designing product market fit surveys and show you how to use Customerly to streamline the process and boost adoption rates.

Preparing for a survey can be challenging, requiring a strategic approach and the right tools. Let’s discuss some initial steps in the process.

Define survey objectives 

Setting objectives helps you define the purpose and the outcomes you hope to achieve. Without clear goals, you may have insufficient insights to improve your product or service.

Identify the key questions you want to answer and set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) objectives. It will help you create a survey that is focused and effective.

Identify the target audience 

To create a successful survey, it’s crucial to identify your target customer and segment your audience effectively. It involves determining the most relevant respondents based on demographics, behavior, and preferences.

Customerly provides robust features to help you understand who your customers are, what they want, and what they expect from your product or service. You can filter all contacts, create dynamic lists and determine your respondents with laser precision.

Choose the right survey software

To streamline creating and conducting surveys, you should employ user-friendly, customizable software that provides automation tools, in-app survey templates, in-depth reporting and customer experience analytics. 

Customerly ticks all the boxes allowing you to easily create product market fit surveys using a pre-made template or creating your survey from scratch. 

You can distribute your product market fit survey via live chat to increase customer engagement and follow up based on customer responses.

You can also decide whether to send the survey immediately, schedule it, or stop it after a specific date. Whatever suits your needs, we have you covered!

Now that you know how to define goals and target audience and which software to use, let’s discuss creating a compelling product market fit survey that drives engagement and increases your response rates.

Avoid typical survey design mistakes

Your customers have a limited attention span and are unlikely to complete a lengthy survey. Customerly helps you reduce high abandonment rates, keeping your survey concise and focused on your key objectives.

Our clean and visually appealing layout you can align with your branding, makes it easy for respondents to navigate the survey.

Avoid using technical jargon or complex language that may confuse your users. Use straightforward language to ensure customers can easily understand and answer your questions.

Choose the right question type

Ensure the questions are relevant to your survey objectives and target audience. Use a combination of open-ended and close-ended questions to obtain both qualitative and quantitative data.

With Customerly, you can choose various question types, such as:

• Multiple choices (button)
• Multiple choices (radio)
• Dropdown
• Scale
• Rating
• Number
• Short text
• Long text

By carefully structuring and connecting questions and possible answers, you can create a logical flow that ensures respondents stay engaged throughout the survey. 

You can use the detailed insights from the survey to optimize your product or service, resulting in an improved customer experience. 

Write unbiased survey questions

To ensure data accuracy and reliability, writing unbiased survey questions is crucial. 

Biased questions can result in inaccurate and misleading data, failing to capture customers’ genuine opinions. Leading, double-barreled, and questions with loaded language or assumptions are examples of biased questions that can skew your results. 

By avoiding these questions and using trusted survey software like Customerly, you can collect unbiased data that provides valuable insights into customer preferences and behavior.

Pilot testing the survey

Before launching the survey, test it with a small sample of your target audience to identify any issues or areas for improvement. Ask respondents for feedback on the survey’s structure, question clarity, and ease of use. 

You can use this feedback to refine the survey and increase response rates.

Customerly in-app surveys and live chat allow you to distribute surveys directly within your app or website.

The main benefit is that it offers a non-intrusive way to gather customer feedback while using your product or service and collect valuable data for your product market fit strategy. 

By using Customerly, you can distribute surveys through these channels in a user-friendly and engaging way, leading to higher response rates and more accurate data.

By analyzing your survey results and making targeted improvements based on customer feedback, you can drive growth for your business. 

With Customerly reporting tools, you have everything you need to make informed decisions and take action to achieve product market fit.

The Insights page displays essential metrics such as completion rates, drop-off rates, rejection rates, and total views. Additionally, you can examine the statistics of individual questions and responses to gain more insights.

The Completion tab shows the most popular responses as a percentage based on the type of response received for each question. It helps you understand how your customers feel about specific aspects of your product or service.

Meanwhile, the Responses tab allows you to view all individual responses, and clicking on a contact will show their feedback. This feature provides detailed insights into each user’s complete answers, allowing you to identify patterns and trends in customer feedback.

If you want to learn more about a particular contact, you can visit their profile. Additionally, if you want to evaluate the individual responses for a specific user, you can find them under their profile page in the Feedback section.

Finally, you can export survey results in CSV and XLS formats. It allows you to analyze and share your survey data with other team members in your organization. 

Once you have collected the survey data, you can use the results to make informed product development, strategy, sales and marketing decisions. Let’s discuss using product market fit survey results in each area.

Incorporating survey results into product development

Not all ideas are good. Product-market fit survey results can provide valuable insights for improving your product. Analyzing the data lets you identify the features and benefits your customers value the most. 

Incorporating survey results into product development can also help you avoid wasting time and resources on features your customers do not care about.

Use this information to prioritize your product development efforts and focus on the areas that will significantly impact customer satisfaction.

This way, you can ensure that you are building a product that meets the needs of your target market.

Adjusting product strategy based on survey results

Analyzing product market fit survey results can inform your product strategy by identifying gaps in your offering and guiding adjustments to your plan. 

It includes refining target markets and messaging to better resonate with customers, assessing alignment with customer needs, and gauging market demand for your product.

Leveraging survey results for marketing and sales purposes

You can use product market fit survey results to create effective marketing and sales messages and improve customer acquisition and retention rates. 

By highlighting the features and benefits your customers value the most, you can create a compelling value proposition that resonates with your target market. 

Additionally, you can use the survey results to identify potential advocates for your product. Customers who rate your product highly on the survey may be willing to provide testimonials or refer others to your business. 

In conclusion, product market fit survey results can provide valuable insights into your product’s strengths and weaknesses to ensure your product meets the needs of your target market and achieve business success.

Conducting a product market fit survey ensures your product or service meets your target audience’s needs and expectations. To start, you need at least some users you can involve in the process.

With the right objectives, a clearly defined target audience, advanced survey software, carefully planned questions, and digital distribution channels, you can collect valuable feedback to improve your product market fit.

Customerly is the best solution for conducting effective product market fit surveys.  

With features such as live chat and in-app survey distribution, customizable and user-friendly survey design, automation tools, and detailed reporting and analysis, Customerly can help you optimize your product or service and drive growth for your business.