(2019-02-15) How To Measure Product Market Fit With Superhuman Founder Rahul Vohra

Gail Alexrod: How to Measure Product Market Fit with Superhuman Founder Rahul Vohra. They’re both even necessary. So the PMF score (very disappointed) measures a level of dependency on a product, either because there’s such a strong emotional connection or because nothing else exists quite like it. The NPS score on the other hand measures how strong your word of mouth effect is. In other words, how strong or how viral rather your product can be in the real world. In practice, one is not better than the other. You need both to build a meaningful company. One is gonna determine the fundamental success of the product, and the other is going to determine your distribution success

On the survey that we send out, we have both the PMF questions as well as the NPS questions.

• Note that in tweets he clarifies that he counts non-response as a negative response in his PMF/NPS surveys. Which roughly no other NPS users do. I agree with him.

What kinds of products do you think this super slow rollout have to get it right, really sort of hyper focused on all the details

How were you able to sort of look at Gmail, that huge, huge, huge elephant in the room and say we can do better.

good vc friend of mine took me out to lunch and he sat me down and he said, :Hey Rahul, you sold a company now. That changes things for you a little bit, especially when it comes to fundraising. You are now able to take on really capital intensive businesses.”

No, seriously. You can raise money on a dream, and no one will question your ability to put together a team that executes.”

for Rapportive, it was much more of the classical way of doing it, which is I had taught myself to be a a semi incompetent web developer, let’s put it that way, built a prototype. I identified a problem, sort of single handedly got this thing out the door, somehow it barely did anything. The core idea of information in your Gmail was so resonant that that quickly got to tens of thousands of users. And then used that traction to recruit some wonderful co-founders and we then use that team to get into Y-combinator and we then used that branding to raise some seed funding and then we were off to the races. And so if you pull that apart, if you imagine this flywheel, the very first thing I did there was build a prototype. And then it was launch it. And then it will show that people really loved it.

I started, scaled and sold Rapportive in 20 months from writing the first line of code.

Now they both have very different orders of magnitude for ambition. Rapportive was a tiny little feature inside of Gmail, whereas Superhuman is the entire email experience of which Rapportive is just a tiny little feature.

(I) had seven failed companies prior to Rapportive.