How to run a Product/Market Fit survey (the Sean Ellis Survey)

Summary: how to apply the Sean Ellis survey to assess your product's Product/Market fit.

Sean Ellis, author of Hacking Growth, described in his book a simple survey to find out whether your product has reached market fit and is ready to start an accelerated growth curve.

Basically, the survey starts with the following question:

• How disappointed would you be if this product stopped working tomorrow?

1. Very disappointed
2. Somewhat disappointed
3. It wouldn't affect me much (I don't think it's all that useful)
4. I don't use the product anymore, so it makes no difference.

If more than 40% of the answers are "very disappointed", then you have Product/Market Fit;

Results lower than that can mean either that your onboarding is lacking (people don't know how to use the product), the product is lacking (the product doesn't meet expectations yet), or you have the wrong audience (we attracted the wrong kind of person to use the product).

In these cases, you need to understand where the problem is and fix it.

The questions that help answer these doubts are the following:

• What would you use as an alternative to our product if it were no longer available?

1. I probably wouldn't use an alternative
2. I would use: ____

• What is the biggest benefit you get from using our product?
• Have you recommended our product to anyone?
• If so, how did you describe it?
• What kind of person do you think would benefit most from our product?
• How can we make our product better so you're happier with it?

How to implement this survey:

The best way to run the survey is using Hotjar and its Polls feature, which is free for up to 2 thousand pageviews per day.

You can see their tutorial on how to do that here.

If you don't have a website, or want to send the survey by email, use Google Forms or Typeform to do it.

Good luck!!