Growing a SaaS startup is hard when you are low on resources, have a skeletal staff, and not a lot of user data. When you are at the early stages it might be tempting to pour all your resources into traffic acquisition and conversion.
However, what if that traffic is not qualified, and you get a whole lot of people who bounce back immediately after landing on your site because it’s not the right fit? What if you get users to sign up based on stellar marketing but find that they leave in droves because the product doesn’t solve burning user problems? And, what if all these users are actually in love with your product but there’s not enough users in the entire marketing universe to tap into and grow?
Answers to these questions are critical in determining your marketing, product, and growth strategy. If you answer them wrong it might be too costly to pivot down the line. This is where the concept of product market fit comes in.
When you have attained product market fit you can:
- Tweak or change features with the assurance that the changes will be more valuable to end users.
- Know for certain which channels are the most cost effective and efficient at getting new users, and focus solely on them.
- Get clarity on your north star metric.
There are different benchmarks to measure product market fit and while they vary based on industry and business model a good indicator has to do with user engagement.
To help you understand more about product market fit check out this quick quiz. These questions will tell you how clearly you get the concept, and also how product market fit can impact on other vital metrics of SaaS growth.