The world market has never been more saturated. With countless innovations looking to make their break, what exactly makes a product stick? Let’s look at 2 successful start-ups–Superhuman and Miro–and the effective product strategies they have employed for proven growth.

Superhuman: Establishing product-market fit

Superhuman is an email app focused on boosting productivity. Founded by Rahul Vohra, its streamlined design and advanced features enhance the email experience, providing users with efficient tools for organisation and tracking.

In 2017, as Superhuman was gearing up towards their launch, Vohra was feeling uncertain. He felt that there was a lack of product-market fit for Superhuman, and was striving for an actionable path to find the right niche for the product.

So, what exactly is product-market fit?

The most-frequently quoted explanation of “product-market fit” comes from Marc Anderssen, a tech billionaire and venture capitalist. In his 2007 blog post, he writes:

“Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

You can always feel when product/market fit isn’t happening. The customers aren’t quite getting value out of the product, word of mouth isn’t spreading, usage isn’t growing that fast, press reviews are kind of “blah”, the sales cycle takes too long, and lots of deals never close.”

To Vohra then, Superhuman had not found its fit with its audience. This drove him to look into possible metrics to measure the current product-market fit, so that they can search for ways to optimise it. 

Challenge: Finding metrics to measure product-market fit in the development stage

Inspired by Sean Ellis, Vohra decided on using the “very disappointed” metric as an indicator for a well-fitted product. 

This metric simply involves asking users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?”, and then measuring the percent who answer “very disappointed.” Based on a benchmark of almost 100 startups, Ellis discovered that companies struggling to find growth almost always had less than 40% of users respond “very disappointed,” whereas companies with strong traction almost always exceeded that threshold.

Now, with that metric, Vohra’s new goal was to improve Superhuman’s product-market fit score.

Optimising product-market fit

To optimise product-market fit, Vohra and the team decided to align the product to the group of users who would be “very disappointed” without Superhuman. This is where Superhuman’s fit lies with the audience–this group represents the customer that can strongly benefit from the product. 

The team wanted to serve this narrow segment better, and therefore placed more value on the opinions of this segment. Additionally, to convert on-the-fence users to love Superhuman, the team also listened to and enacted on the feedback of these users.

By doubling down on what their core users love, and what holds others back, Superhuman has steadily grown into a startup to look out for, earning a spot in Forbes’ 2020 Next Billion-Dollar Startups. 

Miro: Improving user retention

Miro is an online collaborative whiteboard platform that allows teams to work together in real-time, making it easy to create and share various types of visual content for collaboration and brainstorming.

Challenge: Retaining users during the product’s growth

During the pandemic, Miro saw an exponential growth in users, as people were looking for ways they could collaborate online. The broadening of their customer base meant that the Miro team needed to simplify their first user experience. They wanted the product to remain easy-to-use for the less tech-savvy, as only then can they retain these users.

Miro’s Activation Metrics

Activation metrics are a group of leading indicators that focuses on whether a user “activates”--that is, they reach the point of understanding the product’s core value and are ready to actively use the product for their own needs. 

To measure the activation of their users, the Miro Team broke down the user activation phase into 3 parts: the setup, aha and habit stages.

• Setup: the first time the user interact with the product

• Aha: the moment when the user experience and “click” with the product’s core-value proposition

• Habit: when the user forms a pattern of usage around the product’s core action

The team wanted to look into the friction that users may have with Miro early on, such that they can reduce this friction and allow more users to “activate”. That way, they can improve user retention and effectively grow their user base.

Improving the onboarding flow: increasing the “aha” moment

To improve user activation, the Miro team iterated various features to optimise user onboarding. These iterations were aimed at increasing the “aha” moment–by guiding users to realise the core value of the product. 

Such features included tutorials, AI-generated videos, tweaks in the UI and UX, and adding reactions, and many more. Each iteration is backed by extensive data analysis beforehand, and would be followed up by more data analysis and user feedback to assess its impact.

Through constant innovations and smart iterations, Miro has allowed itself to emerge as one of the most valuable start-ups in recent years. With a company valuation of $17.5 billion in 2022, Miro is poised for a future of growth and success.

Conclusion

Building a successful product is no easy feat. Understanding how your product fits into the market and how to have users “click” with your product is only a small, yet essential part of the game. Then again, isn’t this what makes product management exciting? 

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