This guide is your comprehensive resource for understanding and assessing product-market fit. Whether you’re a startup or an established business aiming to scale, this guide will help you use product-market fit surveys to gather actionable insights, identify your target audience, and refine your product offering for sustainable growth. Let’s go!

Here’s what you’ll find:

Whether you’re new to product-market fit surveys or looking to refine your current approach, this guide will provide you with everything you need to design, deploy, and analyze surveys effectively. By leveraging these insights, you can better understand your product's value in the market, uncover opportunities for improvement, and drive long-term growth.

This survey measures how well your product meets market demand using a single key question:

“How disappointed would you be if you could no longer use this product?”

Responses can range from “very disappointed” to “not disappointed at all.” Not only does this survey help assess product-market fit but also provides insights to help you achieve it if you’re not there yet.

Here’s how you can break down the responses:

Try to aim for 40-50 responses from a relevant audience, as recommended by leading experts. Focus on engaged users who have actively used your product’s core features and been activated within the last two weeks. Target this customer group, anticipating around a 30% response rate. This approach ensures reliable, actionable insights to determine how close you are to achieving product-market fit.

Product-market fit surveys help you confirm whether your product truly addresses a market need. By gathering insights from your customers about how they perceive the value of your product, you can validate demand and ensure you're targeting the right audience.

Customer feedback provides a clear roadmap for future development. Understanding what features your customers find most valuable (or what they feel is missing) enables you to prioritize improvements and build a product that resonates with your market.

By understanding why some customers succeed with your product while others don’t, you can refine your messaging, onboarding, or targeting strategies to attract and retain the right users for your business.

Survey feedback helps pinpoint potential opportunities for product enhancements, new features, or even entirely new offerings that align with customer needs. Understanding what resonates most with your audience allows you to focus on growth initiatives that have the greatest impact.

Product-market fit surveys reveal how well your product meets the needs and expectations of your target audience. By identifying areas where your product excels and areas for improvement, you can optimize its features, usability, and overall value to better serve your customers.

Survey feedback helps pinpoint potential opportunities for product enhancements, new features, or even entirely new offerings that align with customer needs. Understanding what resonates most with your audience allows you to focus on growth initiatives that have the greatest impact.

There’s no best channel, but there are channels that you should be focusing on that could be the best for your situation. Here’s a breakdown of the most effective channels for market-fit surveys in different scenarios:

Email surveys are a versatile option for market-fit research, especially when targeting a broader audience, such as trial users, existing customers, or past customers. Emails give respondents time to reflect on their experience and provide detailed insights about how well your product meets their needs.

In-app surveys are an excellent choice when you want to collect feedback from users actively engaging with your product. Whether they’re exploring a new feature, going through onboarding, or completing a key action, in-app surveys let you capture their immediate impressions,fresh, relevant, and essential for understanding market fit.

Website pop-up surveys can be a great way to reach potential customers or visitors who are exploring your website. They’re especially helpful for understanding what potential customers think about your product, what they’re looking for, or why they might not take the next step,like signing up or making a purchase.

If you already have paying customers, post-purchase surveys can provide valuable insights into whether your product is meeting their expectations. These surveys help identify how well your product fits their needs and what improvements could enhance their experience.

To get the most valuable insights from your customer support surveys, it’s important to target the right segments of your audience. Here’s a guide to the groups that can provide the most impactful feedback, some of them may be more obvious than others:

Surveying customers who decide to leave your product can reveal powerful insights into areas where your product might not meet market expectations. These are the users who saw enough to try your product but didn’t see enough to stay.

🤔Why? Their feedback can pinpoint issues like missing features, unclear value, or better alternatives that could help you refine your product strategy.

Your long-term, loyal customers are an invaluable source of feedback on how well your product continues to meet their evolving needs. They can share what they love about your product and suggest enhancements that would increase its value even more.

🤔Why? Loyal customers can provide insights into maintaining and strengthening your product’s market fit over time, ensuring it evolves alongside your audience.

If you have access to prospective customers, those who’ve shown interest but haven’t yet committe,they’re worth surveying too. This group can help you understand their expectations and whether your product is aligned with what they’re looking for.

🤔Why? Their feedback can shine a light on what’s holding them back from becoming active users and how to better align your product with market demands

Surveying new users after their initial interactions with your product is key to understanding whether it delivers on their expectations. Whether they’ve just signed up, completed onboarding, or explored your product for the first time, their feedback offers valuable insights into how well your product fits their needs.

🤔Why? New users provide raw, unfiltered impressions that help you identify gaps in your product’s appeal or functionality right away.

Creating your first product market-fit survey is easy, but first, you have to decide which channel you’ll be using. We’ve covered that on the previous section: What is the best channel for customer support surveys?

So whether you want to send customer support through email, or place it on your website or mobile app, we’ve got you covered.

Once you decide on which channel you’re going with, feel free to jump to that section:

In the main dashboard, click on the Create new survey button.

From there, pick how you would like to start. We recommend starting with an AI-assisted creation or template library for a swift creation. These will get you up to starting your survey in

no time!

If you started with the template library or AI survey creator, you’ll get your survey questions already set for you. You can later edit them to your liking, or add new questions by clicking on “Add new question”. Here you can find a complete list of question and action types.

If you’ve started using one of our pre-made templates or the AI survey creator, you’ll see that your survey questions are already set up for you. However, you can always edit these questions to better align with your brand's tone and the feedback you’re looking to gather. To make changes, simply click on “Add new question” or adjust the existing ones. Below, you’ll find a list of different ways to frame your customer support question, as well as some tips for customizing follow-up questions.

The primary customer support question is typically: "How would you feel if you could no longer use our product or service?"

However, we encourage you to tailor this question to better fit your brand voice and communication style. Here are some variations that our customers have used to align more closely with their specific business needs:

Crafting Effective Follow-Up Questions
​

Follow-up questions tailored to the different responses in your product-market fit survey can help you uncover deeper insights, refine your offering, and better target your audience. Here are some recommended follow-up questions based on each response type:

For customers who chose “very disappointed”

These customers see your product as essential and irreplaceable. Their feedback can help you reinforce their loyalty and turn them into advocates.

For customers who chose “somewhat disappointed”

These customers find your product useful but not critical. Their feedback can help you understand how to make your product indispensable.

For customers who chose “not disappointed”

These users see little value in your product. It’s crucial to understand their concerns so you can refine your product or adjust your targeting strategy.

For customers who chose “I no longer use your product”

These customers have already moved on. Understanding why can help you reduce churn and identify opportunities to re-engage similar users.

Going into the Configure tab, you can modify settings responsible for identifying the respondents and survey status.

If you want your respondents to be recognized, you have to have a tool selected in the field. There are plenty of tools to choose from including favorites like:

⚠️Important - if you need your responses to be anonymous, go ahead and skip this step.

In the connect tab, you can also integrate your survey with other apps that you use on a daily basis. This is, of course, optional, but we highly recommend that you take advantage of this feature

Essentially, integrations will help you automate processes and workflows. For example, you can create triggers based on survey responses to automate support tickets, task assignments, and personalized follow-up actions. The idea here is to have everything in one place, saving you time, improving efficiency, and ensuring that you act on customer feedback right away.

To give you a better idea of what you can do, here are some popular integrations that our customers use:

The Surivcate and HubSpot integration allows you to:

⚠️Bonus - with the new HubSpot App Cards feature, you can also:

Find out more about the HubSpot integration here.

The Surivcate and Slack integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Slack integration here.

The Surivcate and Klaviyo integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Klaviyo integration here.

And the most important step to get your survey out there is to share it. In the Share tab, you can adjust the preview, description, and the name the respondents will see when the survey is opened in your browser.

⚠️Important - To share your survey, you will need to create that email in your email service provider and set up the audience there. From there, you can simply follow one of the options below to finish sending your survey:

All you need to do is copy the code generated once you click on the ‘Get your code’ button and paste it into an HTML editor of your software. It’s as easy as 1-2-3. No coding or technical skills required.

⚠️Important - Don’t forget to choose your email software in ‘Responses identification’ to see the names and emails of your respondents.

Product-market fit surveys reveal how essential your product is to your customers and help guide improvements. Here’s how you can act on feedback depending on each segment:

😍 Very Disappointed

These customers find your product essential and irreplaceable. Focus on reinforcing loyalty and turning these customers into advocates.

🙂 Somewhat Disappointed

These customers find your product useful but not critical. Addressing their feedback can help increase their overall engagement and move them toward loyal advocacy.

😕 Not Disappointed

These customers see limited value in your product. This feedback is critical for refining your offering and targeting the right audience.

🚪 I No Longer Use Your Product

These customers have moved on. While re-engagement may not always be possible, understanding their reasons can help reduce churn and prevent similar cases in the future.

And if you’re not a fan of the manual work…as luck would have it, we’ve got some new AI-powered tools to sort of…do the dirty work for you when it comes to taking your data and turning it into actionable insights.

Here you can make great use of our topics feature. Provided you have connected your survey to Insights Hub, it will take all of the feedback and automatically categorize it into different topics. Within every topic, you’ll find the direct feedback that it relates to making it easier for you act on it immediately.

Topics you’ll most often find:

Insights Hub is mainly used to:

For a full guide on how to use it, check this out. But not to leave you empty-handed, here are some ways you can apply it for your product-market-fit surveys:

And of course on top of that, you get our research assistant. It…assists you with your…research 😀. Find answers to all your questions quickly and effectively just by asking it.

The research assistant takes your feedback and can answer your questions based on:

For a full guide on how to use it, check this out. For now, here’s the top reasons why you should try it out for your product market-fit surveys:

To get you on your way, try asking your research assistant some of these questions:

Use the momentum and ask your Promoters for a positive review. Using the ‘Thank you’ question type, you can redirect your Promoters straight to your favorite review site.

A very popular way of building NPS surveys is asking different follow-up questions to your respondent based on their previous response.

For example, to your Promoters, you can ask what is their favorite thing about your business, and to your Detractors you can ask what do you need to improve. You can achive that using survey logic feature. This feature allows you to ask different follow-up questions based on the selected NPS score.

Survey logic simplifies the creation of different paths for respondents by skipping certain questions based on their previous answers. This allows you to customize the survey experience with tailored question flows and segment users according to their feedback.

As mentioned previously, your NPS survey comes ‘pre-packaged’ with logic. You can check how each question uses this feature, by simply clicking on the desired question and clicking the ‘Logic’ tab:

If you’d like to use this feature for your newly added questions, it’s quite easy to set up.

How to add logic

Step 1.

Once you’ve added your question and added a Single answer selection or a Dropdown list, as well as the other survey questions, head over to the Logic tab of the question and click on + Add new logic.

Step 2.

Here, you'll see the If answer condition, letting you decide when to apply logic.

You can choose to apply logic if the response is or is not equal to one of the answer choices or when it has any value.

This means you’ve got a lot of possibilities to work with. Here’s a breakdown:

If you select Answer 1 or Answer 2, this logic will work for the respondents who select Answer 1 or Answer 2.

If you select Answer 1 or Answer 2, this logic will work for the respondents who select anything other than Answer 1 and Answer 2, such as Answer 3.

In the main dashboard, click on the Create new survey button.

And from there you are met with a new screen. There are four options to choose from:

For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be focusing on ‘Use a template’.

If you started with the template library or AI survey creator, you’ll get your survey questions already set for you. You can later edit them to your liking, or add new questions by clicking on “Add new question”. Here you can find a complete list of question and action types.

If you’ve started using one of our pre-made templates or the AI survey creator, you’ll see that your survey questions are already set up for you. However, you can always edit these questions to better align with your brand's tone and the feedback you’re looking to gather. To make changes, simply click on “Add new question” or adjust the existing ones. Below, you’ll find a list of different ways to frame your customer support question, as well as some tips for customizing follow-up questions.

The primary customer support question is typically: "How would you feel if you could no longer use our product or service?"

However, we encourage you to tailor this question to better fit your brand voice and communication style. Here are some variations that our customers have used to align more closely with their specific business needs:

Follow-up questions tailored to the different responses in your product-market fit survey can help you uncover deeper insights, refine your offering, and better target your audience. Here are some recommended follow-up questions based on each response type:

For customers who chose “very disappointed”

These customers see your product as essential and irreplaceable. Their feedback can help you reinforce their loyalty and turn them into advocates.

For customers who chose “somewhat disappointed”

These customers find your product useful but not critical. Their feedback can help you understand how to make your product indispensable.

For customers who chose “not disappointed”

These users see little value in your product. It’s crucial to understand their concerns so you can refine your product or adjust your targeting strategy.

For customers who chose “I no longer use your product”

These customers have already moved on. Understanding why can help you reduce churn and identify opportunities to re-engage similar users.

Going into the Target tab, this will give you a chance to target your website surveys to specific times, a certain group of visitors, and beyond.

It’s important that you target each survey to the visitors who are more likely to contribute meaningfully. Targeting has a lot of benefits, these include:

In the connect tab, you can also integrate your survey with other apps that you use on a daily basis. This is, of course, optional, but we highly recommend that you take advantage of this feature.

Essentially, integrations will help you automate processes and workflows. For example, you can create triggers based on survey responses to automate support tickets, task assignments, and personalized follow-up actions. The idea here is to have everything in one place, saving you time, improving efficiency, and ensuring that you act on customer feedback right away.

To give you a better idea of what you can do, here are some popular integrations that our customers use:

The Surivcate and HubSpot integration allows you to:

⚠️Bonus - with the new HubSpot App Cards feature, you can also:

Find out more about the HubSpot integration here.

The Surivcate and Slack integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Slack integration here.

The Surivcate and Klaviyo integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Klaviyo integration here.

And the most important step to get your survey out there is to launch it. In the Launch tab, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to install the Survicate code on your site. You’ve got a couple of options to choose from:

Great, you’re to go now. Start your survey and gather customer insights right from your website or in-product. You can start it right awa or set a custom date to start your survey.

Once you’ve collected some feedback, you’re ready to analyze it. Here’s a section dedicated to analyzing your data.

In the main dashboard, click on the Create new survey button.

And from there you are met with a new screen. There are four options to choose from:

For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be focusing on ‘Use a template’.

If you started with the template library or AI survey creator, you’ll get your survey questions already set for you. You can later edit them to your liking, or add new questions by clicking on “Add new question”. Here you can find a complete list of question and action types.

If you’ve started using one of our pre-made templates or the AI survey creator, you’ll see that your survey questions are already set up for you. However, you can always edit these questions to better align with your brand's tone and the feedback you’re looking to gather. To make changes, simply click on “Add new question” or adjust the existing ones. Below, you’ll find a list of different ways to frame your customer support question, as well as some tips for customizing follow-up questions.

The primary customer support question is typically: "How would you feel if you could no longer use our product or service?"

However, we encourage you to tailor this question to better fit your brand voice and communication style. Here are some variations that our customers have used to align more closely with their specific business needs:

Follow-up questions tailored to the different responses in your product-market fit survey can help you uncover deeper insights, refine your offering, and better target your audience. Here are some recommended follow-up questions based on each response type:

a reminder, the crucial question we're asking our customers here is
​"How would you feel if you could no longer use our product or service?"

For customers who chose “very disappointed”

These customers see your product as essential and irreplaceable. Their feedback can help you reinforce their loyalty and turn them into advocates.

For customers who chose “somewhat disappointed”

These customers find your product useful but not critical. Their feedback can help you understand how to make your product indispensable.

For customers who chose “not disappointed”

These users see little value in your product. It’s crucial to understand their concerns so you can refine your product or adjust your targeting strategy.

For customers who chose “I no longer use your product”

These customers have already moved on. Understanding why can help you reduce churn and identify opportunities to re-engage similar users.

Going into the Target tab, this will give you a chance to target your website surveys to specific times, a certain group of visitors, and beyond.

It’s important that you target each survey to the visitors who are more likely to contribute meaningfully. Targeting has a lot of benefits, these include:

In the connect tab, you can also integrate your survey with other apps that you use on a daily basis. This is, of course, optional, but we highly recommend that you take advantage of this feature.

Essentially, integrations will help you automate processes and workflows. For example, you can create triggers based on survey responses to automate support tickets, task assignments, and personalized follow-up actions. The idea here is to have everything in one place, saving you time, improving efficiency, and ensuring that you act on customer feedback right away.

To give you a better idea of what you can do, here are some popular integrations that our customers use:

The Surivcate and HubSpot integration allows you to:

⚠️Bonus - with the new HubSpot App Cards feature, you can also:

Find out more about the HubSpot integration here.

The Surivcate and Slack integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Slack integration here.

The Surivcate and Klaviyo integration allows you to:

Find out more about the Klaviyo integration here.

Survicate natively integrates with 80+ tools. If you didn’t see your favorite integration

And the most important step to get your survey out there is to launch it. In the Launch tab, if you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to install and configure our SDK. Here are the options you can choose from:

Great, you’re to go now. Start your survey and gather customer insights right from your website or in-product. You can start it right awa or set a custom date to start your survey.

Once you’ve collected some feedback, you’re ready to analyze it. Here’s a section dedicated to analyzing your data.

Curious how others are using their surveys within their strategy? Here’s a collection of amazing customer success stories to spark some ideas and inspire you.

PowerUs, a career platform for skilled blue-collar workers, uses Survicate’s product-market fit surveys to ensure their offering resonates with their audience and drives business growth.

Key Achievements:

PowerUs sends quarterly product-market fit surveys to partners and uses follow-up questions to identify areas for improvement. Integrating Survicate with Google Sheets streamlines data analysis, helping PowerUs refine their platform and enhance user satisfaction.

Here’s the full story

Landing, a creative platform for Gen Z, uses Survicate’s product-market fit surveys to stay in tune with their users' needs and refine their platform for authenticity and connection.

Key Achievements:

Landing continuously collects user feedback via product-market fit surveys and a Feedback Button in their design studio. Integrating Survicate with tools like FullStory and Segment helps them analyze user behavior and prioritize features like mobile app development and creative tools, ensuring the platform resonates with their Gen Z audience.

Here’s the full story

Packhelp, a custom packaging marketplace, uses Survicate’s product-market fit surveys to refine their product and align with customer needs across 30+ markets.

Key Achievements:

By integrating Survicate with tools like Segment, Packhelp streamlined feedback collection for website usability, product satisfaction, and churn surveys. These insights informed their product roadmap, improved communication with inactive customers, and identified high-impact features like real-life design dimensions in their editor.

Here’s the full story

What should I focus on when analyzing product-market fit survey results?
Pay attention to the percentage of users who indicate they would be "very disappointed" if your product no longer existed. Also, analyze open-text responses for patterns in feedback, such as commonly requested features or recurring issues.

How do I know which customer segment is driving a low product-market fit score?
Segment your survey responses by demographics, usage patterns, or customer type. Use Survicate’s filters to drill down into specific groups and identify which segments are less satisfied and why. More on that here.

How does my product-market fit score change as my product evolves?
Track your score over time by conducting surveys after major updates or expansions. From there, compare results to assess whether changes to your product positively impact user satisfaction and loyalty.

How can I use product-market fit survey results to guide my roadmap?
Identify the most common pain points and feature requests from survey responses. That way you can prioritize these areas in your product development roadmap to align with user needs and improve satisfaction.

What integrations can I use with Survicate to enhance product-market fit survey analysis?

More on that in this section.

Help Center articles:

Measuring your product market fit

Using market research surveys to validate your product strategy

Blog:

Hacking Growth? Use Product-Market Fit Surveys to Scale

Customer Discovery: Unveiling Key Insights for Product-Market Fit