April 3, 2026
Hey Everyone,
Growth advice is full of experimentation frameworks – how to run A/B tests, validate ideas, build MVPs, or run growth sprints.
What's missing is a simple way to know when the experiments have told you enough, and it's time to go all in.
Here are four ways to figure out whether you already know enough to commit.
1. Ask users how they'd feel without you
Sean Ellis, who led early growth at Dropbox and Eventbrite, developed a one-question survey for this: "How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?"
If 40% or more answer "very disappointed," you have product-market fit and should start putting your energy into growth instead of testing. Below 40%, keep iterating.
You can run it with as few as 40 respondents, and the responses themselves show you what to fix.
Look at what the "very disappointed" group has in common – those are the customers worth building around. Then look at what the "somewhat disappointed" group is missing and build that.
2. Check whether customers stick around
Look at how many of your customers are still active after 3, 6, and 12 months. You want that number to stop falling at some point.
If a solid group is still using your product after 6 months, that's a strong sign. If the number keeps dropping with every cohort, the problem or the solution isn't strong enough yet, no matter how good the early sign-ups looked.
3. Make sure the numbers support scaling
Before you increase spending, check two things:
- Lifetime value vs. acquisition cost: If a customer is worth less than three times what you spent to acquire them, scaling will typically burn cash faster than it creates value.
- Monthly churn: If you're losing more than 5% of customers per month, you're replacing customers as fast as you add them. Fix that first.
4. Notice when customers start coming to you
When product-market fit is real, you feel it in how your sales process changes. Inbound inquiries go up, referrals become a real source of new business, and sales cycles get shorter because people already want what you're selling.
In B2B, this typically takes about 2 years to show up. If you're in year one and customers aren't coming to you yet, that's pretty normal. If you're well past year 2 and every customer still takes heavy convincing, a small adjustment probably won't fix it. You may need to rethink the product, the audience, or both.
What waiting too long actually costs
Lattice spent 9 months building an OKR tool that nobody wanted to pay for.
Two warnings kept showing up:
- Customers resisted pulling out their credit cards
- Teams who tried the product didn't come back for a second quarter
When founder Jack Altman pivoted to performance management, customers started paying annual contracts upfront based on design mockups alone. He was blunt about it in a First Round interview – if traction is weak, you're probably not a small adjustment away. You need to try something completely different.
Try this today
Pick one initiative your team is actively experimenting with. Before your next review meeting, write down where it stands on each of the four checks above
That gives you a starting point for a more concrete conversation about what to do next.
Go deeper
👉 First Round Review: How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product-Market Fit – the full breakdown of how the 40% test became a quarterly operating process
👉 First Round Review: The Pivot to Product-Market Fit – pivot stories from Lattice, Vanta, and Retool with a framework for diagnosing what needs to change
👉 Sequoia Capital: Product-Market Fit Framework – how to recognize which type of product-market fit you're building toward
👉 First Round Review: Speed as a Habit – Dave Girouard on why when you decide matters more than what you decide
Coming up on Monday
On Monday, we'll look at why fewer partners often means more revenue, and share a quick way to score the ones you have.
That's it for this week! Have a great weekend.
P.S. If someone on your team would find this useful, forward it their way.