Finding Product-Market fit using June

Product-market fit is all about finding the combination of a use case and a persona that consistently gets value from your product. If you built a product that doesn't have product-market fit yet, you want to use your retention to find specific personas and use cases that deliver ongoing value.

This is because retention is the measure of the ongoing value your product is generating. If you extract your users with the best retention you can quickly reverse engineer what is your best persona and use case.

Once you know have this information you can:

1. Market and package your product to people that are in the same role and vertical as your most successful users
2. Help more people get to the same "Aha moment" that made your best users retain

For instance, when we first started building June we launched with a very broad positioning: "Instant analytics reports on top of Segment".

Once we got our first couple hundred users, we learned that founders of B2B Saas companies at the seed stage had the best retention. We used this information both to focus our roadmap and concentrate our marketing efforts to acquire more founders that raised a seed round.

Product-market fit is a moving target

As B2B Saas companies grow, they have a natural tendency to keep building and bundling more products as part of their core offering. Each new product needs to find its own product-market fit.

I learned the most reasonable way of doing it from the Collison brothers. In a talk to our YC batch, they shared their common-sense approach to product building.

Here's how it works:

1. Create a shared Slack channel with the first 10 pilot companies for your new product
2. Do whatever it takes to make those first 10 companies successful
3. Create a pilot with 25 companies and repeat
4. Create a pilot with 50 companies and repeat
5. Once you reached 50 companies, there are probably 500 in the world that would benefit from the same product. Now it's time to strategize and think about how to scale your distribution!

Patrick shared that to this day when Stripe decides to build a new product, their product managers tend to still follow a similar approach.

In this week's update, we're introducing a new insight into the Retention report. This new card gives you your most retained users, so you can use these ideas to build your product.

Other improvements

• We redesigned the drill-downs across the product to make the CSV export button more visible
• We updated the retention card on the home to show the cohort table instead of the retention line chart
• The templates list has a new illustration design