Unprompted passionate product shouts vs NPS

I’ve always been a fan of getting hold of our Net Promoter Score (NPS). But I’ve changed a near-religious attachment to this a bit and allowed room to challenge the validity if it doesn’t come with unprompted and passionate product shouts. That unsolicited tweet or a reply to an email campaign telling the team that the product is absolutely fantastic has been a real driver in my own willingness to confirm a proper product-market fit and initiate growth processes.

Without going all McKinsey on you, it might be helpful to look at four potential quadrants we can end up in to illustrate where on the product-market-fit map we are (I see how obvious it is, but it is still a good reminder to self).

1. Unprompted passionate product shouts AND high NPS
   = Winning product
2. Unprompted passionate product shouts AND low NPS
   = Mediocre product
3. NO unprompted passionate product shouts AND high NPS
   = Mediocre product
4. NO unprompted and passionate product shouts AND low NPS
   = Poor product

Now, how do you measure the customer feedback mentioned above, especially in contrast to the quantitative state of NPS? It’s an honest question! A good beginning is collecting this stream of unprompted passionate product shouts, so you get exposed to the velocity and change in tone over time. We ran a slack channel where tweets, ratings, feedback, etc., were pushed in real-time, and I probably looked more at this than the official quarterly-ish NPS reports. But, I don’t have a good answer to this outside of the “You’ll know it when it happens” statement.

Post MVP saw x.ai land in quadrant 3 for a while, and if I am honest and in hindsight, this resulted in a perceived product-market fit — this is plausibly the more dangerous of the four quadrants as you risk getting caught in the traction treadmill (as Andrew Chen calls it). This perceived fit might drive you (given the initial law of small numbers) to prematurely grow something that is not long-term sustainable.

In closing, and a more straightforward statement to share: If you can’t find that handful of tweets or similar that profess love for your product, don’t trust your NPS.