NPS

Net Promoter Score: a loyalty metric from one survey question, would you recommend us, scored from minus 100 to plus 100.

NPS asks one question, how likely are you to recommend this to a colleague, on a 0 to 10 scale. Respondents sort into detractors (0-6), passives (7-8) and promoters (9-10), and the score is promoters minus detractors as a percentage. A plus-30 is good in SaaS; plus-70 is exceptional, the territory of products people evangelize.

Why it matters to an indie builder: NPS is the cheapest early-warning system available. One question, one monthly in-app survey, and you learn whether the enthusiasm in your inbox is representative or a vocal minority. For a bootstrapped product the follow-up question, the open why did you score us that way, is the actual product roadmap: detractor reasons cluster into your next three fixes.

A concrete example: a project-management tool surveys 200 active users. Result: 58 promoters, 92 passives, 50 detractors, NPS plus 4, weak. The written reasons from detractors cluster overwhelmingly on mobile experience, one theme, 31 mentions. The team spends one month on the mobile app. Re-survey two months later: detractors drop to 22, NPS lands at plus 29, and retention in the segment climbs. One question and an open text field directed a quarter of engineering better than any dashboard could.

Common mistakes: surveying at the wrong moment, right after signup measures onboarding friction, not loyalty, so time it after meaningful usage, averaging the raw scores instead of applying the promoters-minus-detractors math (the average looks nicer and means nothing), treating passives as promoters in spirit (they switch products without resentment; they are one good competitor away from churning), and running NPS without the follow-up question, which turns a diagnostic into a vanity number. The analytics blocks on IndieBoot include tools that run in-app surveys natively.

NPS = % Promoters - % Detractors