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- Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup
Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup
“Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.”
He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong:
“It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.”
In practice you have two choices:
Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.”
Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.”
“With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.”
And he argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use:
“In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.”