#3 — Your first 100 B2C customers
October 14, 2023•2 min read
WHAT'S HAPPENING: Startup founders are wasting resources trying to please everyone. The winning strategy is making a small group of users absolutely love your product.
WHY IT MATTERS: Most founders fail by diluting their focus across too many users instead of creating passionate advocates who drive organic growth.
THE BIG PICTURE
The conventional Silicon Valley wisdom pushing for millions of lukewarm users is fundamentally flawed. Smart founders are instead targeting 100 people who genuinely love their product.
"It's better to have 100 customers that love you than a million customers that just sort of like you," Y Combinator's Paul Graham told Airbnb founders, in advice that "changed our business forever."
- When users truly love your product, they become advocates who tell others
- This creates sustainable viral growth without massive marketing budgets
- Early passionate users provide crucial feedback for product development
BEHIND THE SCENES
Airbnb's founders demonstrated this principle by:
- Flying from Mountain View to New York to meet hosts personally
- Living with hosts to understand their problems firsthand
- Taking photos of properties themselves when hosts couldn't
- Hand-delivering payment checks to hosts
"Doing things that don't scale" became their mantra. By April 2009, they had hundreds of passionate users and a clear path to growth.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Expanding your user base is easier than increasing satisfaction levels. And measuring real user love provides clarity: you know exactly how many devoted users you have, while it's nearly impossible to accurately gauge if you're "85% of the way to a great product."
GO DEEPER: This approach creates a clear two-stage strategy:
- Focus intensely on making a small group absolutely love your product
- Only then shift to scaling what's working, which is "a totally different intellectual problem"
This counterintuitive approach has powered some of the most successful startups in history.
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