John Collison: User Passion as Metric

I think the thing that really convinced us in the early days was, and this might be specific to more developer business focused companies rather than consumer, which can get to scale really quickly. But I think in our case what really convinced us was the fact that the users we had were so, so passionate. This was not just for them something marginally better, but they thought that it was life changing and revolutionary and they wanted to tell all their friends, they wanted us to build a way for them to invite their friends to it. That seemed to really get, that got our attention. And so I guess most of the metrics that people talk about day to day, like revenue or user numbers, the. Those are all lagging metrics. And you as the person actually working on the product, you have access to leading metrics. And so apparently with Snapchat, one of the most compelling metrics in the early days was the number of times per day each person used it in that even if this wasn't really big yet, it was growing very quickly and it seemed to have a really deep connection with each of its, its users. And similarly for us, I think the passion that the early users had about the product was that leading metric that indicated to us that something was there. But I think in each case that leading metric is going to be different. But you want to find what that leading metric is, to be able to judge whether this is going to take off or not.