Short excerpt from a YouTube discussion where Paul Graham explains startup growth strategy: start with a "small, intense fire" — find a small group of users who want your product a lot and focus relentlessly on making them happy. He gives examples: Apple initially sold a small number of machines (~500), the idea of 500–5,000 "true fans" depending on product, and an anecdote about a mobile email client whose beta has a single important user (Sam Altman) whom the team treats as their client to optimize for.
Let's talk a little bit about growth as we wrap up here. Startups want to grow. It seems like one of the things Y Combinator really teaches people is how to grow stuff. What do you think the secrets of growing these startups are?
Well, in terms of techniques, you got to start with. You got to start with a small, intense fire. So you have. If you're. Suppose you're the Apple one, right? You have to find. I mean, I think they made something like 500 of those things, right? So all they had to do was like, find 500 people to buy these computers and they launched Apple. Apple.
Yeah.
So you got to find a small number of people. It's necessarily going to be a small number of people. You can't find. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people want a lot. So you've got to find people who want what you're making a lot, and that's necessarily going to be a small number. And. And that's okay. That's how these giant things get started, Right. You don't have to do any better than Apple and Facebook.
Just get those 500 true fans.
Thousand true fans, whatever it is. I mean, if it's a mobile app, it might not be 500, it might be 5,000. But you've got to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. And then you just sit down and you just have a party with those first few users and you just focus entirely on them and you make them super, super happy, Right? Like there's a startup in the current batch that is making a new mobile email client, right? And their beta group has one user, Sam Altman. Their goal is to just make Sam Altman happy. And when they, like, send. Sam Altman uses email a lot on the go. He's sufficiently demanding that if they. And he knows what all the other options are too. So he's sufficiently demanding that if they make him happy that they've sort of used him as like the positive for a mold, Right. They can now, like, they, like, make lots of people happy and that's sufficient. Right. So one of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where you could just like make one user happy is act like you're a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy. It can say Sam Altman at the top of the screen. That's okay.
Yeah.
Just so long as you make Sam feel that he would be bummed if you stopped working on this. That's the test, right? Not like your friends say, oh, yeah, it's good. I'll use it. Right. Like they have to be bummed if you stop working on it.
