Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup

We have five lectures in this course devoted to the product. Because a great product is the single most important thing that you do. The one thing I want to mention for now, as you're thinking about the product you build, is that it is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you. And almost all startups get this wrong eventually. What you want, of course, is a lot of users that really love your product. That's almost impossible to do in practice. You have two choices. You can go deep and narrow. You can have a small number of users that really love you, and then you can find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product. Or you can have a lot of people that kind of use the product once or twice, kind of like it, and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time. With high confidence. I can say you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way. Think about the ones in your own life. The products that are so good that you spontaneously tell your friends about them. The products that are so good that if they went away, you would, like, write the company in protest. That's what it means to really love a product. A good indicator of that is retention and frequency of use. So if you have. 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. And we'll have a session on metrics later. But you really want to get good at analyzing your metrics and saying, is this a user that I'm retaining and that's using it frequently? How do I compare to other products in my space? And that's a good early indicator of users that love you. Better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product. But the important point here is this. Nothing but a great product will save you. We're going to talk about a lot of other things in this course, and they all kind of matter. But if you don't get this one right, if you don't make a great product, the thing is still not going to work.