Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “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, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice you have two choices: 1. 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.” 2. 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.” A good indicator of users loving your product, Sam argues, 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.” Video source: @StanfordOnline (2017)