>I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?” Until that’s a “yes”, founders are

>I think the right initial metric is “do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?” Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target. I have a warning for future, young developers: do NOT join a startup that hasn't found product/market fit, and isn't trying, with all of its might, to find that product/market fit. And when I say, by all of its might, I mean companies that product/market fit isn't the first and foremost goal of the startup. This is really hard to determine from the outside. For example, a friend of mine is working in a well-funded, post series A startup that just declared internally its biggest target was a billion dollars of products shipped by the end of the fiscal year. The team is smart, the founders are passionate, and they've been judicious with their funding. Problem is that the CEO herself admitted that they don't yet have product/market fit. Which is to say their "guiding light" metric is a lagging indicator, i.e. it measures that tail-end of their efforts, and certainly not how much customers love them (and are willing to pay). It's the equivalent of early Facebook using advertising revenue or page views as their growth target instead of monthly active users. As Sam Altman points out, everything they do will be "hacking" or, as PG puts it, doing tricks that are not sustainable for a real, billion dollar company, in attempts to achieve that misleading number. At least from what she told me, the most senior engineer said that this isn't bad: the engineers will focus on product/market fit and the sales/marketing teams will focus on growth. Of course, she didn't say that, in a conflict between the fake growth target and product/market fit, the fake growth target always wins. Even now, I'm trying to pull my friend out, before the mental gymnastics set in. Don't be fooled. A startup needs a real, sometimes small, star in the sky to navigate churning waters. A ship that chases the moon is a ship that will soon be sinking.