Great essay, Sam! I want to expand slightly from a founder's perspective: You always have two constituencies to think about: (A) your users / customers, and (B

Great essay, Sam! I want to expand slightly from a founder's perspective: You always have two constituencies to think about: (A) your users / customers, and (B) your not-yet-users/customers. "Before growth", you should really pay very very little attention to constituency B. If you're doing anything interesting, there will always be a torrent of skeptics, doubters, and haters. (That sucks, but it's very human, and you just have to ignore it.) Focus entirely on constituency A. There are three "R" metrics to look for: (1) Retention. (2) Revenue. (3) Referrals. (Note: these are the three "RRR" of the classic "AARRR" model.) Initially, constituency A might just be your friends or extended network who you can convince give what you've built a try. You may be able to get them to try your new product once or twice, but that's about it. However, if they keep using it again and again voluntarily, that's a really good sign (Retention). If they voluntarily and happily pay for it, that's great (Revenue). And if they voluntarily tell other people they know about it (Referrals), that's amazing! Until you have those nailed -- or at least retention and referrals if you're deferring monetization -- don't worry at all about the "B" group (i.e. don't worry about acquiring new leads at the top of your funnel), because you don't have product-market fit yet. Once you do have a product that the constituency A people love, only then can you start thinking about constituency B and how to turn them into new happy users / customers. (While continuing to make your constituency A happy!) I think Sam is going a step further to place extra emphasis specifically on Referrals out of all three of these metrics. This is a subtle but powerful insight. Whether your product is B2C or B2B, most purchasing decisions have a huge emotional component. If your product is so good that your users want to tell other people about it, that's a huge step above being merely satisfactory, and goes a huge way toward powering your growth. I don't care if you're buying a burrito, a car, CDN bandwidth, or an analytics SaaS. You as a buyer want a reasonable degree of certainty that you're going to feel good about that purchase after you've made it. Hearing that referral from your peer, whether a friend who tried that food truck before, or another engineer who used that SaaS provider before, goes a huge way toward giving you that pre-purchase confidence. If your users aren't excited enough about it to be talking about it with their peers, you may have to adjust your product or your segmentation of the market until you get there.