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> We didn’t want to teach ourselves how to find money-losing customers This!!! Coming from the travel business. I remember this vividly. You acquire a custom

> We didn’t want to teach ourselves how to find money-losing customers This!!! Coming from the travel business. I remember this vividly. You acquire a customer that is not loyal to your product even for 3 seconds for 1$ and you make 0.8$ out of that customer. Building a customer acquisition strategy that will work in the long run and will make you money is such a key realization. Even if it takes you longer and seems like you are moving slower, you should not be tempted. At one point, we saw a 200% increase in users over the course of two weeks due to some "growth hacks". Those ended up just costing money in server and engineering costs. None of the customers actually stuck with the product for the long run.

dgut 9y ago
Jason Fried's whole business philosophy comes to mind [0][1]. [0] https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-choose-profit-e511efc4dcb9 https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-choose-profit-e511efc4dcb9 [1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/exponential-growth-devours-and-corrupts-c5562fbf131 https://m.signalvnoise.com/exponential-growth-devours-and-co...
wpietri 9y ago
100% agreed. Eventually, most companies come down to people being willing to put money down in exchange for something they value. And then doing that again and again over the course of the relationship. So many entrepreneurs are really building products, not businesses. They want to be insulated by money while working on making their perfect thing. And I get that. Building is fun. It's scary to put yourself and your product out there. And it's hugely unpleasant to have that fail. But until we try for real, we'll never truly know what works. The sooner and more often we try for real, the more likely we are to find what works.
- matt_the_bass 9y ago
  >So many entrepreneurs are really building products, not businesses. This!

dgut 9y ago

Jason Fried's whole business philosophy comes to mind [0][1]. [0] https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-choose-profit-e511efc4dcb9 https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-choose-profit-e511efc4dcb9 [1] https://m.signalvnoise.com/exponential-growth-devours-and-corrupts-c5562fbf131 https://m.signalvnoise.com/exponential-growth-devours-and-co...

wpietri 9y ago

100% agreed. Eventually, most companies come down to people being willing to put money down in exchange for something they value. And then doing that again and again over the course of the relationship. So many entrepreneurs are really building products, not businesses. They want to be insulated by money while working on making their perfect thing. And I get that. Building is fun. It's scary to put yourself and your product out there. And it's hugely unpleasant to have that fail. But until we try for real, we'll never truly know what works. The sooner and more often we try for real, the more likely we are to find what works.

matt_the_bass 9y ago
>So many entrepreneurs are really building products, not businesses. This!