Yoo Ok.. first thing you'll hear from blogs, interviews on Youtube, and everyone else in the echo chamber is about growth. Growth growth growth growth. Just f

Yoo Ok.. first thing you'll hear from blogs, interviews on Youtube, and everyone else in the echo chamber is about growth. Growth growth growth growth. Just for a moment, forget growth. Think about engagement. What VCs and investors realllly care about is stickiness ie how often are people using your product. This is true across B2B + B2C. (yes there are examples of low touch point high revenue businesses, but let's forget about those for a second). What you want to prove in the early days is how good your product is for a small subset of people, not how good your product is to everyone. (this is where the (in)famous saying "do things that don't scale" comes from.. partly anyway) Instead of saying to an investor that you acquired 100k users.. tell them: - 30% of our users acquired in the first 7 days return back to the platform every day for 10 days - 20% of users acquired within 3 days of a company key event sign up and make a 'revenue' transaction - 20% of users refer their friends with a 80% conversation rate - time on site is X minutes and users typically return 4 times per day - social media / community engagement on your main channels - site traffic is split 30/70 new vs returning users There's that thing that Paul Graham from YC said to Brian Cheksy from Airbnb. "Go out and find 10 people that absolutely love your product, and go from there"* Also.... one of the biggest pieces of advice with VCs I can give you: Make sure you set the agenda and set deadlines to work to. Don't let investors lead this. This is your business, don't suffer fools or people that are 'too busy'. *Might not be an exact quote :).