To Stoke the Flames Vs Burn Low and Slow

Early-stage companies are obsessively focused on growth,^[1] usually at the expense of retention. That methodology is backwards, because retention should be the north-star metric of any early-stage product. If someone builds a great product that users keep coming back to, it will be easy to figure out how to grow it (raise money, spend money on acquiring users, ask users to share it, etc.) (Location 1733)

Marketing a product with a low NPS is essentially saying to potential customers, “Hey, my product sucks, come check it out.” (Location 1738)

Ironically, this is one the core tactics of growing slowly. It's finding a formula that works, and then deeply questioning if adding new processes will cause more harm than good.

^5876cf ↩︎