Growing from 10 to 100 to 1000 users

Lots of folks I talk to about building products want to know how to grow from a tiny initial user base (10 people) up through 100 to 1000. It certainly seems like each of these stages is different, but it’s not clear why. I recently thought a lot about this when interviewed by Jay Acunzo of Nextview Ventures. My take is that the reason why these are fundamentally different stages is because of the relationship you have with these people…in short it comes down to bias:

“Initially when you start, you can talk to friends and get them excited about what you’re working on. These people are your co-workers, friends, and family so they’re easy to find and talk to. But they are also completely biased…”

We also touched on a lot of other topics like what features to build, when to focus on product vs. growth, etc. Here is the entire interview.