HTSAS Lecture 4

Getting users is such a crucial part of a startup (as Peter Thiel also discusses to great length in his book, Zero to One). So, I’m glad Sam Altman decided to have Adora talk about it so early on in the course.

One of the points in her talk was the idea of an honesty curve in which different kinds of users have differing levels of honesty. Friends of friends seem to give the best feedback for free products or services, while strangers seem to give the best for paid products or services. I found the latter particularly interesting. At first thought, it seemed kind of funny to me that when they paid you, you got even more out of the transaction because they would also give you amazingly honest feedback (which is, of course, something you would definitely want). It seemed kind of unequal to me that the entrepreneur got so much out of the transaction (the world generally seems to follow a law of conservation of sorts).

And it turns out the law of conservation also applies here. I completely forgot that getting new users who have to pay for your product or service is so much harder than getting new users who don’t. Ultimately, the extra effort you put into a paid product or service results in more honest feedback from your users. And I find this relationship striking, the fact that there is this incredibly meaningful way for you to convert effort into more reliable and frequent user feedback.