What It Takes to Get Your User Base from 0 to 1,000,000
Navigating “The Maze”
What will it take to get your user base from zero to one million? Persistence, connections, cash and a good idea — in that order.
The Maze
Finding users is like finding your way through a huge hedge maze, and all startups have to go through it. The Maze takes exploration, time, patience and iteration. There will be confusion, uncertainty, suffering, and possibly even death before you find your way out.
People are highly resistant to change, and even the best ideas take time to catch on. You’re also still working on turning your idea into the best version of itself, which increases the effort and time required and forces a lot of iteration.
On top of that, you’ve likely never had to connect with your potential user base, and cutting through all the marketing noise they’re bombarded with every day to show them your cool new product is hard.
Often you’ll need to:
- Change the product to make it solve the problem better.
- Pick a different problem to solve with your product.
- Talk to the same people, differently, about your product.
- Talk to different people about your product.
Worse yet, it’s never clear which to try, and how long to try it until you turn around and try a new path.
The Maze sends many startups to an early grave. The “great idea” shine fades, the rush of doing something new subsides, doubt creeps in, money runs out, and partners leave. Ben Horowitz notes in The Hard Thing About Hard Things,
…you knew the job was dangerous when you took it…this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
Finding Your Way Out
The Maze is dangerous, and everyone gets lost. That’s all normal and should be expected.
Most everyone starts with an idea. If not, there are plenty in The Maze on the bones of earlier wanderers to pick up. To get through The Maze, you’ll need cash to keep you alive while you wander. You’ll want connections since they’ve been through it before and can see parts of The Maze from the outside. The right connections can help you get through faster, prevent blind alleys and open secret doors.
No matter how well connected you are, or how much cash you bring, you’ll need more of both before you’ll find the way out. For that, there is only one answer. Persistence.
How do you go from zero users to a million? You persist.
For a more detailed look at the different phases of startup growth, I highly recommend reading: Dropbox’s First Marketer Shares About the Startup Stages of Growth.
