Forget the Millions. Focus on Your First 10 Users.
My Co-Founder and I have been thinking a lot about what really matters when building a startup. And honestly, it all comes down to one thing:
👉 Making something people want.
It’s a bit cringe 😅 but it’s true.
It’s not about where you come from. Or where you studied.
Sure, Stanford on your LinkedIn helps open doors.
But doesn’t get you to Product-Market-Fit.
The best founders get this. Though most investors dismiss it 🙃.
Luck is a big part of it. But we can all help make luck happen.
Some quick thoughts:
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Forget the millions. Obsess over the first 10 users.
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It’s harder (and more impactful) to make 100 people love you than 1,000,000 people just kind of like you.
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Chasing novelty ≠ being noble.
Even Brian Chesky (Airbnb) says this is how they built a $75B company.
And Nathan Barry (ConvertKit) nailed it: “Do things that don’t scale, because that enables the channels that do scale.”
For us at Pretty Prompt, it’s not chasing 1 million users.
It’s 1 × 1,000,000.
That mindset shift changes everything in what you build and why.
💬 Curious, how did you get your first 10 users? What did you obsess over that actually worked?
(Please go give Pretty Prompt a go! It's pretty powerful and I'd love to hear your feedback👂).
+1 to “1 × 1,000,000.” I’m testing a tiny ranking snapshots project (Rankiwiki — reference only: rankiwiki.com). Three of my first 10 came from hands-on setups. Curious: what did you obsess over first—activation or retention?
This is where I'm at with math4fun.io. Getting first 10 users. I'm doing a lot on SEO and I'm sending cold emails to public elementary schools. When I will get first customer, I will post a longer post here on indie hackers.
Give pushing! You can make it
Being lazy next level. I need this for GitHub Co-Pilot to better instruct my AI Agent..
Try it out on ChatGPT for now!
Love this. I'm actually at that stage right now - chasing my first 10 users for My Morning Brief, a small AI tool that turns your inbox and calendar into a personalized podcast each morning.
What I'm obsessing over isn't scale at all - it’s just finding a handful of busy people who will actually listen to it daily and tell me if it really saves them time.
Curious - for you, was there one thing you did differently that tipped people from "sounds cool" to "I'll actually use it every day"?
Such a good question! I try to look at the individual users on the analytics and see if I find any patters, to then reach out personally to those users and give value from something that I think they need from the product, and ask for a call.
For example, I noticed some of our users were "snoozing" the extension quite often. So we built a way to "pin" it, so it doesn't disturb them when they don't need it. I message them and got amazing feedback saying "you read my mind, yes I'd love to chat with you".
Really solid mindset, turning 10 users into raving fans is everything.
Just signed up for Pretty Prompt to check it out (clean design!). Noticed there's no welcome email after signup, that's likely causing a leak where interested users never get guided to their first moment of value.
That first 48 hour sequence is what turns casual signups into the obsessed fans you're talking about. The founders getting this right use a simple 3 email welcome flow to guide users to that moment where the product really clicks for them.
Hey! You should have received an email! With Pretty Prompt you can sign up and try it without providing your email. Once you use it for 3 times, you'll be prompted to sign in to keep using it.
Once you sign in, you get a welcome email, and you can continue using it for free. Hope this makes sense!
Just to confirm the leak, I literally just did the flow again:
Used 3 prompts as a guest.
Hit the sign in wall.
Did not receive any email.
This means 100% of users who engage but don't sign in immediately are falling into a black hole with zero follow up. That's a critical segment of your most interested users slipping away.
The automated email I mentioned isn't just an optimization it's a necessary patch for a broken step in your funnel. It's leads you're currently pouring straight into the drain.
Welcome to the startup world. Things are broken. Always :)
Just to confirm we do have a triggered email. Probably something happened that didn't work there, so I'd ask for your email, or feel free to email me to ilai [at] pretty-prompt.com and I'll verify it :)