Back in November of 2019, I had the honor of hearing two inspirational guest speakers— Andrew Yang (presidential candidate and entrepreneur) and Sam Altman (President of YCombinator) — speak on tech, entrepreneurship, and the future. Both of them are successful startup founders, so they most likely understand what it takes to start a startup.
Even though Andrew and Sam had built different organizations — Andrew built a nonprofit on educating college students on entreprenurship and Sam built an AI company— they understood the importance of understanding one’s user base: “It’s much better to first make a product a small number of users love than a product that a large number of users like. Even though the total amount of positive feeling is the same, it’s much easier to get more users than to go from like to love.”
This idea stuck with me. Even though Andrew Yang’s coalition was small (~5% of the electorate), I could tell that each and everyone of his supporters were extremely passionate. I knew this because in Berkeley, every single Yang supporter I knew — even though there wasn’t that many— was passionate. As an example, some of our members would be willing to run around with a cutout of Andrew Yang because they believed in Andrew’s mission. We were small but passionate.
And, in my view, this is the most important idea in entrepreneurship, which is making sure that you create value for a small number of users first before expanding to a large number of users. Think about the most successful companies today. They all started with a product that their early users loved so much that they told other people about it. Therefore, I believe that, by starting small, you’ll be able to generate value for your users — and then the world.
