Founder Lesson
How do you know that consumers love your product?

What I hear most often is “just last week a customer told me how much they loved using the product.” Or founders will say "our daily active users (DAUs) or monthly active users (MAUs) continue to increase.”

These are both decent ways to keep your fingers on the pulse of the business, but they have flaws. Customer feedback is important, but their actions matter way more than what they tell you. And any monitoring of active users gives you a high-level, cumulative view of your metrics, but lacks focus.

So how do you know if your customers are using your product in a way that indicates that they truly love it?

In this podcast, an experienced investor and product manager describes how she evaluated consumer engagement in the early days of Pinterest.

What her team focused on in the very early days was “growth of a core action.” Instead of fixating on vanity metrics (like MAUs), they focused on “weekly active pinners" because it’s the best way of evaluating an exchange of value with their customers. As she says, "consumers need to perform the action that is the foundation of your product."

As a startup founder you can spend your day checking-off an endless list of to-dos. There are also many ways to convince you and your team that your product is working (or isn’t working). If you want to have a high-growth startup that touches many people, do your best to understand if your customers are taking the actions that they need to take to indicate to you that they truly love your product.

If you are particularly interested in product, here are all my blog posts tagged "product." Enjoy!

Get Right to the Lesson
I’d recommend listening to the entire thing, but to get right to the point go to minute 5:31 of this podcast.

Thanks to these folks for helping us all learn faster
Sarah Tavel (@sarahtavel), partner aGreylock Partners (@GreylockVC)
Dorm Room Tycoon (@dormroomtycoon)
William Channer (@williamchanner)

Please let me and others know what you think about this topic
Email me privately at dave@switchyards.com or let's discuss publicly at @davempayne.