Want Your First 1,000 Users This Quarter? Read This

You’ve done it – you’ve finally created your first product. Congratulations on this great milestone!

I’d encourage you to take some time to relax, celebrate, and reset, because now comes the hard part: getting people to actually use it.

It won’t be a straight line, and getting your first handful of customers will look very different than getting your first thousand. Here’s how to transfer.

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Your first 100: Build on your MVP.

Ideally, your initial steps include creating a minimum viable product, or MVP. As the name suggests, this version was supposed to be relatively straightforward to build and only include the most essential functions.

Your MVP is suitable for early users, but as soon as you pass your first 100, it’s time to start adding features. Your approach shouldn’t be in a vacuum—gathering and listening to feedback is key. Implement a continuous improvement system instead of major releases that threaten product stability. For example, you could release a simple quality-of-life improvement that eliminates an extra click in a typical workflow, or a lightweight onboarding tooltip that guides new users through their first task. These aren’t big, flashy releases, but they significantly reduce friction and show users that you’re listening.

AI can be an invaluable partner when you iterate. I’m a proponent of bootstrapping, but the reality is that 29% of startups fail under the pressure of money. Leveraging AI to develop your offerings helps test ideas and refine features more cheaply before investing in real development time. According to the International Data Group, 85% of organizations are already using AI to increase business insight and efficiency – a figure that will continue to grow as technology evolves.

Another way to generate customers (and build goodwill) is to offer your products for free. Doing so ensures that there are no barriers to access. In return, you get fast, actionable feedback that you can build on quickly.

Your First 1,000: Scaling

Once you’ve crested 100 users, you’ve proven something important: you’ve built a product that people want. Now, your job is to turn that idea into a sustainable business.

Reaching your first thousand is less about an achievement and more about the experiences of discipline. This doesn’t mean chasing obscurity, but it does mean staying up-to-date on trends and thinking critically about how you position your product. During this time, you should test the pricing structure, increase PR efforts and continue to pay attention to feedback. The goal is not perfection. It’s about learning fast and doubling down on what works.

If you haven’t been creating content up until now, now is definitely the time to start. It doesn’t matter if you’re clearly a difficult technical person – you have to find a way. For me, writing is a way to articulate my own thinking and a creative release that lets my brain work in new and exciting ways. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. A friend of mine recently launched an app that helps screenwriters break down their story ideas. But the thought of promoting it terrified him. Eventually, he was able to use AI to create a content plan he could afford, then hire a social media expert to implement it. The point is that there are creative solutions to spending too much time on promotion, but that doesn’t mean it can be ignored.

Beyond 1,000: 50/50 rule

Without careful attention, products can risk experiencing their own version of the Gartner hype cycle. If you’re not familiar, here’s the breakdown: Technology stimulation occurs when a technology emerges, with the initial excitement that comes with it. Initial hype (typical of VC-backed companies) then creates a high of expectations, followed by a trough of disappointment that occurs when reality does not match expectations. The slope of enlightenment occurs when the public begins to truly understand the value of the product.

The fifth and final stop along the hype cycle is where we are now, just beyond 1,000 users: the dreaded plateau of productivity. This is where many once promising businesses die. Sam Altman famously called this “the post-YC decline” — “Instead of constantly focusing on building a great product and growing, (founders) focus on everything else,” he said.

But if you want your business to be sustainable in the long run, this is not the place to rest on your laurels.

To keep growing, you need to adopt what I call the 50/50 rule: spend 50% of your time developing and improving your product. Spend the remaining 50% on development. Ruthlessly cut out any activity that doesn’t fall into either of these two categories.

I realize this sounds difficult, and it is. You need to conduct a serious, data-backed audit of the areas in which your business is struggling and where there is a real need for change. Once you’ve done that, time management tools like Trello and Asana can help you track your time and make sure you’re keeping pace.

“Momentum is everything in a startup,” Altman wrote. “If you have momentum, you can avoid most other problems. If you don’t have momentum, nothing will solve your problems except gaining momentum.”

Taking your product from an MVP to a sustainable business is a long road. But it can be done. Keep your energy flowing, be ruthless with your time, and eventually, you can achieve the kind of long-term growth that successful companies are built on.

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You’ve done it – you’ve finally created your first product. Congratulations on this great milestone!

I’d encourage you to take some time to relax, celebrate, and reset, because now comes the hard part: getting people to actually use it.