Your First 25 Users Matter More Than Your First 2,500

Growth makes us obsessed with big numbers.

10,000 users. 50,000 email subscribers. 100,000 monthly visitors. A million impressions.

Those numbers matter.

But lately, I’ve been thinking much more about the first 25 people.

Because the first 25 users aren’t just users.

They’re the beginning of the product’s culture.

They’re the people who decide, often without realizing it, what this place feels like.

Every new community has invisible rules.

What do people post? How polished does something need to be? Do people answer questions? Do people joke around? Do they use their real names? Do they share photos? Do they help strangers? Does anyone come back?

When there are thousands of users, those patterns feel established.

When there are 25, they’re still being created.

That means every early interaction matters more than it looks like it does.

The first few people who post are showing everyone else what “normal” looks like.

The first person who answers a question teaches people that questions get answered.

The first user who welcomes someone new makes the space feel different.

The first few people who return voluntarily are telling you that there might actually be something here.

That’s not just engagement.

That’s culture formation.

I used to think community growth was mostly about distribution.

How do we get more people in? How do we increase signups? How do we drive traffic?

Those questions still matter.

But at the beginning, I think the job looks a lot more like hosting.

You invite people intentionally. You introduce them. You show them around. You make sure nobody walks into an empty room. You notice when someone contributes something. You respond. You connect people who probably should know each other. You give someone a reason to return.

That doesn’t scale very well.

But maybe it isn’t supposed to.

You’re not optimizing a funnel yet.

You’re trying to make a place feel alive.

Large numbers can hide weak products.

Traffic comes in. Some percentage converts. Some percentage disappears.

You can watch dashboards all day without really understanding whether anyone cares.

With 25 people, it’s much harder to hide.

You notice who comes back. You notice who disappears. You notice when nobody posts unless you ask them to. You notice whether people use the feature you were convinced mattered. You notice when someone finds a completely different use case than the one you designed. You notice if a person tells somebody else without being asked.

That’s incredibly useful.

At that size, user behavior is still legible.

You can actually learn names. You can remember what somebody was trying to do. You can understand why something confused them.

The feedback loop is much tighter.

A signup is easy to celebrate.

Someone entered their email. Great.

But then what?

Did they do anything? Did they find something useful? Did they contribute? Did they recognize another person? Did they come back the next day? Did they come back when there wasn’t an email reminding them? Did they tell somebody else?

One of the questions I keep coming back to is: Would anyone notice if this product disappeared tomorrow?

That sounds dramatic, but it’s a useful test.

If the answer is no, getting another 2,000 signups probably isn’t the most important problem yet.

The product needs to matter more.

Especially in community products, early users create value that you cannot code.

They add the first photos. The first recommendations. The first conversations. The first reviews. The first inside jokes. The first signs that another human being has actually been here.

That changes what the next person experiences.

A map with no contributions feels like a database.

A map with recommendations from recognizable people starts feeling like a community.

A feed with company posts feels like marketing.

A feed with people actually talking feels inhabited.

A directory is useful.

A directory where you recognize contributors starts becoming something else.

The users are helping build the environment.

If every early user influences the experience of the next user, then acquisition quality matters a lot.

The goal isn’t simply: Get 25 people.

It’s: Get 25 people who actually understand why this exists.

People who have a reason to participate.

People who are close enough to the core problem that their behavior teaches you something.

People who might care about each other.

That can mean growing more slowly.

I’m increasingly okay with that.

Because bringing a thousand people into an empty, confusing, half-formed experience doesn’t solve the problem.

It just lets a thousand people experience the problem.

You can personally welcome them. You can ask why they signed up. You can fix something because one person was confused. You can introduce two people. You can ask someone what they were expecting when they clicked a button. You can notice that one user hasn’t returned and wonder why. You can manually seed something that will eventually become automated. You can make the experience feel unusually personal.

None of that is scalable.

That’s exactly why the beginning is the time to do it.

There will hopefully be a point when you cannot know every user.

The first 25 are your chance to understand the product at a human scale.

Product teams spend enormous amounts of time trying to understand users.

Surveys. Analytics. Interviews. Heat maps. Session recordings.

All useful.

But there’s something incredibly valuable about simply being close to the first people using what you built.

Not watching them as data points.

Knowing what they were trying to accomplish. Knowing what happened. Knowing what disappointed them. Knowing what unexpectedly delighted them. Knowing the weird workaround they invented because your interface didn’t make sense.

Early users will tell you what the product actually is.

Sometimes that answer is very different from what you thought you built.

This is probably the biggest shift in how I’m thinking about growth.

The instinct is often: Build it. Launch it. Scale acquisition. Optimize later.

I’m becoming much more interested in: Build it. Find a small number of people who genuinely need it. Make it unusually good for them. Watch what happens. Fix what doesn’t. Understand why they return. Then find more people like them.

Scale the behavior that already exists.

Not the behavior you hope will exist once you have enough traffic.

If 25 people join and nobody cares, that tells you something.

If 25 people join and five keep returning, that tells you something.

If three people start talking to each other without you prompting them, that tells you something.

If someone invites a friend, that tells you something.

If somebody says, “I’ve been looking for something like this,” that tells you something.

Those signals are small.

But early-stage products are made out of small signals.

You don’t need millions of users to learn whether something feels useful.

Sometimes you just need enough people for the product to stop being theoretical.

So right now, I’m much less interested in asking: How do we get 2,500 people?

And much more interested in: How do we make the first 25 care enough to stay?

If we can answer that, the bigger numbers become much more interesting.

Because then we’re not scaling an empty room.

We’re inviting more people into a place that already feels alive.