While laying the foundation for the [How To Start a Startup] course in the first lecture of the series, [Y Combinator president Sam] Altman shares a mantra repeated regularly within the accelerator:
“It’s better to build something that a small number of users love, than a large number of users like.”
Why? He’s seen time and again that it’s much easier to increase your number of users than the amount that users like your product.
Given the current atmosphere of frenzied experimentation at many top news organisations, this important bit of insight can help publishers to frame their experiments and make the right choices about which products to scale up.
Altman offers another way of looking at it: “Making something that people want, but only a medium amount, is a great way to fail, but not understand why you’re failing.”
Read the full piece at The Media Briefing
