Everyone loves to draw perfect viral loops on a whiteboard. Users magically appear, invite their friends, and create a beautiful, exponential growth curve. It looks so clean. So easy. It’s a complete fantasy.
I’m going to tell you a story you won’t find in any pitch deck. In early 2019, I was living in a tiny Cupertino apartment with $4,700 to my name. My rent was $3,700. I had a gut feeling that the world would soon need software built for remote teams, and I found the perfect domain: RemoteTeam.com. The owner was a developer about to get married. I messaged him and said, “I have 4.7k in my bank account, my rent is 3.7k. I’ll wire it today if you’ll sell for 4k.” He said yes. My last dollars were gone.
That’s the messy reality of building something from nothing. It’s not about clean diagrams; it’s about taking crazy risks. Eighteen months after that $4,000 bet, Gusto acquired RemoteTeam.com. I’ve been fortunate to build two companies that were acquired and invest in over 200 more, including giants like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I’ve seen what real growth looks like from the inside. It’s never a magical loop. It’s a messy, hands-on, and often grueling process of building a community, one person at a time.
Your First 100 Users Are Everything
Founders get obsessed with their viral coefficient, the ‘k-factor’. They think if they can just get it above 1, they’ve won. But that number is a vanity metric if you don’t have a rock-solid community. You can burn millions on ads, but if users don’t stick around, you’re just lighting money on fire.
We learned this the hard way at my first company, MovieLaLa. We built a feature for sharing movie recommendations. On paper, it was a great viral loop. In reality, it was a leaky bucket. People signed up, shared a few movies, and vanished. We were focused on the wrong thing.
At RemoteTeam, we did the opposite. We didn’t just celebrate our 100th user with an automated email. We personally reached out to every single one. We had a private Slack channel with them. They weren’t just users; they were our co-creators, giving us the brutal, honest feedback we needed to build a product people would actually pay for. These first 100 users are your foundation. Know them inside and out.
The 100-10-1 System
Forget the hacks. The secret to explosive growth is a simple, repeatable system I call the “100-10-1” rule. It’s about focus.
Your first 100 users are your foundation. As I said, these are the people you build with. They are your focus group, your beta testers, and your first believers. They give you the truth.
Your next 10 are your champions. From that initial 100, you’ll find a small group of true believers. These are your champions. At MovieLaLa, we identified our top 10 and gave them special access, invited them to exclusive events, and made them feel like insiders. They became our evangelists, spreading the word more effectively than any ad campaign could.
Your first 1 is your North Star. This is your ideal customer profile, boiled down to a single person. Who is the person that gets the most value from your product and will shout it from the rooftops? For RemoteTeam, our North Star was a startup founder with a distributed team, drowning in the complexities of global payroll and compliance. We built our entire marketing strategy around solving her specific problems.
It’s a Grind, Not a Miracle
Building a community isn’t glamorous. It’s responding to support tickets at 2 AM. It’s having painful conversations with users when your product breaks. It’s feeling like you’re shouting into the void. At RemoteTeam, we were a tiny, engineering-led team of just me, a CTO, three employees, and nine global contractors. We were all doing jobs we’d never done before. The velocity was insane because we had to make it work.
I remember when our payment processing went down. It was a complete nightmare. But our users were incredible. They weren’t just customers on a spreadsheet; they were part of our journey. They were rooting for us. That’s the moat that a strong community builds around your business. It’s a defense that no amount of competitor funding can breach.
So, the next time someone starts talking about viral loops, ask them about their first 100 users. Ask them about the time everything broke. The truth about community building is that it’s not a loop. It’s a messy, beautiful, and deeply human process. And it’s the only thing that actually builds a business that lasts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the most common pushback you get on this?
People often push back by citing exceptions or edge cases. And they're usually right that exceptions exist. But building a strategy around exceptions rather than patterns is a losing game for most founders.
How can I apply this thinking to my own situation?
Start by identifying the core principle behind the opinion, not the specific example. Then ask yourself: does this principle apply to my context? If yes, test it in a small, low-risk way before going all in.
What experience informs this perspective?
This perspective comes from over a decade of building companies in Silicon Valley, two successful exits (RemoteTeam to Gusto, MovieLaLa to Gfycat), and investing in 200+ startups including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Scale AI. I write about what I've lived.
How has this view evolved over time?
My thinking on most topics has changed significantly over the years. Early in my career, I held many conventional views that experience proved wrong. I try to update my beliefs when the evidence changes.