A Few Who Love You, Not a Lot Ambivalent

The line is the heading of principle 5 in Paul Graham’s February 2009 essay “Startups in 13 Sentences” (paulgraham.com/13sentences.html). The paragraph under the heading sets up the choice: “Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It’s easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise.”

Graham didn’t invent the principle. The essay opens by crediting Paul Buchheit: “it’s better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.” A reporter had asked Graham what he’d say if he could only tell startups ten things; the Buchheit line was one of them, and the rest of the list (which ran to thirteen, not ten) is Graham working out the others.

The same paragraph adds an epistemic reason. If you think you’re 85% of the way to a great product, you can’t tell whether it’s really 70% or 10%. The number of users who love what you have is easy to count. Picking depth means picking the measurable side.