Can we talk about hitting 10,000 users before revenue?

I keep seeing people say you need revenue first, but my startup got to 10k users in six months with zero income. We built something people actually wanted to use, but I think that distracted us from figuring out how to charge for it before we ran out of runway. Has anyone else found that growth milestones can actually hurt you if they come too fast?

2 comments

2 Comments

logantaylor2h ago

...and then you realize you've built the world's most popular free hobby. @park.wyatt that AWS line hit me right in the gut. We spent months celebrating each new user signup like we were popping champagne, meanwhile our server costs were quietly eating through our last three months of runway. The worst part was when I finally tried to add a subscription tier and half the users just ghosted. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I should've just put a paywall at user number 500 and called it a day.

park.wyatt12h ago

Haha we managed to hit 5k users before realizing we still couldn't pay our AWS bill. Growth is like getting to the front of a really long line only to find out the store is closed for inventory. We were so busy celebrating that we forgot to figure out how to put a price tag on the thing people were addicted to using.