Personal insights and practical advice about growing a product: mistakes made, lessons learned, and unexpected wins.
When I launched my app, I had no idea what I was doing. Like many first-time founders, I was fueled by passion, caffeine, and the belief that I was building something people needed. My first 10 users were friends, family, and a couple of curious strangers. Hitting 1,000 felt like a miracle. Reaching 1 million? That was something else entirely.
The journey from 10 users to 1 million wasnât a straight line. It was a rollercoaster of late nights, broken code, lucky breaks, and painful mistakes. Here are the biggest lessons I learned from scaling a product to 1 million usersâthings I wish someone had told me when I was just getting started.
1. Your First Users Are GoldâListen to Them Obsessively
In the early days, every user matters. When you have 10 users, you can talk to all of them. Do it. Ask them what they like, what they hate, what confused them, and what they expected but didnât find.
One of our earliest users pointed out a UX issue that we hadnât noticed. Fixing it doubled our activation rate. Another user shared a use case we hadnât thought of, which led us to a new feature that became our most-used.
Lesson: Donât guess what your users wantâask them. Every complaint is a gift in disguise.
2. What Got You to 1,000 Users Wonât Get You to 10,000 (Let Alone 1 Million)
In the beginning, we hacked growth. Cold emails, Reddit threads, Product Hunt launches, indie hacker shoutoutsâanything to get noticed. It worked⊠for a while.
But what helped us grow early on didnât scale. We had to shift from hustle-based tactics to systems: SEO, content marketing, referral programs, and eventually paid acquisition. That transition was hard.
Lesson: Growth strategies need to evolve. Build repeatable systems that scale.
3. Build for Retention Before You Chase Growth
We made the mistake of trying to grow before our product was sticky. We were signing up users who never came back. It felt like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
So we paused all marketing and focused on retention. We improved onboarding, added in-app guidance, and set up behavior-based emails. Our retention numbers improved dramatically, and only then did we start growing again.
Lesson: Growth is meaningless if you canât keep users. Retention is the foundation of scale.
4. Tech Debt Is a Tax You Eventually Have to Pay
To move fast early on, we took shortcuts. We hardcoded things. We skipped tests. We ignored performance warnings. And for a while, it worked fine.
But when we hit 50,000 users, everything started breaking. Features slowed down, bugs multiplied, and deploying updates became risky. We had to stop building new things for two months just to clean up the mess.
Lesson: Move fast, yesâbut respect your future self. Pay off tech debt before it buries you.
5. Hiring Too Late Hurts More Than Hiring Too Early
We waited too long to hire. Partly because of budget constraints, partly because we thought we could handle it all. By the time we brought on our first support person, our inbox was buried. When we hired our first engineer, our roadmap was months behind.
The right hires accelerated us like crazy. They brought fresh perspectives, took pressure off the core team, and raised the quality bar.
Lesson: The right people are force multipliers. Don’t wait until youâre drowning to bring them in.
6. Data Is Your Best Friend (If You Know How to Use It)
For a long time, we were flying blind. We had basic analytics but didnât know what metrics truly mattered. Once we got serious about dataâsetting up funnels, tracking cohorts, measuring LTVâwe made much better decisions.
We discovered that one specific action early in the user journey predicted long-term retention. Once we knew that, we optimized everything to guide users toward that moment.
Lesson: Data isnât just for dashboardsâitâs for decisions. Invest in tracking early.
7. Outages and Failures Will HappenâOwn Them Transparently
When we hit 500,000 users, we experienced our first major outage. It lasted six hours. It was awful. But instead of hiding, we sent out a transparent email explaining what happened, what we were doing to fix it, and how weâd prevent it in the future.
The response? Overwhelmingly positive. Users appreciated the honesty, and many said it actually increased their trust in us.
Lesson: People donât expect perfectionâthey expect honesty. Own your mistakes.
8. Unexpected Wins Often Come from Unexpected Places
Some of our biggest wins were total surprises. A blog post we almost didnât publish went viral. A user weâd barely interacted with turned out to be an influencer and brought us 10,000 new users in a week. A small integration we built âjust becauseâ ended up opening a massive B2B opportunity.
You canât plan for those things, but you can create the conditions for themâby experimenting, sharing your journey, and being open to serendipity.
Lesson: Leave space for luck to find you. Some of your best growth wonât come from your roadmap.
9. Community > Customers
When we started treating our users like a community instead of just a customer base, everything changed. We created a Slack group. We hosted AMAs. We asked for feedback before launching features.
Not only did engagement go up, but so did word-of-mouth. People donât just want to use productsâthey want to be part of something.
Lesson: Build with your users, not just for them. Community is a growth engine.
10. Youâll Never Feel “Ready”âDo It Anyway
At every stage, I felt like an imposter. When we hit 10,000 users, I worried we werenât professional enough. At 100,000, I feared weâd hit our ceiling. At 1 million, I still felt like we were winging it.
What Iâve learned is this: no one really knows what theyâre doing. The key is to keep learning, keep shipping, and keep showing upâeven when itâs messy.
Lesson: Progress beats perfection. Just start, and figure things out as you grow.
Final Thoughts: Growth Is a Journey, Not a Hack
Scaling from 10 users to 1 million taught me more than any book, course, or podcast ever could. It was equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. We made mistakes, missed opportunities, and learned everything the hard way.
But we also built something people loved. And in the end, thatâs what itâs all about.
If youâre just starting out, hereâs my best advice:
- Focus on solving a real problem.
- Talk to your users constantly.
- Donât chase growth before youâre ready.
- Take care of your team.
- And remember: itâs a marathon, not a sprint.
You donât need the perfect idea, the perfect plan, or the perfect product. You just need to keep going.
The first 10 users are the hardestâafter that, anythingâs possible.
