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Finding 100 users who love you is better than 1 million who kinda like you.

Love is better than like.

That’s the mantra that Sam Altman focused on while leading Y Combinator. Why?

“If you look at the companies that have gone to become super important and valuable, and shaped the world in a big way, they tend to have fairly fanatical early users,” Altman says in his Masters of Scale episode.

You want to make your product as indispensable as humanly possible. That’s your primary objective — before you shore up your business plan, or plan your PR campaign, or any other steps along the road to world domination. Your first step must be: make yourself indispensable.

That’s the same goal that Altman is seeking to fulfill now at the helm of OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company.

This week's featured episode:

Customer love is all you need, w/Sam Altman

The true seed of scale is customer love, which you can’t buy, hack, or game. Sam Altman, former president of Y Combinator, scaled countless startups by focusing on this one idea: Finding 100 users who love you is better than 1 million who kinda like you. Now, as CEO of OpenAI, Sam leads the creation of genuinely useful AI products. He shares timeless insights in his interview from 2018 on how to build on the love of passionate customers to create world-shifting tools.

Listen now

Building on this...

Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva

"Every time we gave someone a new account, we’d call the customer. We spoke to hundreds of people, and got a really deep insight into what it was that they needed, questions that they had, things that didn’t make sense."

Listen >>

 

Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb

"Embrace being small, make something perfect — because that's going to be what fuels your company going forward."

Listen >>

Action Item: Talk to a customer

Choose a 30-minute window in your day, and schedule a call with a customer. Any customer: someone who wrote in to your help line, or visited your store, or wrote a review. What to ask them? Three things: What problem is your product solving for them? What’s one thing they wish you would change about it? What’s one thing that would make them want to tell everyone they know about it?

Then ask follow-up questions, and most important: LISTEN.

This Action Item appears in Day 4 of The Mindset of Scale course. You can find it in the Masters of Scale Courses app, available for iOS & for Android.

Learn more about this week's guest!

In March of last year, Sam Altman wrote about the future and how he believes we should navigate it. “The technological progress we make in the next 100 years will be far larger than all we’ve made since we first controlled fire and invented the wheel,” he writes. The essay is called “Moore's Law for Everything.” You can read it here >>

Sam appeared on The Ezra Klein Show last year to talk about the political shifts to expect as AI reshapes our economies and societies. As Ezra writes: "Some of it is speculative, of course, but some of it isn’t. That shift of power and wealth is already underway." You can listen to here >>

NEW on Rapid Response:

Rapid Response: From ‘delusion’ to criminal justice revolution, w/Ameelio’s Zo Orchingwa

When a tech nonprofit competes against a $2 billion incumbent dominating the market, its odds are slim. But Zo Orchingwa took that bet, founding Ameelio, believing that access to communication and education for the incarcerated is needed for their future success. Ameelio is on a quest to partner with every prison district in the country until one day, it scales enough to be redundant.

Listen here >>

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