100 users means you’ve found your early adopters. These are the people who need what you’re building, not just those who think it’s cool. At this stage, every user matters. You can talk to all of them, understand their pain points, and iterate directly based on their feedback.
$100/month proves your product has value. This isn’t a hobby project or a free tool. At $100/month, you’re solving a serious problem. It’s a signal that your users aren’t just experimenting—they’re invested. They’re choosing you over alternatives, and they’re paying for it.
$10K MRR is the first real milestone. It shows you’re onto something scalable. At this level, you’re no longer guessing—you have data, feedback, and a system that works. Investors take notice because it’s proof that your idea isn’t just theoretical.
Here’s the playbook:
- Start small. Focus on a niche.
- Talk to your users relentlessly.
- Iterate based on what they need, not what you think they want.
- Charge enough to prove value. Free doesn’t mean they love it—paying does.
- Retain before you scale. 100 loyal users are better than 1,000 casual ones.
Unit economics: Sure, everyone would want a better widget, but you need to understand the broad dynamics of what it will take to pay for the supply and demand of your product. If you build it, they will not come—I promise you. You need to expect to rely on cost/effort to make people aware of your product. You need to have a sense of how your product will be created and how much that will cost.
Distribution: Assume that if your product existed tomorrow, nobody would care. Build and launch an app? You can count on 10 downloads in the first week, and half of them are bots. As important as your idea is how you’ll generate awareness for it. Half of the successful businesses today are simply taking a proven product or service and finding a new way to distribute it. These ideas are far more compelling than net-new ideas because at least we know there is demand. A great example is the ghost kitchens that popped up from UberEats and Grubhub: a new mode of distribution suddenly creates a huge opportunity for the most obvious thing—a restaurant. But one with cheap real estate and no place to sit. If your idea was to create ghost kitchens in cheap warehouses, now you’re thinking on the right level. But you weren’t, were you?
Market: On what basis do companies like yours trade? For example, e-commerce businesses trade on EBITDA, while SaaS companies trade on ARR. Growth rate always matters highly. There are cases where a highly unprofitable business can be worth billions because of high growth and high margins (see: every public SaaS company). There are cases where highly profitable businesses are worth less than zero because they are shrinking and have terrible margins. Understand this dynamic and have some semblance of an end goal in mind.
You need to separate sales from marketing. Sales is a conversation; marketing is a broadcast. Marketing gets the phone to ring, sales takes the call and closes the deal.
For B2B, sales resemble project management: the goal is not to convince everyone to buy your product or service but to diagnose their needs and only engage with firms that will benefit. For larger deals, you “sell with your ears” as much as you talk.
Confidence and conviction will win in sales and marketing all day over intelligence. Usually, sales and marketing are the main difference between an idea and a thriving business. Think about best-selling books—many aren’t made by incredibly talented writers, but by talented marketers and sellers. Some of the best-written books in the world will never be read because the writer doesn’t know how to market or sell. Some lucky authors get a good publisher to do that for them, but even selling yourself to the publisher takes skill in selling.
Whenever you deal with someone, try to conceptualize yourself as a consultant, not a salesperson. Great salespeople are more like matchmakers—people have a problem, and you have a solution. People are pretty sensitive in situations where they could be persuaded. Conversations should feel like you’re trying to convince a friend to watch a really cool movie rather than a high-pressure, ultra-confident Wolf of Wall Street closing.
If you really want to learn the craft, put yourself in more situations where you can talk to a salesperson and put them through their paces. Start taking calls from telemarketers, and instead of hanging up, tell them you’d rather they send you an email. Go to a car dealership and tell them the car you want is too expensive. This is a decent way to get experience.
My biggest advice is to get a coach, mentor, or consultant who you talk with once per week to get feedback. This is how professional salespeople learn in practice (e.g., from a sales manager). This will accelerate your learning by a factor of 10 versus doing it yourself. They will help you read each situation and push you to focus on the right places. Otherwise, it’s easy to flounder in the wrong ones.
Preselling
Validate: Until you have money in hand, you have not validated your product.
- Email subscribers with a coming-soon landing page.
- Tons of traffic with a “viral” article.
- People clicking an ad.
Process:
- Pinpoint the primary problem your customers face.
- Prepare a pre-sales landing page that explains your offer.
- Get feedback, find objections, and measure willingness to pay.
- Answer questions, overcome objections, and pre-sell your product.
The caliber of technical talent you can get when you’ve got a paying customer lined up is massive. Sell it, then build it.
Body of Knowledge 
Leave a comment