A Few Raving Fans Beat a Crowd of Lukewarm Users

The counterintuitive truth about early-stage traction that most builders miss

In the earliest stage of building, ten people who are obsessed with your product are worth more than 1,000 who “kind of” like it.

Think about your favorite local restaurant—the one with a line every night and impossible-to-get reservations. Now compare that to a chain restaurant with decent food and lots of locations. Which would you rather own? 

Most early stage builders chase the chain restaurant model: more locations, broader appeal, faster expansion. But the most successful products start as that tiny restaurant with the devoted following. Intensity of love—not breadth of like—is the true foundation for sustainable growth.

Raving Fans Matter More Than Numbers

Here's what most builders miss: lukewarm users leave no clues, but raving fans are treasure maps. When someone kind of likes your product, their feedback is generic. "It's nice." "Pretty good." "Could use some improvements." You learn nothing actionable from their politeness.

But when someone loves your product, they become your unpaid product team, your organic marketing engine, and your proof that you're solving something people desperately need. Deep love creates three things you can't buy with any amount of marketing spend.

1. Rich feedback. Raving fans will tell you exactly what's broken, what's magical, and what they wish existed next. They've thought about your product as much as (or more than!) you have. They notice things you missed. They've built workarounds for your bugs that become your best feature requests. While casual users drift away silently, users who love the product fight with you to make things better.
2. Organic growth that compounds. Fans evangelize without being asked. They bring colleagues to demos, send you referrals, mention you in their social media channels, write unsolicited reviews. One obsessed user can generate ten new customers organically because their enthusiasm is genuine and infectious. Marketing can't manufacture that kind of authentic recommendation (this is what investors call viral coefficient (or the K Factor) when each user brings in more than one additional user, creating exponential growth. Here's a deeper dive on this if you’re curious).
3. Proof of urgency. When someone can't live without your product, you know you're solving a real problem, not an imaginary one. You're building a painkiller, not a vitamin. This distinction becomes crucial when you're deciding what to build next and how to allocate your limited resources.

It's not about how many people know your product exists. It's about how many can't live without it.

How to Spot a Raving Fan

1. Raving fans don't hide. They exhibit specific, observable behaviors that lukewarm users never do. The most telling sign is that they complain loudly when something breaks. If your platform goes down or your product goes out of stock and nobody notices, you have a problem. Raving fans will email, tweet, or message you frantically when they can't access what they need.
2. They're also constantly pushing your product beyond its intended limits. They're building hacks and workarounds, combining your tool with others, finding creative applications you never imagined. This isn't user error—it's users desperate for more value than you're currently providing. Pay attention to these creative misuses; they often reveal your next breakthrough feature.
3. Perhaps, most importantly, they become your volunteer sales team. Without any prompting, they mention your product in conversations, recommend it in forums, or bring it up at work. They ask "what's next?" before you've even planned it, more excited about your roadmap than you are. They have strong opinions about what you should build because they've already imagined how they'd use it.

The ultimate test is simple: if you turned off your product tomorrow, would anyone scream?

Not just be disappointed—would they be genuinely distressed? Would they reach out to understand what happened and when it's coming back? If the answer is no, you don't have raving fans yet. You have casual users, and casual users don't build businesses.

Practical Steps for Builders

The path forward requires discipline and focus. 

1. Start by talking to your top five users weekly—not through surveys or forms, but actual conversations. Listen to their exact words, not your interpretation. When they describe problems, note the emotional language they use. Are they frustrated, delighted, desperate? The intensity of their language reveals the intensity of their need.
2. Next, ignore the vanity metrics that feel good but tell you nothing. Look beyond  downloads, press mentions, and website traffic. You should be closely tracking retention and intensity. How often do people come back? How long do they stay? How quickly do they adopt new features? These behaviors reveal true engagement in ways that signup numbers never will.
3. Then comes the hardest part: doubling down on what your raving fans already love instead of spreading thin across every feature request. Ask your most obsessed users what they love most about your product, then make that thing even better. Deepen the obsession before broadening the audience. This feels counterintuitive when you're desperate for growth, but it's the only sustainable path forward.
4. Frame every experiment around deepening love, not broadening reach. Instead of asking "How can we get more users?" ask "How can we make our best users even more obsessed?" Instead of "What features do people want?" ask "What would make our raving fans unable to live without this?" The questions you ask determine the answers you get, and the answers determine what you build.

Momentum Through Love

A small but obsessed user base isn't a "nice to have." It's the only reliable starting point for scaling.

Growth built on indifference collapses. Users acquired through broad marketing campaigns leave as quickly as they arrived. Features built for lukewarm feedback satisfy no one deeply.

But growth built on love compounds. Obsessed users become your best salespeople, providing social proof that money can't buy and virality that can drive rapidly compounding growth. They provide the clearest product direction because they understand the problem you're solving better than anyone else. They form the foundation of sustainable revenue because they'll pay premium prices for premium value. Most importantly, they give you the confidence to say no to distractions and yes to what matters.

Early-stage builders don't need thousands of users. Find a handful who would scream if you disappeared tomorrow. Build for them. Everything else will follow.

How many of your users would scream if you disappeared tomorrow? Hit reply and let me know—I read every response.