"Probably the most important single piece of advice I got, which is probably one of the most important pieces of advice I can give you, is he [Paul Graham] basically drew out this chart and he said, 'It's better to have a hundred people that love you, a hundred customers that love you, than a million customers that just sort of like you.' In other words, if you have a hundred people that absolutely love your product, they'll tell a hundred people, and then they'll tell a hundred people, or even ten people. This thing will grow; we call it growing virally. In fact, almost all movements in history have grown this way as well. There are deeply passionate followers, and they grow it and they're customer advocates.

The problem is, in Silicon Valley, the general wisdom is, 'I need to build some app. This thing needs to have this viral coefficient; I need to get millions of people to use it, and they gotta like it enough to share it.' And that's totally the wrong way to think about it, especially if you're in a service business like ours. So, Paul Graham said all you have to do is get a hundred people to like you; don't worry about millions of people. That was totally freeing. Because until then, I'm like, 'How the hell am I going to get a million people to do this if I can't even get my mom or my sister to do it?' But I can find a hundred people.

And so we literally decided to do things that don't scale. If all you need to do is get a hundred people to love you, do things that don't scale."

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