Sterling Proffer

Product teams overvalue hitting home runs vs hitting 100 singles back to back. This leads them to take bigger swings by going after bigger markets of new users. They get bogged down by trying to establish product-market fit for a new set of users and never fulfill the potential of their current product-market fit.

Until you recognize that they are adjacent users and commit to helping them, they will remain adjacent. They aren’t going to get there on their own. You have to be passionate about them and learn to view the product from their eyes. If you don’t focus on them, growth slows and your cohorts decay.

The rule is simple: Do not be a commodity. Do not be easily comparable to other people who have, roughly, the same set of skills and the same background. The rule may be simple, but its history and implications are incredibly rich.

Glaringly, the prominent artists complaining about record labels demanding TikToks tend to be Millennials who love a good music video—or at least seem to appreciate the power of cultivating distance from their listeners.