Hey!

If you’ve ever told yourself, “I’ll add [feature] once I have more users”, read this.

I just spent months in that trap.

The feature I gated: social in MotoLog (my Strava-for-motorcycles app).

Friends, leaderboard, profile cards. I kept saying I’d build it once I had more users. Today I shipped it. And realized I had it completely backwards.

The trap:

“Social only matters once you have users.”

The reality:

Strava without social isn’t Strava — it’s a spreadsheet. The social layer IS the product. Without it, the first 100 users have nothing to stick around for.

The order should be:

1. Ship the social/loop layer first
2. Drive users into a product where retention is already engineered
3. Not the other way around

3 signs you’re in the same trap:

• You’re building a “logbook” version of your app, planning to add sharing later
• Your roadmap has a feature labelled “wait for users first”
• The first user of your app has nothing to do other than wait. This one is extreme, agree, but possible

If 2 out of 3 — ship the social/loop layer this week. Even if it’s ugly. Even if you have to two-phone-test it yourself in a parking lot (I did).

Here’s today’s video — Bangkok ride, the two-phone test, the lens story, the honest reckoning at the end:

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Next week I’m going the opposite direction — researched 53 app ideas backed by data, not vibes. The methodology that comes out of that is something I’ll be using for everything I build going forward. More on next Monday.

That's it for today. Keep shipping 🚀

Aivars