This is an excerpt from my friend Nate’s recent blog post “How to Get Millions of Users“, which is a great distillation of some big and heady thoughts tying product design, development, marketing, and onboarding all together in a nice little package. It’s a pretty long post, but read it all. I promise it’s worth it:

When we build products for groups of people we aim for a fictitious middle. While we’re trying to make something people LOVE we make assumption about what they love. It would be like saying to your girlfriend “I hear women LOVE Victoria’s Secret. Go try this on.” when in actuality some women might like that but she really loves sweat pants; taken as an individual, demographics mean jack.

When we build products for real people — starting with ourselves — however, we know exactly what to build.

Before he launched Foursquare, Dennis Crowley would go around saying “I just want a Leaderboard for my Saturday night and I want to be at the top of it.” Foursquare wasn’t just built for himself, it was built with a very specific set of friends in mind — those he spent his Saturday night’s with.

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There are only a few days left to apply for this round. Applications close this Saturday at 11:59pm. If you’re thinking about applying, but want to know more about how it works, check out this video. It should tell you everything you need to know about the selection process.

SproutBox – How does it work? from SproutBox on Vimeo.

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