Dec 30, 2025 · 4 min read
There is a standard playbook in business: find your happiest customers, ask them what they want, and give it to them. It feels like the safest path to growth. These are the people who love your brand, defend you on social media, and buy everything you sell.
But there is a hidden danger in this approach. When you focus exclusively on appeasing your "superusers," you stop seeing the market clearly. You enter a state of myopia where you mistake the loud desires of a few for the needs of the many. This isn't just a stumbling block; for many companies, it is the beginning of the end. It creates a feedback loop that feels like success but leads directly to irrelevance.
The problem usually starts in the product roadmap. Your most loyal customers always want more. They want more specs, more buttons, more customization, and more power. Because they are willing to pay for these things, you build them.
This leads to products that are marvels of engineering but failures of strategy. History is littered with examples. Jira became a labyrinth of custom workflows, automation rules, and enterprise features that power users loved but new teams found overwhelming. Salesforce kept adding complex enterprise CRM modules and customization options long after smaller teams moved to simpler tools like HubSpot or Pipedrive.
These products were objectively good, but only for the 1% of users who were already obsessed with the brand. To an outsider—a team looking to adopt their first project management tool or smartphone—these products looked expensive, complicated, and intimidating. By chasing the approval of the superuser, these companies built walls around their products that new users couldn't climb.
Why do smart executives fall for this? Because it makes money in the short term.
Releasing a high-end, feature-packed product to a base of die-hard fans is a guaranteed cash infusion. It extracts maximum value from the people who already love you. It makes the quarterly earnings look fantastic. It feels like a win because the reviews from the community are glowing.
But this is a "harvesting" strategy, not a growth strategy. You are squeezing more juice out of a lemon that is slowly drying up. While the company celebrates the profits from the superusers, they are often neglecting the risky, expensive Research and Development needed to attract the next wave of customers. They become scared to innovate because innovation might alienate the core base.
The real damage happens at the top of the funnel. A healthy business needs a constant stream of new customers to replace the ones who leave. But when you optimize for the superuser, you break the entry path for the beginner.
When a potential customer looks at a Jira instance with hundreds of custom fields and complex workflows, they don't see "the most powerful project management tool ever made." They see an overcomplicated system compared to the "good enough" option like Linear or Notion that their team can actually use. When the entry price (in dollars or complexity) gets too high, new people stop showing up.
This creates a death spiral. Your user base stops growing and starts to shrink as older customers leave. Because you haven't built an affordable or simple on-ramp for new users, there is no one to replace them. The company slowly withers away, all while its remaining customers tell them how much they love the new features.
This phenomenon is often fueled by a false sense of security. When Yahoo began its decline, it was famously obsessed with whether the "Yahoos" (their core fans) liked their new features. As long as the core users were happy, management felt they were on the right track.
They didn't realize that their core users were becoming a tiny island in a massive ocean. While they were high-fiving over positive feedback from the faithful, the rest of the world was moving to Google and Facebook.
To build a product that lasts, you have to be willing to ignore your best customers. You have to be willing to say "no" to the complex feature requests of the superuser so you can say "yes" to the simplicity needed by the beginner. If you only build for the people you already have, you will eventually run out of people to sell to.