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Users vs Customers

Lots of startups I come across are effectively multi-sided platforms.

I find founders of those startups often don't make a clear distinction between users and customers.

To help them think more clearly I often ask them to think about a customer as being the person who pays something to them. Users are simply there to create a product that customers will pay for.

For example when you search with Google you are a user. When you use Google AdWords to place an advert on Google's search engine you are a customer because you pay for that advert. You wouldn't pay for that advert if lots of users wouldn't see it.

I sometimes get push-back along the lines of "but our users are our customers too".

Founders intuitively understand that customers are the ones that should be bent over backwards for. Often they are totally focused on a delivering a great experience to their users so they want to call their users customers to give themselves permission to ignore their real customers.

If you ignore your paying customers for too long, you won't succeed.