If you’re a founder who talks about your users as though you could reach them, run the query I ran this week. It took about a minute and it was not a good minute.
My database has sixty-nine users. There is a column on that table called
consent_market, because we built the signup flow properly – explicit
opt-in, plainly worded, no pre-ticked box.
One of them is true.
Sixty-eight said no.
The system worked. That’s the uncomfortable part
Nothing here is broken. Nobody made a mistake. The consent design did exactly what it was built to do, and I would build it the same way again.
That’s what makes it worth writing down. A bug you can fix. A number that is correct, honest and much smaller than the one in your head is a different problem.
It doesn’t announce itself.
Three words that look like one thing
Users are people who turned up and did something. That’s the number that goes in your update when someone asks how it’s going.
An audience is people who would notice if you stopped.
A list is people you are permitted to contact.
Mine were 69, unknown and 1.
I had been quietly treating all three as the same figure for months, because the first one is the one on the dashboard.
Why founders get this wrong in the same direction every time
Because a signup feels like a relationship.
Someone gave you an email address. It landed in a table you own. The number went up. Every part of that experience says connection.
None of it is one.
The consent checkbox is the quietest thing on the page. So the person who joins and the person who agrees to hear from you again are two different populations, and only one of them shows up in the count you recite.
What I’d check today
Run the actual query.
Not the dashboard number, not the total in your head – the count of people who have affirmatively agreed you may contact them.
If your product has no such field, that is the finding.
Then ask the second question, which hurts more: of the people who did consent, when did you last send them anything worth opening?
A permitted list you never use decays into a list that will not open you.
And then the one I’m sitting with.
If the honest number is one, every plan I have that begins with “email the base” was never a plan.
It was a sentence.
I don’t think the fix is a better consent prompt. The fix is to stop counting the wrong number.
A product with users and a business with an audience are two different achievements.
I have exactly one of them.
Want more like this? Rick writes about the go/no-go decision, founder counterintuitions, and the business of building ventures worth building.
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