Before Features, Before Growth: The Two Foundations Every Product Needs

When you are starting a company, everyone has opinions about what you should build next. More features. Better onboarding. A redesign. A growth campaign.

Most of this advice skips the foundation.

I have made this mistake myself. I have watched founders I respect make it too. You build something, it works, and then you start adding — features, users, complexity — before the base is solid. It feels like progress. It is usually debt.

At The Samba, we work with founders at the beginning of their journey. The ones who build something lasting almost always get two things right before anything else.

The First Foundation: Be Where Your Users Already Are

This sounds simple. It is not.

Your product needs to exist where your users already spend their time. Not where you wish they were. Not where they go when they are motivated. Where they actually live, every day, without thinking.

Distribution is not a detail you figure out later. It shapes everything — your product format, your constraints, even your language. If using your product requires users to change their habits, you are fighting an uphill battle from day one.

Ask yourself honestly:

• Do users find my product naturally, or do I have to push them there?
• Does using it feel like part of their routine, or like an interruption?
• If I stopped all marketing tomorrow, would usage continue?

If your product requires intention to use, you have a presence problem. No amount of features will fix it. You need to find where your users already are and meet them there.

Practical example: If your users live in Slack, your product should live in Slack. If they check email first thing in the morning, that is where you need to be. Do not build an app and hope they will download it. Go to them.

The Second Foundation: Do Not Break What You Promise

Once users find you, you have made an implicit promise. Every time they use your product, they are trusting that it will work the way it worked before.

When your product breaks, it breaks trust. Users do not see your code, your infrastructure, your reasons. They just know that something they relied on let them down.

This does not mean you need to be perfect. You will have bugs. You will have outages. What matters is how you handle them and whether users can predict what to expect from you.

Trust is built by:

• Doing the same thing well, repeatedly
• Failing gracefully when you do fail
• Communicating honestly when things go wrong
• Fixing problems before adding features

The trap: Early on, it is tempting to ship fast and fix later. Sometimes that is right. But if you are constantly breaking things for your early users, you are training them not to trust you. Those early users are your foundation. Treat them accordingly.

Why the Order Matters

Here is what I wish someone had told me earlier:

First, presence. Get your product into the daily life of a small number of users. Not through campaigns or launches — through integration into their existing habits.

Then, trust. Deliver consistently. Become reliable. Let users stop thinking about whether your product will work.

Only then, features. Once users have presence and trust, they will tell you what they need. Features for users who trust you extend value. Features for users who do not know you are noise.

Only then, growth. Growth multiplies what you have. If you have presence and trust, growth multiplies value. If you do not, growth multiplies problems.

Most founders want to jump to features and growth. I understand — it feels productive. But if you scale a product that users do not naturally encounter, you are paying to be ignored. If you scale a product that breaks, you are paying to disappoint people.

A Simple Diagnostic

Before your next planning session, try this:

1. Can I name 10 users who use my product without being reminded? If not, you have a presence problem. Focus there.

2. When was the last time my product failed a user? How did they find out? If you do not know, you have a trust problem. You need better visibility.

3. If I built nothing new for three months, would my current users care? If no, your presence and trust might be strong enough to think about features. If yes, figure out why they need novelty to stay.

4. If I doubled my users tomorrow, what would break? Be honest. Fix those things before you grow.

What This Means for You

If you are just starting, this might feel like I am telling you to slow down. I am not. I am telling you to sequence correctly.

Build something small that lives in your users’ daily habits. Make it reliable. Let a handful of people depend on it. Then — and this is the hard part — resist the urge to add features until those users ask for them.

The founders who build lasting companies earn the right to grow. They do not assume it.

Presence first. Trust second. Everything else follows.

You have one job right now: become essential to a small number of people. Do that, and the rest gets easier. Skip it, and nothing else you do will matter.