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Adam D’Angelo on the importance of building a “natural growth path” into your product

June 27, 2025

“The same thing that gets you from 1 million users to 10 million users is also what gets you from 100 users to 1,000 users.”

As the founder of Quora explains:

“You need to build a product that is going to grow naturally, and then once you have a product in that state, you can do some artificial things to kickstart it.”

When Quora was getting started, Adam and his three co-founders asked about 500 of their friends to post questions on the site.

“You’re not going to get a good answer,” they explained, “but as a favor to us, can you just do this? And anytime you see a question that you can answer, can you just answer it even though no one’s going to read your answers?”

About 10% of their friends (~50 people) ended up doing this, and from there, Quora started getting an increasing amount of content every day.

“It was very small, but it was enough to turn into a small community,” Adam says. “Then with more interesting content, it was more attractive to their friends. So we let them invite their friends, and we grew from there.”

He continues:

“There needs to be a natural growth path for the product. Quora has about 400 million unique monthly visitors today, and they’re coming because there’s a lot of content that’s valuable to them. Some of the visitors decide to sign up and write an answer to a question. Then we have a little more content the next day. Then with a little more content, we can attract more users. That same core loop is what took us from 100 users to 1,000 users to 10,000 users. ”

Adam sees a lot of founders get this wrong:

“I see a lot of companies put a huge amount of effort into the early marketing or the early community stuff, but if the product is not set up to grow and scale, it doesn’t matter how much energy you put into the early kickoff phase.”