> We didn’t want to teach ourselves how to find money-losing customers

This!!!

Coming from the travel business. I remember this vividly.

You acquire a customer that is not loyal to your product even for 3 seconds for 1$ and you make 0.8$ out of that customer.

Building a customer acquisition strategy that will work in the long run and will make you money is such a key realization.

Even if it takes you longer and seems like you are moving slower, you should not be tempted.

At one point, we saw a 200% increase in users over the course of two weeks due to some "growth hacks". Those ended up just costing money in server and engineering costs. None of the customers actually stuck with the product for the long run.