How to Keep Your First 1,000 Users

Great list indeed.. And the key points are focusing on a niche (cheap, easy, close, ...) before expanding. BUT even though Foursquare did that in New York to begin with, the speed of expansion afterwards is important too. Foursquare went from 1 city to 100+ in a bit less than a year opening slots of new cities every second month or so. As Groupon did that in a shorter period of time. The conclusion simply being (i guess) : once your model (product, business) is proven locally on a niche, don't wast time and get global fast.

Great goal that I believe is skipped over in a lot of "How to" articles.

Getting as many users as possible as quickly as possible not only outstrips your capital to capture those users, but most of them never stay on for long.

Focus on perfecting features and functions that make and keep 1000 users happy. If at first you don't then iterate. Don't keep trying to capture more users when your first 1k are not even using your product.