The action that qualifies a user as active should correlate with real value from your product, like posting a photo on a social network or completing a ride on a transportation app.

If your startup has strong network effects, focusing on active users may be more important initially, with revenue becoming a focus later on. It's crucial to define what 'users' means for your startup, as it can vary significantly. For example, having 100 users could mean they just signed up or that they actively engage with your product daily for about 10 minutes. The latter is a much more valuable metric.

If you're not seeing user engagement, focus on getting people to use your product quickly, regardless of labels like beta or MVP.

It's important to choose meaningful actions for measuring user engagement; simply tracking app opens can lead to misleading retention metrics.

Understanding how users interact with your product is crucial for growth and building something people truly want.

Daily active users (DAU) is a more meaningful metric than monthly active users (MAU) because it reflects actual engagement with your product.

In advertising-based business models, having millions of active users is essential before brands will buy ads, making active users a reasonable proxy for revenue.

To determine if users are getting value from a product, simply measuring engagement, like watching more content, can be misleading; for example, watching fight videos may not reflect true user satisfaction.

The challenge for product designers is to create a user experience that balances engagement with genuine value, rather than just driving more clicks or views.