The short and sweet answer is NO :) Just because you build something does not mean everyone will come. Actually, at times - even if you build some thing absolutely awesome - people may not come.

The reason behind this is called "Value Attribution" - if you really want to understand the concept behind this - please refer to a very famous experiment conducted by Washington Post but here’s the summary of what they did.

The Washington Post asked world renowned Violinist – Joshua Bell to play on his 3.5 million dollar violin at Washington D.C metro station without revealing his identity.

The hypothesis was that Joshua Bell, who had given tons of sold out performances on auditoriums where tickets averaged $100/person, would be able to gather a large crowd just based on his sheer talent.

But, after playing some of the most intricate music ever written on a 3.5 million violin that was hand crafted by Antonio Stradivari in 1713, Joshua Bell could not get ANY TRACTION. During his 45-minute performance – no one really stopped by to listen to his performance let alone gathering a crowd to appreciate it!

So we might wonder – what went so wrong? Why did Joshua Bell fail to get any traction?

Well the answer lies in Value Attribution and Crowd Mindset!

The people traveling through Metro station that morning did not recognize that the person-playing Violin was a world famous violinist Joshua Bell. They also did not realize that the violin that was being played was worth 3.5 million dollars. To them, it was simply a guy playing violin on a busy morning. What is a value of a guy-playing violin on subway station? Nothing right? So – no one really stopped or even paid much attention.

The same thing is true when you build a product. People subconsciously attribute value to every product. This is the primary reason I believe that no one will come just because you build a product.

From above example, you should be able to tell that even if your product is world-renowned but if people fail to recognize the value of your product, they will not come.

So, it is very important to create a good product but then it is even more important to communicate its value to the users. Once you are able to do those two things then only are you ready to talk about user acquisition and user retention.

Your product value creation is your sales funnel or better known as your value proposition. The users whom you plan to acquire must first travel through your sales funnel in order to understand the value of your product. So where or how you pick up your users it is not that important. What is critically important is what you show them along the way.

The second thing that is equally important during user acquisition cycle is to understand their mindset. For example, it is easy see that the mindset of the crowd on a subway station in above example was surely different from the mindset of the crowd in a live theater. The people at subway station were there to catch a train and you can safely assume that they were not interested in listing to music. The music was probably the last thing in their mind so even though, more than 1000 people passed by, no one really stopped or appreciated the music.

Similarly, bringing a crowd of 25K users to your site on day one may make you feel good but it does not add any value unless it’s the right crowd with right mindset! I think the focus should be on acquiring the right customers but that will only happen if you truly understand the value proposition of your product and then be able to communicate it with right set of customers!