Together with a singular design strategy informing your design decisions, analytics and insights are most important to make informed decisions when building out a new product. I come across one dominant issue again, again...and again.

The initial target audience is way too broad.

Here, a simple example to illustrate why its so detrimental to 0-1 efforts.

Imagine a new social app focused on video clips within friend groups, the founders decide to launch broadly, targeting more or less all users. Their focused efforts are mostly around the feature set and iterating on the editing tools, the UI etc.

Here is the problem with this approach and inevitable consequences it and any other product would face:

1. Diluted messaging - by speaking to everyone, no one is really listening.
2. Incremental iteration - small changes most often goes unnoticed by users.
3. No quality Insights - Without user specifics you really don't understand anything.

Always start small with a well defined audience. Hyper focus on these users until you know exactly what resonates with them, aim only for large impact changes and learn from their impact. Most importantly, don't rush scaling your audience until you have this foundation in place.