How to identify and remove users who hijack your product

Executive overview

Early-stage startups attract users beyond their target audience. Some use the product in unexpected ways that harm the network, distort the roadmap, and destroy more value than they create.

Not all unexpected users are bad. There is a spectrum: intended users, interesting edge cases worth studying, low-value users, and hijackers — users who actively damage your product or business. Kick out the hijackers.

The core risk is letting hijacked users control your product roadmap.

The user spectrum

• Intended users: using the product as designed
• Edge-case users: unexpected use with real potential — study these
• Low-value users: short-term revenue, no long-term value creation
• Hijackers: net negative — harm the network, distort priorities, create liability

Recognising hijackers

• They use your product in ways that damage other users or your reputation
• Paying hijackers are harder to cut — revenue creates psychological friction
• The test: is the negative clearly outweighing the positive?
• Customer support overload is only a problem if you're not learning from it

Why you still cut them

• Short-term revenue does not justify long-term product damage
• Hijackers push feature requests that serve their use case, not your core users
• Solving half a problem for many users beats solving no problem well for anyone
• Keeping them signals to the market what your product is — and isn't

The Justin.tv lesson

• Justin.tv was hijacked by users streaming copyrighted content
• A separate subset — video gamers — turned out to be valuable edge-case users
• That edge case became Twitch
• The copyrighted-content streamers were the actual hijackers: no long-term value, clear downside