As you consider where to place your energy, the sales funnel can sometimes make this decision for you. If you are converting 50% of all visitors to members, and 50% of all members to users, but you are only getting 200 new unique visitors a day, then you should obviously spend your time getting visitors. In other situations, you might want to wait on getting visitors until you are more successful at moving people through other aspects of the funnel.
On a related note, Sean Ellis has popularized the idea of product-market fit, which has a lot of value as you decide your priorities using this funnel. Sean has often said that if at least 40% of your existing users wouldn’t be “very disappointed” if your product disappeared then you don’t yet have product-market fit. This means that your product doesn’t solve enough of a pain. It isn’t adequately loved by the users, and the team needs to focus on the product more than growth. His overall point is that you shouldn’t try to find new visitors, or optimize the funnel for them until you have a product that people want.
This creates a little bit of a catch 22. If you don’t have any traffic, then you won’t have users to poll as you try to find out how disappointed they would be in your absence. However, focusing solely on growth would be a bad move, as you’d be optimizing in vain if your core offering is lacking.
Get an adequate user base, then ask them how well your product fits their needs before taking things to the next level. You have to grow some to know if you’re even on the right path to becoming more. Just don’t put yourself in a situation where you are expending massive energy in an attempt to grow a product that people don’t love. It’s that simple.