Customers vs. users: Why word choice matters

GUEST: When you’re a startup founder, you get a lot of questions. What’s your traction? Are you technical? When do you expect to implode and go back to working at a bank? Most of them are easy to answer. But there’s one that I get pushback on. It usually goes like this:
“ Alex, how many customers do you have?”
“We have a few hundred, but most aren‘t paying yet at this point.”
“Those aren’t customers, Alex. Those are users.”