I think "How we did it" case studies are interesting and useful, but the moment you turn it into "Here's how you can do it too!", you're on snake-oil territory.
Edit: My beef is with the prescriptive tone of the post, as if getting 10,000 paying users is as simple as 1, 2, 3...
>but the moment you turn it into "Here's how you can do it too!", you're on snake-oil territory.
You seem to be interpreting the post very literally. The author's tone is clearly different from snake oil salesman who have a flashing $299 course on SAAS scaling at the bottom of the page.
A helpful habit when reading an article is to ask yourself how the author would reply if you asked them a question. If you ask a snake oil salesman if they're certain, they'll say yes.
Whereas the impression I got from this article was that the author was constantly learning, testing assumptions. If you asked them "are you sure this worked? Would this work for anyone, in any circumstances?" I got the impression they would say "perhaps not" and discuss where they had uncertainties.
You can't include all uncertainties when writing. Such an article would be unreadable. Any writing requires reading between the lines.
Edit: My beef is with the prescriptive tone of the post, as if getting 10,000 paying users is as simple as 1, 2, 3...