I spent part of yesterday at the Future of Money Summit in San Francisco. It was an interesting conference, and most topics covered were completely new to me. I was there to learn and be exposed to new things. That happened, and it was awesome.

One of the speakers made a comment that didn't sit well with me. He said "we have over 2 million customers" because over 2 people people had started free accounts on his website. Now, maybe I'm just getting into semantics, but I consider these people to be called "users" not "customers", given that none of them had ever actually participated in a financial transaction with the company and he had no data to show that they ever would.

In my mind, here are the classes of people who visit your site / service:

1. Visitors. People who visit your site / service
2. Users. Visitors who sign up, but only participate in things that are free to them (i.e. they pay nothing)
3. Customers. Users who convert to paying for a product / service
4. Recurring Customers. Customers who pay you on a regular basis

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