profile

StartUp To ScaleUp

StartUp Founders: Friction Kills. Marie Kondo It.

Published about 1 year agoΒ β€’Β 2 min read

Hey Reader,

Founders' obsession with speed is akin to a squirrel on espresso - hyperactive and directionless. You don't want speed, you want velocity: momentum in the right direction. For founders, before the user journey, before the wireframes, before the before, comes the 5 pillars of the user journey. (𝕏 Tweet)

TLDR; Marie Kondo your app. Barriers to usage often come from prioritizing company wants over user needs or value. Friction kills.

Unlock New Audiences with CAASie

​CAASie gives startups an easy path to outdoor advertising. Reach new audiences w/ lower CAC & higher visibility. Escape the AdWords battleground.
​
Meet customers where they are - from billboards to gyms, offices, & charging stations. Stand out, compete smarter.
​
No contracts, no minimums. Use CAASie now.
Need help, reach out to Joe.
​Want to get in front of 140,000+ founders? Go here.

LAST WEEKS FRAMEWORK:

​1.8 StartUp Founders: Create Lovers Not Users. Even in V1.

LETS GET INTO IT:

Every unnecessary barrier, every overlooked user need, is a missed opportunity to win (to convert). The gold is converting the beans already in your funnel, vs finding new beans to hid your failures.

Iterating your solution in your head through critical thinking is free. The more you go through it, repeat it, visualize it, think about it, talk about it, the more you do before you do, asking why to literally everything, the more likely you are to build into value.

Just get the user to the destination as clean and clear as humanely possible, that's it.

The 5 Pillars: Onboarding, Data In, Product Value, Output, and Measurement - are the foundations of the user journey. A chance to evaluate your app's purpose, impact, and success metrics at every stage to the right and left of your solution. Clarity before you drill.

This workbook might help you thinking about thinking:

Embrace the iterative process, the constant challenging, root it in real user feedback (direct and indirect) to help get closer to product-market fit. Examination of every single step, fighting for the user towards genuine value.

  • Do you really need all those questions in onboarding?
  • Do you really need the user to upload branding when you could grab it for them?
  • Do you really need to bombard users with all features at once, or can you introduce them gradually?

Just ask whether every feature, every step, every gate, every requirement genuinely serves the user or merely satisfies a perceived internal need. Are you truly user-centric, or are you projecting your own assumptions onto your users?

Question everything. Fight for the user. This is what differentiates successful startups from those that never understand why their app didn't catch on.

As always, you are welcome to grab time with me.

Good luck.

-- James
​

​

Not A Subscriber?

Join 140k+ StartUp Founders reading my weekly newsletter offering tactical insights to start, scale, and fund their startup. Real advice from a 3x exited founder.

​

​

​

β€ͺ8424 Santa Monica Blvd, Suite A523, Los Angeles, CA 90069
​Unsubscribe Β· Preferences​

StartUp To ScaleUp

by James Sinclair

Where 140k+ founders read my weekly newsletter offering tactical insights to start, scale, and fund their startup. Real advice from a 3x exited founder.

Read more from StartUp To ScaleUp
The Kill Chain, Download the template

Hey Reader, Right now, in the thick of the hard work, it’s easy to confuse effort with progress. It's hard to separate exploration work from completion work. Both matter. But only one completes the job. That confusion usually starts with drift. Half-loops. Half-commits. All noise. It feels like action. It’s not. Let’s fix that. You half-execute. Test instead of commit. Cold email campaign with no replies? Failed channel. Fumbled pitch? Market doesn't work. Meanwhile, that unanswered email in...

2 days agoΒ β€’Β 5 min read
Reality ? Consensus

Hey Reader, Your startup exists in multiple realities simultaneously.You see a unicorn. They see a horse with an ice cream cone stuck to its head. Same startup. Different realities. That gap between perceptions is where founders live every day... the space between what is and what's perceived. The investor who squints at your deck and diagnoses the wrong problem. The advisor who actually knows what's holding you back. The prospect who can't see why your solution matters. The team member who's...

9 days agoΒ β€’Β 5 min read
Never Arriving

Hey Reader, One of the things you only discover by being a founder is that... You never arrive. The goal posts always move. We know this. Build the product, no time to celebrate, now you need a customer. Sign the customer, no time to celebrate, now you need to fix the bugs. Fix the bugs, no time to celebrate, now you have to keep your customers. It's always "just one more thing." Perhaps my fave way of explaining it, is as a founder you are always standing on the edge of a cliff, when...

16 days agoΒ β€’Β 5 min read