Notes from Day 1, User 1

Since stumbling into Silicon Valley, “Day 1, User 1” has been on my bucket list.

If you’ve worked at a late-stage startup, you know that a few foundational decisions have an outsized influence on the trajectory of the company. I have always been curious about what those decisions feel like, and how you have to flex your product skills in new or different ways to be effective.

Now that I’m on the other side of the milestone, here are a few reminders I’ll take to my next Day 1:

This stage is all about qualitative evidence and reasoning.

For all that people talk about data-driven decision making, making sense of your first 1 (or first several hundred) users is really a qualitative exercise. If you’re in a B2B situation, you probably have one or two customers, unique in ways you can’t see without a larger customer base. In B2C, your first users are often friends and family, or an extended network that became interested in your solution not just because of the solution itself. People love to talk about personas — it’s rare that you have enough volume to detect a pattern! Every passionate piece of feedback has to be analyzed. There is a great deal of subjectivity as you try to parse “one person’s opinion” from “something that could change our direction” — open conversations with your team are so important to avoid the bias of a single person’s perspective. The team’s past experience and external frameworks (e.g. has this business model been validated in an analogous way?) become important to augment user feedback.

Onboarding is more complicated than you think it is.

You’re launching a new product. It’s changing all the time. You’re not sure who the perfect target customer is.

The only thing more confusing than your (lack of) internal documentation is your marketing! You barely know what the product is, let alone how to put it into the right words to concisely explain to someone else without context. Onboarding (from awareness down to ‘how do I use it?’) deserves your utmost focus. You’ll lose the opportunity to test the rest of your hypotheses without the right plan to get people in the door.

You need to reach your passive participants or detractors right away.

Right next to ‘what is working,’ your priority at an early stage is to determine what isn’t working, so that you can make improvements. You have an extremely narrow window of attention from people who didn’t see immediate value from your product (they’ll forget about you as soon as they move on!), so it’s critical to have a process set up to catch those people and collect their feedback as soon as possible. I’ve noticed that even a 12 hour delay can change response rates. Urgency can be wielded poorly in startups —this is a place to wield it for maximum learning!

One of my favorite things about Day 1 is that everyone is thinking like a product manager — defining the problem you’re trying to solve, the user you’re trying to reach. Making difficult decisions on limited information and an informed intuition. With the right team, these conversations and urgent pivots become a shared muscle you’re building — the process of converging on the right thing.