James Sinclair tells first-time founders to map the user journey by hand before building anything. Role-play each step, write down what happens at signup, selection, delivery, and follow-up, then turn it into a flowchart to see where you actually need technology. A dog-food subscription shows how this works.
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Nice piece of advice for first time founders who are trying to work out what to build. They've got the idea, they know the problem statement, they kind of know the solution, they kind of know what they're going into. Is to think about if you were going to do it manually, as in, there was no technology involved, there was no website, automation, any of that. If you were actually to do this manually, how do you build this product? Perhaps an example is you want to start a dog food subscription business. Okay, so you stand outside Petco and you wait for someone to walk out with dog food and you say, hey.
Would you like this food delivered to.
You every week or every month for the exact same price you're paying a.
Petco delivered to your door? She says, yes. You say, great.
What's your dog, how old?
Do you want the same food? You want different food? Do you want any other bits and pieces?
Great.
How often do you want it delivered?
Great.
Can I have your name and address and your billing details? Great. Next Tuesday, you go deliver the food, you ring the doorbell, drop off the.
Food, send a text, hey, food's delivered.
Let me know if I can do.
Anything else for you.
A few days later, maybe you ping an email, just want to check it, make sure everything's going great. Just so you know, you know, make sure you have, you know, your flea.
Or your other medicine.
If you want to add it to your order, let me know.
Do you want some dog treats?
Let me know. Two weeks later, next order arrives, two weeks later. Maybe you send them a little newsletter, an email that says, hey, here's some things that you might want to add. Who knows? My point is we've just written out.
A workflow of how you would run your business if you were doing it all by hand and manually, through conversation, through phone call, text message, email, in person, whatever it is, write it all out as one big long document, then go back and try and break it up into the steps. As in draw yourself a flowchart. Step one, step two, step three. Now you know your user flow. Now you know your user journey. Now you know the steps you actually have to complete in order to deliver the task and do the task. And now you can start thinking about, right, what are the technical solutions I'm going to need to be able to build and deliver this to scale. From being a manual process where I deliver the food to a computer, managing the logistics, the sign up, the automation, all of the bits behind it. Sometimes it's a really helpful way to kind of understand your core product from the sequence of the user is running that role play inside of your head on paper into a workflow and backing into your product.
Sometimes you just realize you miss a.
Few bits and pieces when you jump straight into the solution and you haven't actually mapped the user journey out. We can talk later about the exact user journey and how to make it epic and customer success and all those things, but just as a baseline. Just write it out as if you were going to do it manually. How would it work? Thanks.
