Scott Belsky explains the concept of the "first mile experience" — the initial part of a product that most customers see and where the largest drop-off occurs. He argues teams must design the first 30 seconds to make users feel successful (fast, look good, feel good) to enable product-led growth, and warns that as products scale toward monetization they often deprioritize this first mile, mis-serving later cohorts (pragmatists) compared with early adopters. He recommends continuously investing in the first mile.
Chapters
This is probably one of the most important questions in product. I think that every product has what we call a first mile experience, which is the part of your product that the most customers will see and it's all drop off from there. What gets people through the first mile experience? Well, first of all, you have to empathize with where that customer is at, whether they're a consumer or an enterprise customer. In the first 30 seconds of that first mile of your product, I guarantee you they're lazy, vain and selfish. Right? They want to get through it fast. They want to look good, they want to look good to their boss, they want to look good to their friends, they want to feel good about themselves. There needs to be some quick hit of feeling successful in that first mile in order for them to engage further. By the way, feeling successful quickly in a product is another description for product led growth. When you get customers through that first mile experience, which is ironically the last mile of companies building an experience, typically it's the final mile before you launch where you're like, oh wait, what should the onboarding be? And what should the splash page? Oh, and what should those defaults be? That's like a happenstance conversation towards the end of shipping, when in fact, like that's the only thing that every customer will ever see and it's all downward from there. So why not nail that? In fact, I would go further to say that if you can really just nail the first mile experience of your product, and after that it's all kind of shitty, you're probably one of the top 1% products out there, really, if you can just get people through. So what's interesting is this goes back to your question, is that I think that the whole Silicon Alley Valley life cycle is great. Companies like the ones you're building that reimagine something really hard as really simple, with that beautiful, clever interface, that great first mile experience, and you bring people in. And as a result of this work that you do, people flock to your product from other products and other workflows that they once did. They're refreshed by the simplicity and the thoughtfulness and the design and everything else. And then your product grows and it starts to listen more to power users than to new users. It starts to attach what you're hearing from power users with opportunities for monetization. Then you have your investors being like, so when are you going to start making revenue? Then you go to more enterprise or sales calls and you realize that they need that laundry list of things to sign the dotted line. What do you do? You add complexity, you add more choice points, you add more innards, more process. And you probably don't make more time for that first mile experience. Well, something else has happened when you weren't looking, which is that that first cohort of customers that came into your product, those were early adopters, right? And your first mile was nailed for them. But now if you've been working on all these like power users and monetization, this new cohort of customers has come into your product that are no longer first adopters. They're pragmatists. They're not coming because they like to test and try new products. They're coming because their boss told them they had to or or they read some blog that said this is the best product in their space and they tinkered with all of them and chose yours. And the first mile needs to be different for them. So the short hack to bottom line this is to spend consistent time forever on that first mile experience of your product.
