The Foundational Four

When you're building an app, start with these four sections.

Earlier this fall, I wrote a piece on how companies should be extremely judicious about what they build into their apps. The theory is that everything you add is more likely to cause confusion with your users than deliver the business value you crave. While I do believe in this limited effort theory, it also needs to be stated that there are some areas where you need to put in the extra work. Like a lot of extra work. I'm talking obsessing over the work.

These core four areas are the make-or-break components of your app:

• Signup and order path

• First Time User Experience (FTUX)

• Instrumentation and analytics

• Viral loops

I've gone through quite an evolution with these areas[jm1] . I once considered each of them just cookie-cutter work, and from what I see in the tech industry, a lot of people who build apps do as well. Everyone knows you need signup, so why waste a bunch of time working through it, right? Wrong.

This wasn't just a tiny error in my thinking – it was a fundamental misconception that can torpedo your entire service. If you don't nail these, it can be catastrophic for your app, regardless of how well you've figured out product-market fit and the quality of the rest of your work.

Let's walk through each and look at where you should put your effort in.

Signup: First Impressions Matter

It's very tempting to just use the standard approaches to signup and call it a day. After all, we're all busy and there are many more interesting problems to solve. Don't get me wrong, building a signup flow isn't the most fascinating job you'll ever have at your startup. But let's think about it this way: signup is the first 'action' a customer will take on your app. That's after hearing about your service, wading through whatever marketing vehicle got them there, and taking the time to download your app.

Signing up for an account should, at a minimum, show the same level of thoughtfulness that you put into the rest of your app. First, you need to make sure you're up to date on the latest design and thinking around signup. Then, download as many apps as you can and go through their signup process. I prefer to do screen-by-screen teardowns so I can refer to them later.

As for the philosophy behind signup, I'm a firm believer in making it as light as possible. My guiding principle is you should never ask for something from a user that you aren't going to provide an immediate benefit for. Example: you want someone's phone number in the signup process? There better be a clear rationale for it besides "we want to market to you on your phone." And of course, it goes without saying – your word is your bond here. Delivering on this will set the tone that you respect what users are giving you and send a strong signal that you will deliver. Most crucially, you cannot fail any step along the way. This is probably the easiest way to lose a user forever. Don't be that product manager with the broken "forgot password" flow.

First Time User Experience: Skip the Tours

A close cousin to signup is the first-time user experience, sometimes referred to as onboarding or user education. Many product managers will decide to build a tour or tutorial that sits on top of the core product, popping up the first time a user runs the app to "educate" them.

I detest tutorials for a couple of reasons.

First, these get in the way of the core experience. Your user just downloaded the app – why on earth do you want them to click through a bunch of screens without any interaction (or benefit, see previous) before using it? While I don't have data on your specific usage, I'd bet good money that a tour might be the single biggest driver of people abandoning your app.

Second, if the interactions of your app are so complex that they require a tutorial, shouldn't you just make the damn app easier to use? This might mean making the app simpler for all users at the start and having new features appear as users get more comfortable. That is *if* you need to make it that complex at all. One word of advice: simplify!

Instrumentation and Analytics: Measure What Matters

It's a well-known adage in product development: You can't judge what you can't measure. And it's true. You have to make sure you're instrumenting nearly every screen you're developing so that you can gather the data necessary to make decisions. I've made two distinct errors in my thinking here.

One, you forget to add instrumentation time into the development cycle, leading to flying blind. Or two, you just decide to instrument everything. Both are problems. Yes, if you can't measure something, you can't fix it. But I would posit that you need to think through exactly how you're going to use the data you're gathering. So my suggestion is to decide on your KPIs ***before*** you start developing your instrumentation specs. By keeping the scope tight, you won't add a ton of work to your developers' docket. But even more importantly, you'll keep your dashboards super focused on the key metrics that you actually need to obsess over.

Studying Viral Loops: Make It Natural

It's been over 10 years since Nir Eyal published Hooked, which talked about making your service extremely sticky using behavioral strategies. While I disagree with many things that Eyal argues for, especially about the responsibility companies owe in ethically creating products, his suggestion about deeply understanding users' viral loops remains critically important in building digital services.

The idea of viral loops is simple: there are triggers that cause users to engage with a new service, which lead to the user taking an action and deliver something so valuable that it creates a loop that engages them. Take Zoom Conferencing – you got an invite to a meeting, which led you to download the software, and you were rewarded with high-quality video calls. You then would use the service to set up meetings and added to the growth by sharing with other users.

This loop is what everyone who builds a service is trying to create. But before you can consider building a sticky loop, you need to closely examine what users do in other contexts or apps to inform your loop building. At Gimme Radio, we closely studied how our users shared content and what they were trying to accomplish to guide our building. My advice? Identify your potential users and understand their motivations and behaviors before you start building features. That way, you'll know what additional social services are important to them and build your product to fit into their lives, not the other way around.

Remember, while these four areas might seem basic or boring, they're the foundation everything else builds on. Nail these, and you've got a fighting chance. Screw them up, and it won't matter how amazing how great your app is because people might not get to that part of the service.