Startup Log – April 22, 2024
Today was one of those split-brain founder days—part building, part thinking, part minor existential spiral. But progress was real, and that’s what's keeping the lights on (literally and mentally).
Ship, Iterate, Repeat
We’re revamping the onboarding flow, and it’s… messy. The cognitive load of our current experience is too high—users are bouncing, or worse, getting confused. We’re basically asking someone to assemble IKEA furniture without giving them the little hex wrench. Today was spent wireframing a stripped-down version that gets people to value faster. Less clutter, fewer dropdowns, no unnecessary setup steps.
Design and product feedback loops were tight—some real "small team superpower" vibes.
Analytics Are Lying (Or At Least Misleading)
We thought the funnel was tracking post-signup actions. It’s not. Mixpanel and GA are tripping over multi-step flows, so we’re only seeing part of the story. Flagged for engineering. It’s annoying, but also very startup.
Still, the existing data screams the same thing: activation is our choke point.
Pitch Practice ≠ Pitch Perfect
Investor conversations are warming up. We’re threading the needle between looking ready and actually being ready. Spent a chunk of the afternoon rewriting our story—less “we have these cool features,” more “this is a gnarly problem and we’re weirdly qualified to solve it.”
Also: we now reference our early traction and unique UX angle a lot more confidently. That took longer to internalize than I expected.
Backend: Please Don’t Break
One random tweet or Hacker News mention, and we might melt down like cheap plastic in a microwave. We started sketching out a basic scaling roadmap—Redis caching, background workers, horizontal scaling. Not building it yet, just trying to not be caught pants-down if things go boom.
Team Check-In
One teammate hit a wall today. We grabbed lunch and had a real conversation about burnout. No fixes yet, but it was good. We're small enough that one person running on empty becomes a systemic issue pretty quickly. Making team health a weekly ritual from here on out.
What I Learned Today (And You Can Too)
🧠 How to Spot High Cognitive Load in Onboarding:
- Watch actual users go through your flow (no assumptions).
- Count clicks and think steps—it adds up fast.
- Look for drop-off points and ask: what question is the user trying to answer here but can’t?
- Ruthlessly prune anything that doesn’t get them to “aha” faster.
Today’s motto: “Just because it’s useful doesn’t mean it needs to be shown on day one.”
—
We’re still pre-seed, but we’re starting to hum. Real usage, real feedback, and the first sparks of momentum. It’s fragile—but it’s alive.
