The user journey
Everything before signup is your marketing. Everything after it is Sarah. The four stages a user travels once they exist, and what she does at each one.
Every product has the same shape. You spend money and months getting a stranger to create an account — ads, content, SEO, a launch. Then they're in, and almost all of that machinery stops.
That handoff is the whole idea:
| ← your marketing | signup | Sarah → |
|---|---|---|
| ads · content · SEO · launches · landing pages | the handoff | first success · habit · paid · product feedback |
Sarah does nothing to the left of that line. She doesn't run campaigns, write blog posts, or chase leads. She starts the second a user exists, in the part of the journey most products leave to a welcome email and hope.
That's also where your money already is. You paid full price to acquire everyone on the right side of that line. Whether they activate, stay, upgrade, or tell a friend is decided entirely after the acquisition spend is spent.
The four stages after signup
At any moment, a user who has signed up is in one of a small number of states. Signed up but never started. Ten minutes in and stuck. Reading your pricing page. About to cancel. Just had a win and feeling good about it.
Sarah's whole job is one sentence: recognize the state, and do the single thing that's worth the most money there.
Those states line up in the order a user travels them, with a fifth underneath that makes the other four land better.
| Stage | Her job | Why it's money | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Get them started | Get them to a first success; unstick them on the spot | The survival gate. Everything below is multiplied by "did they survive this" — an unactivated user makes save and upgrade all ×0. |
| 02 | Stop them leaving | Catch the cancel, handle the refund honestly, re-warm the ones going cold | Plugging a leak is the cheapest revenue there is. You already paid to acquire them. |
| 03 | Grow the account | The right offer to the hesitant; upgrade the ones hitting their ceiling | The only upward money — expansion from users who are already happy, plus conversion of the ones on the fence. |
| 04 | Learn from every chat | Personas, use cases, what they'll pay for — out of every conversation | Doesn't produce money directly. Makes 01–03 land better: who deserves an offer, how big it should be, what blocks activation. |
Internally we call this the Lifeline. You don't need the word — you need the order, because it's also the order to build in. Stage 01 first, because nothing below it pays off until users survive it.
What one stage looks like
One state, one move. Here she's caught someone stuck on a blank canvas — and the interesting part is what she doesn't do:
She had credits she could have handed over. She didn't, because the user wasn't out of credits — they were out of ideas. Reading the state correctly is the job. Handing out the wrong remedy costs you money and doesn't fix anything.
That conversation cost you nothing to enable. It's her words only — free, no server to build. How much you have to build draws that line exactly.
What she can't see yet
Sarah lives in a browser tab. Everything above fires because a user is there — on a page, in a session, doing something.
So there are real states she is blind to today, and you should know before you install rather than after:
- Signed up and never came back. Nothing watches for the absence of a first use.
- A payment that failed. No billing-webhook listener. The highest-ROI slice of churn is invisible to her.
- Quietly going cold. She catches a returning user when they return. While they're gone, she can't tell.
All three need the same thing — a way to notice users who aren't on the page — and it doesn't exist yet. When it does, this page will say so. Until then, don't read anything on this site as "she watches your users for you." She meets them.
Next: How much you have to build — the exact set of things that work the minute you paste the script tag, and where the line is that needs a server.
How much you have to build
Exactly what starts working the minute you paste the script tag, what costs one line of code, and where the line is that needs a server. No roadmap, just what runs today.
1 · Get them started
The survival gate — getting a new user from "I'm here" to "I made something I care about", and unsticking them the second they stall.