What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Don't Make Me Think
Priya spent a weekend building the order form for her new candle business: name, email, shipping address, billing address, a dropdown for scent, a dropdown for size, a checkbox for gift wrap, a text box for a personal note, and a final screen asking customers to "confirm their preferences summary." She was proud of how complete it felt. Her first ten customers, though, mostly abandoned the form halfway through, and two who finished ordered the wrong scent because the dropdown label didn't match the product photo. Priya only found out because her sister, testing it for fun, said "wait, what am I supposed to pick here?" three separate times. By then, a week of ad spend had already pointed strangers at a form that lost most of them before checkout, and Priya had no idea how many, because she'd never watched anyone else use it. She had assumed that because every field made sense to her, it would make sense to a stranger buying a candle for the first time, and that single assumption turned out to be the most expensive decision she'd made all month.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Make the next step obvious, not just possible
A customer or new hire should never have to stop and reread a button, a label, or a step to figure out what happens next. If something is technically clear but requires a half-second of decoding, it still counts as friction that a competitor's simpler option can win on.
A founder labels a pricing button "Get Started" on one page and "Try It Free" on another, and visitors hesitate, unsure if the two lead to the same thing.
Pick your three most-visited pages and read only the button and link text out loud, in order, checking whether a stranger could predict where each one leads.
Strip every option that isn't earning its place
Every extra field, plan tier, or paragraph of explanation is something a busy customer has to read and judge before acting, and most early-stage products have far more of these than they need.
A founder adds four pricing tiers to look established, and prospective customers spend so long comparing plans that most leave without choosing any.
Remove one field, option, or sentence from your core signup flow each week and watch whether completion actually drops before adding it back.
Watch a handful of real customers try it, early
You don't need a research budget to learn where people get stuck; watching three or four people who aren't your friends or cofounders attempt your actual signup or checkout flow surfaces problems no internal debate would catch.
A team debates internally for weeks whether their onboarding is confusing, never once handing the product to an outsider to find out directly.
Recruit three people unconnected to your business, sit beside them while they try to complete your core flow, and write down only where they pause or ask a question.
Fix the worst confusion first, then look again
When feedback surfaces several rough spots at once, resist the urge to smooth all of them simultaneously. Fixing the single most disorienting step first, then retesting, usually reveals that some of the smaller complaints were really just symptoms of that bigger one, and chasing every complaint at once burns time you don't have.
Cutting options and cutting testing time can quietly work against each other: a founder eager to ship a simpler flow may skip watching anyone use it, assuming fewer choices automatically means fewer problems. But a cut made purely on instinct can remove something a customer actually needed, not just clutter. A short test with even one or two outside users before each cut keeps simplification honest rather than just a guess about what customers won't miss.
Name one thing, honestly
Where in your current signup or checkout flow have you assumed something is obvious simply because you built it and never watched a stranger try it?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Recruit three people unconnected to your business, sit beside them while they try to complete your core flow, and write down only where they pause or ask a question.