I once met two different startups, years apart from each other, that were:

And yet…

One startup was building incredible traction.

The other? Faltering. Dumbfounded why the product wasn’t clicking in the market.

The singular difference between the two startups came down to the way that the startup’s designed the customer workflows in the product.

In all of Tundra Angels’ startup investing, I am going to make a bold statement 👇

It tends to not be the best product that wins in the market.

The product that tends to win is the one that the customer can integrate into his or her workflow the easiest.

This is far from the “disruption” that Silicon Valley likes to talk about. It’s really about complete accommodation. 😂

Workflows, at their core, are a path to achieve an outcome. Your customer is repeating workflows over and over. Routine.

Yet, many startup products tends to tamper with existing customer workflows and behavior.

And if 10x increase in value occurs with a very similar if not identical workflow, then a mega market winner is afoot.

Here is the story. This left an indelible mark on me on why designing around workflows and behavioral friction are so important.

Let’s say that Company ABC is run by Ryan, and Company XYZ is run by Craig. Let’s say that both startups existed in the legal space selling to paralegals on staff at legal firms.

Each of the startups’ value propositions were very similar. It involved vastly shortening the time to complete a very repeatable task - getting the customer to the intended outcome much faster.

Both startups had also identified that the paralegals did not want to be replaced.

But here was the material difference:

✅ One CEO (Ryan) thought about the product design through the lens of behaviors and workflows.

The other CEO (Craig), didn’t. ✅

Both were even using the same essential technology. But, Ryan had mapped out a more robust and clear work process accounting for behavioral tendencies, where Craig clearly had not.

Importanlty, this difference between what Ryan saw and what Craig missed led them to different contexts for their solution.

For context, these paralegals worked in a particular industry. In their workflow, there was a very common PDF document that was routine for their jobs that came up over and over again.

Ryan intuitively thought, “I’ll build a summary of this document and make their jobs easier.” So, he developed a V1 of the product that created a summary of this PDF document.

But Ryan then observed an interesting behavior - the summary that he provided wasn’t enough.

Now, through feedback and observation, Ryan learned that this summary was not something that the paralegals were behaviorally used to receiving. Ryan’s product was delivering them something that was out of step of their current behavioral workflow.

Importantly, he observed that even though they read the summary, the paralegal’s natural behavior was to also read the full PDF document anyway, just to be sure that the summary was accurately representing the document.

Ryan realized that this “quality assurance” action was a critical behavior that the paralegals saw as the value that they believed to be contributing. Thus, changing this behavior too much would make the paralegals nervous to adopt his startups’ new technology.

So, Ryan realized to get adoption, the paralegals needed something slightly different than the summary. Thus, Ryan created a V2 solution.

In this new workflow, the paralegals start with a PDF, but through Ryan’s startup’s technology, the paralegals now read a Smart PDF of the same document which shortens the time of their existing process. Essentially, they execute same process but it’s a much shortened process with shortcuts.

So, his V1 product delivered a summary of the PDF, which is initially what he thought they wanted.

But when he learned they read the PDF anyway, he instead delivered not a summary, but rather a smart PDF of several pages that they could reference part of the larger document.

✅ Importantly, by good product design, the paralegals are still reading the PDF in the same way they had in the past with existing behaviors. But instead of a summary which created friction due to disrupting their workflow, the solution became a smart PDF which was much less onerous than it was before. ✅

It’s augmenting the paralegal’s skills and empowering them to be able to do better.

Unsurprisingly, Ryan’s startup is doing very well.

Now, the CEO of XYZ Company, Craig, missed something critical… which led him to build a different product altogether.

Just like Ryan, Craig had also observed that the paralegals did not want to be replaced from their jobs using AI.

But in Craig’s case, he came up with a V1 of his product that delivered a summary to the end user.

But here is where he failed - Craig missed the fact that the summary was not enough for the paralegal. He didn’t see that the paralegals read the whole PDF anyway, to make sure things were in check based on their expertise.

Interestingly, on my call with Craig, I learned that he believed they wanted a summary because it was advice that was seeded to him by an external party, not a user in the market.

Unfortunately, Craig was dumbfounded as to why the product wasn't working in the market.

It “should” have worked. And I didn't know either. Until I met Ryan

Craig didn’t get to the granularity of workflow behaviors.

In so doing, Craig never got to the key insight that Ryan did - that paralegals want to read the entire PDF document.

The underlying technology? Exactly the same.

The use case? Exactly the same.

The market user(s)? Exactly the same.

The major difference? 👇

✅ One CEO honored the embedded friction in workflows and behavior and what changing them could mean. He designed a solution in step with those workflows, choosing to work within those constraints and not develop something outside of them…

…whereas the other CEO had designed their solution completely unaware of workflows and customer behavior. ✅

Not seeing this caused both CEOs to develop different solution workflows.

What I one to call out here is that these two solutions, behaviorally speaking, are not 180 degree differences off from each other.

They are say, behaviorally 15 degrees off from each other.

I mean, seriously, the difference between a summary and a smart PDF is really not that big of a difference. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that if the startup's product does not accommodate the user's workflow exactly, it will be met with friction and resistance

✅ Until a startup’s solution points to the true north of the market, 15 degrees off is the same thing as 180 degrees off. ✅

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