Every product has an aha moment. Mine is the one thing I can't control

Every product has an aha moment. Mine is the one thing I can't control.

Project #1, part 2: activation for Pashtpan, my Telegram bot that tracks court cases for lawyers.

The aha moment is the point where users get the value and stay. The famous example is Facebook: new users who added 7 friends in their first 10 days kept coming back. So Facebook pushed everyone to add friends.

For Pashtpan, the aha moment is the first alert: "something changed in your case."

But it depends on the courts. If nothing changes, no alert comes, and the user waits.

There's a step before that, and that one is mine. Before the aha moment comes the setup moment: the first thing a user has to do to get there. For Pashtpan, it's adding at least one case. Many people signed up and never did.

So I stopped looking at the bot as its founder. I took a new phone, made a new account, and went through the flow as a stranger to see where a user would get stuck. I made a very small change that moved the needle a bit.

Today, 4 out of 5 users still haven't added a single case. But the ones who did follow 2.4 on average; one user follows 13, and 11 people have already received a real court alert. I know the next fixes. I just haven't shipped them yet.

If you can't control your aha moment, work on the step right before it.