The AHA moment sounds simple, but it isn’t
Every product has that magical AHA moment, the point where a user finally “gets it” and sees the value. In theory, it’s obvious. In practice, it’s one of the hardest problems in product design.
I learned this firsthand while building Typedream, a website builder we eventually sold. What seemed like a simple journey, “help people get a website live”, turned into one of the most complex challenges I had.
We thought we knew
At Typedream, we thought the AHA was clear: your website gets built.
So we optimized for speed. From zero to one in minutes:
- Choose a template
- Add your details
- Boom, you have a live site
That part worked. But then came the harder parts, the steps that turned a casual user into a serious one:
- Customizing their site
- Publishing it to the world
- Upgrading to a custom domain
This was where things broke down.
Session replays felt like staring at CCTV footage, random clicks, unfinished edits, rage-clicks. Funnels told me where people dropped off, but not why. Asking users “who are you?” during onboarding gave us segmentation data, but tying that back to behavior was messy.
And once Typedream grew into an all-in-one dashboard with multiple entry points, it only got harder. Were users here to blog? To build a landing page? To sell digital products? Everyone came with different expectations, and I had no clean way to see what their AHA moment was, or how to guide them there.
Our playbook
We didn’t just sit and wonder. We ran the playbook every good founder or PM would run, and I’d still recommend these tactics to anyone building today:
Analytics Funnels (Posthog)
We tracked events across the onboarding → customize → publish → upgrade journey. This gave us hard numbers. For example, we’d see that 70% picked a template but only 20% customized. That instantly told us where to focus.
Pre-Release User Interviews
Before launching major flows, we tested them with users. This helped us catch obvious points of confusion, like unclear steps when connecting a custom domain before rolling out broadly.
Ongoing User Interviews
We regularly reached out to customers to hear their stories. These conversations shaped countless product decisions, from copy tweaks to onboarding screens.
Email Nudges
We followed up with reminders: publish your site, connect your domain, try this feature. A simple email often reactivated people who’d stalled out.
If I could do it again
But even with this playbook, I often felt like we were missing something deeper.
Were people dropping off because they were just curious testers? Or were they serious customers hitting friction? Which parts of the product really pulled users to their AHA, and which distracted them away?
Those were the questions I could never fully answer. They stuck with me long after Typedream was acquired.
What’s possible today
These days, I’ve been looking at what Autoplay AI can do, and it’s eye-opening compared to what we had back at Typedream. Instead of watching through hours of replays or trying to stitch together funnels, it surfaces where people are hesitating and what path they’re on and trying to take.
What stood out is that it doesn’t just tell you where someone dropped off, but why. Whether they were actually on their way to the AHA moment or if they came in with a completely different goal. That context has been the thing I always wished I had at Typedream: a way to see intent clearly, not just behavior.
It feels less like guessing and more like finally seeing the whole picture.
And it’s the same principle I’m applying now with Sendegg, the next project I’m building. The lesson from Typedream is clear: data is everywhere, but intent is what actually matters.
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