austinchang

i agree with you here but sounds like you are mostly talking about "Early Adopters"?

Power users of a product who get deep recurring value from your product are get to analyze. they may be mostly earlier adopters at first but hopefully will grow to be your core customer.

sure. happy to chat. ping me at austin [@] initialized [.] com

thanks for the comment. agree that chasing after the "wrong" customers is a whole pitfall unto it's own. Nothing here says you need to chose your user based on existing top of funnel. Often times those are earlier adopters who try something and leave.

When thinking about your products critical user journey you need to think about ideal cases: who is the User, what is their Goal and in what Context they are using your product. Lots of work goes into understanding each of these to hone in on specifics for each product and definitely much more detail than this first article.

completely agree. most "Critical User Journey" articles are written by UX or product designers.

this article was meant to be an introduction to show how any product, startup, or company can use User Journeys as a framework for product development (not just product design) and how if executed in a systematic way can unblock growth.

thanks andrew. glad that you thought it was valuable.

you summed it up quite well. it is very easy to lose sight of what your users go through for the first time every day when you are the one adding to the system to extend or expand it.

Sorry everyone for the sudden notice. This has been wrecking us for some time and we went back and forth about how to handle this timeframe. Having a long graceful transition period for our users would have been great but for reasons that we could not control Fridge as it currently stands had to be shut down quickly. Unfortunately there are tough decisions (especially in startups) to make and tougher consequences to live with even if they come with a silver lining at the end.

We remain dedicated to building great products and hopefully things will become more clear after the dust settles.

Again, sorry for the sudden notice...

yeah! great job guys... keep it up

thanks for the tips! we are in the middle of updating our "getting started" flow which isn't as optimized as it should be.

this and a full featured native experience is coming in the next few weeks!

Public groups or events on FB could work but they suffer two things:

- people not invited, not involved, or random people start to get messages about the event and it becomes noise and adds to the clutter. Interactions around specific and esoteric groups, events or interests in a public forum isn't really the best way to spur real conversations.

- be yourself: post, message, comment, heart what you want in the confines of that topic, event, group. Fridge takes permissions and privacy around access to profiles, pictures out of the picture and lets you post and share what you want with exactly the right people

it all comes down to social context and not having a one size fit all hierarchy of relationships.

Fridge lets you connect with friends, family, strangers you just met, co-workers, soon to be acquaintances, etc... around specific events, relationships, or groups.

Don't have to add anyone as friends or worry about privacy or permissions. Clustered social graphs mimic how you meet and interact with your real life network.

Some of these may work on FB but many topical, time and event based relationships would not work within the FB friend request structure.

Learning simple logic gates in LOGO making the turtle go around a path... do kids still do that today or is it much fancier?