CREATING WITH SYSTEMS

HOW SIMPLE TACTICS
BECOME MEANINGFUL
INTERVENTIONS

CONTEXT // 01

THE CHALLENGE

I was working with an early-stage AI startup and we could feel the absence of key components along the critical workflow. Like most early startups, we had been building the foundations of learning and adapting: instrumentation, decision-making processes, research, well-defined ICPs, etc; but these are all connected, and when something gets blocked upstream or downstream everything starts to feel it.

I reviewed the map I had made to represent our critical workflow and compared it with the idealized model for startups of that stage, and this helped me pinpoint what we really needed to add: we needed to create and integrate a market tap.

A market tap is a way to sense and interpret the currents and opportunities of the market. It feeds all the internal operations and keeps the whole company tethered to the reality of the market. A market tap can take many forms, like user insights, market studies, a homebrew formula based on commodity prices, etc. So long as it helps you understand the market, it can fill the role of a market tap.

Here are some of the more detailed signs that we were missing a market tap:

Usage ambiguity:

We had moderate but sustained traffic, but usage patterns varied significantly. Without a clear, emerging segment, it was hard to determine intention, success, and value and therefore hard to do more than address anything with real priority.

High potential, low focus:

We had strong hypotheses about direction, but nothing external tipping the scales about which to pursue.

Speculation creep:

After addressing the obvious improvements, speculation was creeping into design, features, and all the other main segments of our activities. For true adaptation to take its course, we needed consistent, active market behaviors to observe, discuss, and build upon.

INTERVENTION // 02

THE APPROACH

There are many ways to build a market tap, but I recommended we start with something simple, tried, and true: a cheap SEO + landing page experiment.

The premise: tap into existing search behavior, find the best match between what people are already looking for and what we have built, put up pages targeting those searches, and compare performance.

Why this intervention fit:

• High potential return for relatively little effort
• Easy to control experiments and interpret the results
• Well-understood methodology with plenty of resources to reference
• We already had our ICPs defined well enough to move fast on content
• We had instrumentation in place that, with a few tweaks, would give us detailed data on who entered the core app flow from which landing page
• If it works well, we would get usage behavior attached to market intent for free

Here's how we set it up:

1. Keyword research: We collected terms with adequate search volume relative to competition. This step generated a lot of discussion. We compiled a list of high-value keywords using SeRanking and Google Trends.
2. Facilitated Design Workshop: A 1.5-hour session where we reviewed mocked landing pages that I had pre-filled with options for language and design. All we had to do was vote on and tweak the language and elements already derived from our keyword list.
3. Instrumentation: We set up dashboards in PostHog to track who came in from which page and whether they followed through into the core app flow.
4. Deployment: We created the pages and let the experiment run while we worked on other things.

OUTCOME // 03

THE RESULT

After letting this run for about a week, the results were dramatic.

One of the landing pages, representing a certain use case of the technology, surged with traffic. We ended up listing on the first page of Google within a few days. Not just visits to the page, but follow-through into the core flow of the app. This persisted for the duration of the experiment.

After double-checking our experimental design, we determined that we had indeed created a market tap and were detecting legitimate market signal.

Now that we had this real market behavior circulating through the rest of our activities, it changed our trajectory. Over time, it simplified our product and design focus and brought far more users into the usage flow.

REFLECTION // 04

THE LESSON

The lesson is that paying attention to the needs of the system can give simple, well-known techniques outsized impact with cascading effects.

SEO landing pages are not a novel technique. Anyone can look up how to do keyword research and put up pages. But the value wasn't the tactic; rather, it was knowing where it fit into the system we were building, and how the rest of the system was positioned to receive what it produced.

With the tap, we escaped the doldrums of usage ambiguity and speculation and found quality information to feed our hard work to create something real and valuable.

PRINCIPLE: The value of a tactic is not in its novelty but in understanding where it fits within the system you are building, and how the rest of the system is positioned to receive what it produces.