Parastou Saba

Most products lose people in the first 60 seconds, here's where

I'm a UX designer who lives in the first run of products, the moment right after signup, where most activation is won or lost. Four leaks I see over and over, with cheap fixes:

• Show value before the wall, don't ask for trust (signup, permissions) before showing anything.

• Treat the empty state as a first impression, zeros and blank charts read as "broken," not "new."

• Ask for heavy permissions when they're needed, not all up front.

• Don't let the paywall and the payoff land at the same moment.

For those who've launched: where do people actually drop off in your first session?

The baseline has moved fast this year. AI-generated UI is good enough now that for a lot of products the core screens come out clean on the first pass , dashboard, settings, checkout, all serviceable. That used to be weeks of work for a solo maker. It isn't anymore, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

I'm a UX designer, mostly on complex, high-trust products, and here's where I think it currently stops: AI generates screens, but product experience lives in the sequence between them. The happy path is basically solved. What doesn't come out of a prompt is what happens when someone is confused, hesitant, or something broke empty states, the permission ask that feels invasive, the error that doesn't say what to do next, the ability to undo something. None of those are visual problems, so a tool optimizing for a good-looking screen has no reason to raise them.

For solo makers, wearing every hat is almost unavoidable - developer, marketer, support, product and often designer too.

AI makes this even easier now. You can generate UI pretty quickly, but a lot of products end up relying on consistent, polished AI-generated solutions rather than something truly unique or thoughtfully designed for their specific product.

So I m curious:

Do you design the UI/UX yourself when building solo?