The one-page concept

How to use it

1. Fill it in after your customer conversations, with your notes and the exact phrases people used at hand.
2. Write each line in one to three sentences, no more. If you can't fill a line, you've found a gap in your knowledge while it's still cheap to fill.
3. Under the nine lines, do the napkin math: price times realistic customers in year one. Then look at that revenue next to the race you picked. Forty customers at fifteen a month is roughly seven thousand a year, which is fine for a side product and a disaster for a venture you plan to live on.
4. List the assumptions that must be true for this to work, and rank them by how much damage each would cause if wrong.
5. Write your launch thresholds now, while you have nothing to defend.
6. Put the page away for a day, then reread it cold with the three questions at the foot of the sheet. If the answers are yes, print it and keep it visible. Mid-build, when tempting features appear, it's the page you check. Is this on the page? No? Then not now.

The nine lines

1. The person

Who exactly is this for? Not a demographic, a situation. "Freelance designers juggling client feedback across email and chat" beats "creatives" by a mile. Use the actual people from your research as the picture in your mind.

2. The problem

In their words, not yours. You collected exact phrases in your conversations. Use them. If your problem statement sounds like marketing, rewrite it until it sounds like a complaint you overheard.

3. Today's alternative

What do they do right now? The spreadsheet, the manual process, the competitor, the doing nothing. Your real competition is usually the current habit rather than another product, and habits are strong.

4. The solution

What you'll build, in one or two sentences a non-expert understands. A test I use: what is the one question the product answers, and how fast? For an energy app I worked on, the question was "when should I use electricity to save money", and the answer had to be a graph you read as green or red in three seconds.

5. The wedge

Why will they switch? Name the one dimension where you clearly beat today's alternative: dramatically faster, dramatically simpler, dramatically cheaper, or possible-at-all. Products that are slightly better at five things lose to products that are dramatically better at one.

6. Why now

What changed that makes this possible or urgent today? A new technology, a new behavior, a new rule. If nothing changed, ask yourself why this doesn't already exist.

7. Why you

Your edge, in one sentence. Reach, knowledge, credibility, taste. Don't flatter yourself here. This line is for you, not for an audience.

8. The money

How does revenue happen? One model, one price point, stated plainly. Subscription at X per month. One-time purchase at Y. Take a position. You'll adjust later, but "we'll figure out monetization" isn't a line.

9. First hundred

Where specifically do the first hundred users come from? Named channels, named communities, your list from the research phase. If this line is weak, stop and fix it before building anything, because no line on this page kills more products than this one.

A filled page, for real

This is the page for Mira, a customer-interview tool I built. Line eight is unfinished, and the page says so. It doesn't need to be impressive, only true.

And here are the nine lines for the book itself, run through its own method.

From chapter 5, "The one-page concept".